Do cells have goals? | with Melanie Challenger, Nick Lane & Philip Ball
Is purpose something our brains invented, or is it built into life itself?Three thinkers take on one of science's oldest unresolved questions: what does it mean to be alive? Author Melanie Challenger is joined by biochemist Nick Lane and science writer Philip Ball for a live inquiry that begins with Richard Dawkins's claim that nature exists without purpose, and asks whether recent biology points somewhere different.
Along the way: why scientists still can't agree on a definition of life, the synthetic "spud cells" that replicate their genomes, divide and even compete without being alive, how ideas about life moved from Aristotle's living body through the 18th-century "man a machine" to the gene-centric view of the 20th century, how energy flow and hydrothermal vents may hold the key to life's origin, and what agency, xenobots and brain organoids mean for how we think about AI.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction: A Live Inquiry Into What Life Is
03:06 Does Nature Have Purpose? The Dawkins Challenge
07:08 Why Nobody Can Define Life
09:12 Building Life From Scratch, and Why AI Raises the Stakes
13:52 From Aristotle to "Man a Machine"
25:18 Energy Flow: What a Dead Whale Is Missing
30:16 Aristotle's Living Body and the Search for the Agent
41:05 Is Biological Agency Real?
46:55 How Life Works: Membrane Voltages and Hydrothermal Vents
54:01 Why Science Sidelined the Body
58:16 Beyond the Genetic Program
1:00:09 Scaling Agency: Xenobots, Organoids and Ethics
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About the speakers:
Melanie Challenger writes, researches, and broadcasts on the history of ideas, the history and philosophy of science, and the relationship between humans and the living world. She is the author of How to Be Animal: What it Means to Be Human, among other works, and host of the podcast The Psychosphere. Melanie is internationally active in bioethics, deputy co-chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and Vice President of the RSPCA. She is also an award-winning poet and librettist for opera and oratorios, and a National Geographic Explorer.
Philip Ball is a writer and the author of many books on science and its intersections with culture, including How Life Works (2024). He was formerly an editor at Nature, and was awarded the Royal Society's 2022 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy or social functions of science.
Nick Lane is Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry and Director of the UCL Centre for Life's Origins and Evolution (CLOE) at University College London. His research is on how energy flow shapes evolution, from the origin of life to sex and even consciousness. He has published more than 100 papers and five celebrated books on life's origins. His awards include the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for excellence in communicating science to UK audiences.
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This was filmed at the Royal Institution on the 16th of July 2026.
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Melanie's book, Alive: what life is, how it works, and why it matters: https://geni.us/63sV1MB
Ri Members can watch the audience Q&A that followed this talk:
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