Today’s ID the Future features audio of the first in a series of YouTube videos by Dr. James Tour on the origin-of-life problem. Here Tour, a renowned synthetic organic chemist and professor at Rice University, explains why he is addressing the origin-of-life issue, also known as abiogenesis, and touches on some common misconceptions about the field. He says the organizing impetus for the series is a YouTube video by Dave Farina, “Elucidating the Agenda of James Tour: A Defense of Abiogenesis.” As Farina’s title suggests, he begins his video with an ad hominem attack, seeking to discredit Tour by showing that Tour is a Christian. Tour briefly responds to this line of attack and then moves into matters scientific. There he touches on, among other issues, thermodynamics and the origin-of-life puzzle of low entropy and high energy.
On this episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid reads an excerpt from Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design by Finnish bioengineer...
On this ID the Future, Taking Leave of Darwin author Neil Thomas and host Jonathan Witt continue their conversation about Thomas’s journey from Darwinian...
Materialist philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote that "only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation…be safely built.” But is this...