Speaker 0 00:00:00 <silence>
Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Greetings. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today we continue a four-part conversation series between Philosopher of Signs, Dr. Steven Meyer, author of signature in the cell, d n a, and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. And Dr. James Tour, a world-leading synthetic organic chemist at Rice University. The topic is the origin of the First Life and Dr. Tour's assessment of the State of Origin of Life research today. These conversations were recorded in November and December, 2022. After Dr. Tura released a series of videos in response to YouTube science communicator Dave Farina and his videos attacking Dr. Tour's research. Dr. Tura and Farina also conducted a formal debate at Rice University in May, 2023. But for those who are not satisfied with that debate or still have questions about the origin of life, this set of conversations between Dr. Meyer and Dr. Tour should bring much needed, calm and clarity. In part two, Meyer and Tour discuss the work and claims of Origin of Life researcher Lee Cronin.
Speaker 2 00:01:18 They begin with a review of the four classes of molecules before critiquing Cronin's foremost reaction experiments and his claims to have found a process that's analogous to cell Division two. Also discusses the importance of ality, as well as how amino acids behave in aqueous solutions. Turns out that warm little pond story we've been told for many years is chemically implausible. The discussion rounds out with a reminder of the information problem. Something Maya writes about at length in signature in the cell, have prebiotic chemists made any progress on the sequence? Specificity problem, none whatsoever, says Dr. Tour. A quick reminder that these conversations were recorded on video. As each begins, you'll hear an introduction over some background music. The first of all you'll hear is Dr. Tour, followed by Dr. Meyer. Introducing the episode now, enjoy part two of Stephen Meyer and James Tour discussing the state of Origin of life research.
Speaker 3 00:02:20 I am locked and loaded, and it's not because of you. It's because of, of, uh, my position on these things has brought attack from people on the internet and attack from the scientific community. That's why I am locked and loaded. So if, if you think that I am being hard on people, trust me, I am an angel compared to the way that they treat me.
Speaker 4 00:02:43 Hi, I'm Steven Meyer, the Director of the Center for Science and Culture here at Discovery Institute. Today we're going to do our second video podcast featuring Dr. James tour of Rice University organic chemist and nanotechnology specialist. Jim has been stirring things up a bit with his critique of Origin of Life research, and in our last episode, we talked with him about some of the interactions he's had with Origin of Life researcher named Steve Benner. And in this episode, we're going to talk about the, uh, work of Lee Cronin and critiques that Jim has offered of Lee and some of the videos that he's made in response to some of, uh, Lee Cronin's work. Uh, the purpose of these videos is to, uh, introduce our audience to the work of Jim Tour, to his, uh, his interesting analysis and critique of Origin of Life research, and also provide some scientific background that will make it easier for people to understand the, the, uh, the video lectures that he's produced.
Speaker 4 00:03:43 Um, Jim, I think one of the interesting things about this debate is it's developed, is that it was really sparked by an internet blogger who goes by the handle of, of Professor Dave. And I think you've been in a, as we've discussed before, a bit of an awkward position in that Professor Dave is not an organic chemist. He's not an origin of life researcher. Um, he's not a PhD scientist. I think he has a master's degree in, uh, in science education, which is a, a perfectly wonderful, uh, vocation. And, and, and, uh, but he's not a specialist in this area. And so he has, he has made a lot of claims in response to you that, uh, you have, you, you think are scientifically indefensible, but it's been a little, you've been in a difficult position to, uh, attack someone who's not a scientist and who's not really, uh, at your level in science.
Speaker 4 00:04:31 And so I think an interesting and exciting development is that, uh, in re recent, uh, videos that Professor Dave has produced, he has cited other, uh, scientists and in particular people doing origin of life research in, in critique of you. And I think that's given you the opportunity to respond scientists to scientist. And so you're not, uh, as it were, punching below your weight class, but actually taking on people who are worthy of critique from someone of your stature. So what we're gonna do today is gonna give you a chance to first summarize the arguments of Lee Cronin, who is, uh, one of Professor Dave's experts, and then respond and give people a little bit of a preliminary, uh, introduction to some of the more detailed content that you're putting out on the internet about this important debate, specifically in this case with, uh, with Dr. Cronin. So he's produced three videos, uh, or you have three videos in response to his work, and he's produced a bunch of, uh, professor Davis produced videos about Lee Cronin. And the first of those, um, doesn't really talk much about chemistry, but he, uh, uses a lot of analogies to get across the idea that, uh, that, uh, it's not really not gonna be that hard to explain the origin of life. Can you, can you, uh, talk a little bit about the, the first of the first of those installments?
Speaker 3 00:05:49 Okay. Let, let me start out by saying that, that he, Lee and I have had discussions, uh, on, on Justin Briar Lee's program. I found him a, a a a, a nice person. We had a, we had a good civil discussion. Uh, he said some things on a, on a program, uh, Justin Brearley, that, that, uh, I'm trying to mislead people. I'm misleading people by what I'm saying. And then he got on another program with me, and we had a discussion. And, and on that program that I went on with him after I pushed him and pushed him, he said that the primordial soup model, which is a model where you have small molecules in some pool or pond, there's some lightning strikes, and that results in the formation of the molecules needed for cells, and those assemble into a cell, and you have life. And that is the beginning of life. And he says the primordial soup model is a good model. And so when I had this discussion with him, I was able to get him to the point of saying that we know that there were small molecules. We know that there was life, but we don't know how it happened. We don't know how you
Speaker 4 00:07:00 Got from the small molecules to the living cell.
Speaker 3 00:07:03 Right? We really don't know how it happens. And I got him to go ahead and say that, that we don't know how it happens yet. He, he then, uh, says that, that, uh, icontinue, he continued on in Dave's program to, uh, to push this idea that there is this model. And he gives examples. And I think, again, Lee's a nice person, and he gives examples from his own research that he says are suggestive of what could have happened in the primordial soup. My argument is that everything that he showed, that he spoke of in Dave Farinas video concerning what he's done in his own lab, is utterly ridiculous when it comes to life. The first, when it comes to apply to life, the first thing that he did is he took some inorganic salts, some, uh, inorganic, uh, molybdenum salts, I believe they were. And, and, uh, he does something called auto catalysis.
Speaker 3 00:08:03 Auto catalysis was shown on inorganic complexes by a name man named Oswald in about the 1920s, a long time ago, 100 years ago. There was nothing magical about that. He said it was mind blowing, it was not mind blowing. He said he was making houses and he was making skyscrapers. What he meant by that is he's making things that are micron sized things you cannot even see. But they were larger than the starting molecules that he had. So what is auto catalysis? It's when you have a template, when you have something that forms a template and around this, you do, you, it catalyzes the formation of something that's like itself, but that new thing that dislike itself in his case is a little bit bigger, and that becomes a template for the next one. And that's a template for the next one. And he says he's forming skyscrapers. When he says skyscrapers, he just means that, that it's micron size. He doesn't mean that it's literally skyscrapers or literally, literally houses. And that has almost nothing to do with the origin of life. This is chemistry that was talked about 100, literally 100 years ago by Oswald. And, and, uh, uh, there's nothing special in this, and it has nothing to do with the origin of life. And he says it took no information. And this
Speaker 4 00:09:22 Was, yeah, I was just gonna ask if that, if that's because the, the molecules that are being, uh, auto catalyzed are not themselves relevant to the origin of life.
Speaker 3 00:09:31 Yeah. The molecules are inorganic complexes that have absolutely nothing to do with the origin of life. They're not around the classes of molecules, organic molecules that you need for life. They don't demonstrate anything that that's relevant to life. There is nothing there. It's an interesting paper. It's an interesting paper from a chemical perspective that shows some templating effect, but that's it. This is a much harder thing to do when you're dealing with non-symmetrical molecules. He's dealing with symmetrical molecules, things that have high symmetry. When you're dealing with the organic molecules that make up life, you don't see these type of symmetry elements. And, and it has nothing to do with what's happening in organic systems. Organic systems are far more complex in setting them up. And so when he eventually gets to the organic systems, there's a lot more setup you have to do. And the, the, the, the so-called auto catalysis becomes far less interesting. So everything that Lee Cronin has published that he says has something to do with life, has nothing to do with life. And the, the other two pieces we can talk about as you, like, there were three, three papers that he talked about. Yeah. But,
Speaker 4 00:10:38 But before we go there though, let's just remind our audience of the four basic types of organic molecules that have to be made, because that will provide a little background for appreciating the critiques that you're offering, because I think it's, it's cr uh, crucial to understand that in origin of life research, the object of explanation is the living cell. Um, my PhD supervisor who was, uh, who wrote on the Origin of Life Harm, Mingus, said that behind every, uh, behind the question of the origin of life is the question of the nature of life. What is it she said? Is it, what is it that we're trying to explain? The origin of every origin of life researcher has to reckon with life as we know it. And so, uh, if you make high symmetry models, uh, molecules, if you make essentially crystals of, of inorganic molecules, that's not relevant to life. We gotta build different types of molecules that have different types of properties, including the ability to, to to store information. So can, maybe a good place to start for our audience is just to review those, those four classes of molecules that are critical to making life as we know it.
Speaker 3 00:11:43 Okay. There are the four classes of molecules. One is sugars, which are called carbohydrates or saccharides. It's all the same thing. Sugars, carbohydrates, saccharides, all the same thing. And the, the polymers made from those. And so you, that's, that's one class based on the sugars. Another class is based on amino acids that polymerize to your proteins and your enzymes. Uh, so that's the second class that are based on amino acids. The third one is based on nucleotides, which are a sugar with a base and a, a base, meaning that it's a nitrogen containing compound and a phosphate group hanging off. And that's what makes up the d n A and the r n a. And then you have the lipids, which, which make up a lot of the bilayer, the surrounding the shell of, of the cell, and the shell of the organelles that might be in the cell if you, if you, if you had a, a, a eukaryotic cell, uh, pro.
Speaker 4 00:12:41 That's excellent. So those are the, so you have, those
Speaker 3 00:12:43 Are four classes.
Speaker 4 00:12:43 Four classes. And, um, and so at a, at a macro molecular level, you have, you have the sugars, you have the proteins or enzymes, you have the nucleic acids, d n a and r n a, and then you have the lipids. And so you can't get anywhere if you can't build those molecules. And as, as I understand it, a big part of your critique has been that the undirected chemistry from smaller inorganic molecules does not spontaneously move in the direction of any of those life relevant molecules. Is that in the, in the broadest sense, the, the problem that you're identifying? Right.
Speaker 3 00:13:18 So in, in the broadest sense, if you use directed chemistry, that's pre biotically relevant, meaning that you're using chemicals that would've been available on a prebiotic earth. So nothing that's been human designed, uh, complex, human designed, you're just using basic chemicals and what Steve Benner would call hands off chemistry, where you're putting minimal input chemistry into it, you can't make any of these compounds, uh, uh, that, that are in any state usable. You might make a trace of them in a sea of other molecules where you have much, much less than 1%. And so it becomes impossible to use it because it's already, it's already, uh, filled up with other molecules in it. What Lee Cronin does is he makes it an inorganic complexes, which have nothing to do with any of the four classes of chemicals like zero to do with any of the four classes of chemicals. So that, that's the problem with his first paper, which he said was mind blowing and be, but it, it's actually utterly ridiculous. And that's what I show in my video. It's a bunch of nonsense
Speaker 4 00:14:27 And, and apparently irrelevant because he's, he's not building the chemicals that are actually present the in living systems
Speaker 3 00:14:35 Cor correct. And he, and, and he has no way of even projecting how that chemical would ever be relevant for any sort of living system. So it's a, it's, it's, it's just ridiculous. And it's amazing that the community, the origin of life community itself didn't just just fall over laughing when he made this relation to origin of life, which, which doesn't constitute the, the majority of his paper, the majority of his paper is very interesting chemistry. It's when he makes the relation to an origin of life type scenario. And so this is, this is just, uh, a bunch of nonsense. And then he says, uh, there's, there's, the, this element meibum is, is, is like, uh, almost as abundant as iron, not as abundant as iron, but he has no reason to believe that this wouldn't work with iron. What is he talking about? This had nothing to do with a bunch of rust and iron oxide even refers to it as rust, because it's a bunch of metal oxide.
Speaker 3 00:15:33 It has nothing, nothing to do with life, nothing. And so, so, and, and he knows, he knows what life is because he has videos where he is even said, where you've gotta have a cell, you've gotta have homeostasis, where you have this internal working state, you gotta be able to pass information onto offspring. He, he understands what life is, but then he makes a bunch of junk, and he says, this is suggestive of life. That's the problem. Now, Lee's a nice guy, but, uh, uh, he, it's because of him that people are so misled in this whole area of origin of life where they think it's
Speaker 4 00:16:07 Already been solved. And you, you cite an interesting statistic too, about how many PE people think that, uh, scientists have been able to mix molecules together in laboratories to produce single cell life forms, such as bacteria. Um, what, what, how many people, what, what's, what percentage of the public believes that
Speaker 3 00:16:25 Two thirds, over two thirds of the percentage feel that think, think that scientists have made bacteria, mixed chemicals together to make simple single cell organisms like bacteria. And this to this is totally untrue. In fact, one third of the population thinks that scientists have made simple organisms, simple animals like frogs in the, in the laboratory. So, so th this is so far from the truth, and it's because of this loose talk of people like Lee Cronin, these sorts of experts. They're loose talk in what they say that it leads to this type of thing.
Speaker 4 00:17:06 Well, let's talk about some more of the, uh, more specific scientific results that he's touted. We, you've, you've, we've talked about his ideas about auto catalysis and your explanation of why those are not relevant to explaining the origin of life. But he also has done some work on the foremost reaction, which is a reaction as I understand it, that produces sugars and therefore would be, could be conceivably relevant to a prebiotic chemistry, because that is one of the four classes of molecules that need to be produced. What does he claim about this reaction, the foremost reaction? And what has he demonstrated in the laboratory about, its the plausibility of generating sugars through this reaction under prebiotic conditions.
Speaker 3 00:17:49 So he takes some simple organic chemicals and, uh, lets it undergo a foremost reaction. And he himself even says that in seconds to hours, you get billions of different products. This is totally contrary to what Dave Farina teaches. And Dave didn't even know it. Dave, in the same video. Hey,
Speaker 4 00:18:09 Jim, just before you go into that more, could you just for our audience, explain in general terms what the foremost reaction is?
Speaker 3 00:18:16 Foremost reaction is to take a simple aldehyde, simple aldehyde, uh, uh, a compound that has a carbon to a double bonded to an oxygen along with an alcohol. And you polymerize these into the structure of carbohydrates of sugars.
Speaker 4 00:18:33 And are these two starting molecules inorganic or organic? They're
Speaker 3 00:18:37 Organic. So you, they're organic. Okay. You can, you, you can, you can take simple organic compound and polymerize it. So it has an alcohol on it. It has, it has a, uh, an aldehyde on it. And, and, uh, you mix it. He mixes it with, uh, calcium hydroxide. Now, interestingly, in the very same video, Dave goes on to say that calcium hydroxide is irrelevant because it's too strong a base to really be, be widely available on an early earth. He concedes that it's available. He wants to dismiss calcium oxide, but his expert comes on and uses calcium hydroxide, and he didn't even notice it. He put up a paper with Lee Cronin's work showing calcium hydroxide, and Dave didn't even notice it. So the poor man cannot even see calcium hydroxide in that paper. He doesn't even realize. And in fact, he cited another paper in his, in his, uh, uh, critique that also had calcium hydroxide. Even his own slide showed calcium hydroxide. And he said it was not relevant. And then he brought on, when he later brought on Steve Benner, he used calcium hydroxide, and Dave didn't even notice it. So we're talking about a man who is utterly clueless on the topic of chemistry, trying to teach chemistry. Put Dave aside, now we're dealing with his so-called expert Lee Cronin. So Lee Cron.
Speaker 4 00:19:59 Yeah. So what, what does Lee's claim about, about the foremost reaction and how it could have occurred on the early earth and what he's getting out of his simulation of that?
Speaker 3 00:20:07 So what, what Lee does is he tries to do the foremost reaction, but he keeps dumping in more and more of the starting material. And he says, as it goes through these recursive cycles, it cleans itself up. It starts clean, you get less compounds. So in other words, you initially get billions of compounds, but he makes it less billions by somehow cleaning it up.
Speaker 4 00:20:30 And, and, and the billions are a problem because you, you don't want lots and lots of things besides the sugars. You just want the sugars that are life relevant. If you, all a a lot of other byproducts, they're going to, they're gonna interact with each other, and you're, you're gonna move in a life unfriendly direction, right? You, I mean, lots of things is a problem, not a good thing, right?
Speaker 3 00:20:50 Right. You, you, you actually gum up the works. That's why chemists in a laboratory will wait, work very hard to minimize the number of byproducts. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, this is what you spend most of your time on trying to minimize the number of byproducts and maximize the compound that you want. And so what Lee does is he gets billions and billions of compounds. He can see, say, a thousand of those, because under those thousand dots or spots, there's many others under there that he can't detect because they all co elute, they all come overlapping with each other. And, and then he dumps in more and more material going through these recursive cycles. And he says, you see, I'm getting less dots here. I'm getting less compounds. That's not the case. Because if you read his experimental literature, the, the experimental, which Dave never, never read, he says that he takes off, he takes off 70% of the supernatant, the things that are floating in the solution, it's suspended in the solution, and he and the things that are precipitating out fall out of the solution. And he doesn't use those. So in other words, the reason he gets less material is because these compounds are polymerizing, they're falling out, and he's only skimming off the top. So of course,
Speaker 4 00:22:07 You're, so, he, he's skimming the way, essentially the waste byproducts out of this, out of this, the resulting system. And then that allows him to concentrate the one thing he's looking for, uh, and to get fewer, fewer interfering,
Speaker 3 00:22:21 Uh, right. So, but not the one thing. He's concentrating maybe a hundred billion things into 99 billion things.
Speaker 4 00:22:30 Okay? <laugh>, he's still got, so he really hasn't solved the problem. He's only made it minimally less, uh, and,
Speaker 3 00:22:36 And
Speaker 4 00:22:37 Destructive
Speaker 3 00:22:38 Because he, he cut out 30% of his solution. If, if you cut out 30% of the products that precipitated out, yeah, you're gonna clean it up. And the more times you do that, but you have to keep adding.
Speaker 4 00:22:49 So this is not a naturally recursive system. This is an intelligently intervened. He's intelligently intervening to, to, to clean things up so that he's gradually purifying his, his reaction product.
Speaker 3 00:23:01 I think you're being very kind by even saying that this is an intelligent method. It is not an intelligent method. You, you are speaking of intelligence as adding, adding some user input into the system. But it, it's too flattering of a word, Steve. It's too flattering of a word for, for what's being done here. So there's nothing intelligent about this. He's just letting the polymers crash out. And then he has to keep adding in more and more starting material. Where do you get boat loads of more and more starting material to start dumping into this pure starting material you dump in, and then he gets out so many products, he can't even analyze which icer he's got. And then he says, well, we have identified a compound that looks like ribo, but I'm telling you, the man has billions, billions of compounds in there that would be totally unusable. Did he ever use the ribose for anything? No. Why not? Because he can't separate that ribose from anything. You can't even separate it. Even with the most advanced techniques that we have today, he used something that was called ultra, uh, uh, uh, ultra high pressure, uh, liquid chromatography, ultra li liquid chromatography, which is the most complex method. We have to separate compounds in an analytical, not a preparative column, but an analytical meaning. You can only you do traces of the material. He couldn't even separate it out. He even says, says
Speaker 4 00:24:26 In there, and again, if you don't, if you don't separate it out, you're gonna get interfering cross reactions that are gonna create sludge that have nothing to do with life. That's
Speaker 3 00:24:32 The problem. Exactly. Exactly. And it doesn't do anything. And Lee understands this because he has other videos where he says, you might find one molecule of something in interstellar space that might be life relevant, but it's not good for anything because it's mixed in with many other molecules. So he understands this, he
Speaker 4 00:24:50 Understands the problem.
Speaker 3 00:24:51 Yes. He understands the problem, yet he
Speaker 4 00:24:53 Goes ahead and makes, I quote from quote him here, Jim, he, he says, all the people that have made life in the lab have cheated. Yes. Yes. So he sort of, first of all, we haven't made life in the lab. That's absurd. All the people who have made life friendly chemicals in the lab, I suppose he could say, but he acknowledges the cheating, but not about his own work. What's going on? Right? Right.
Speaker 3 00:25:14 So, so he said, all the people who have made life in the lab have cheated because they've used molecules that have come from naturally occurring cellular sources. Number one, even if you use molecules that come from cellular sources, they've never made life in the lab. So he has a lot of loose talk that can confuses society. Nobody's made life in the lab. And, and so as you know on, on my video series that I really drive that point home that his loose talk, he's responsible for people thinking that people have made life in the lab because he went around saying it, and he understands the magnitude of the problem. He's nowhere close. He said in 2011 that he, he'd make life in his lab in two years, and he didn't, you know, it's, it's, it's two years past 2011. I mean, it's, we're 11 years <laugh> almost 12 years past 2011, and he hasn't yet done it. So, so this is such loose talk that he comes out with. And, and, uh, why should Lee Cronin be surprised that Jim Tour is reacting to this? Everybody should react to this. Any chemist would react to this if they followed this work. Nobody's made life in the lab. The junk that he made in that foremost reaction is utter junk. It's not useful for anything. It's no good.
Speaker 4 00:26:31 Well, let, let's talk about his, uh, an additional video that, um, professor Dave has come out with, uh, touting some of Lee Cronin's other work on, um, apparently simulating how Whole Cells divide. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, can you tell us a little bit about those claims and, and then we'll get into, uh, analyzing them as well.
Speaker 3 00:26:54 Okay. So, so he claims that, that, uh, that most important thing in his laboratory is bubbles and salad dressing. Like when you shake up salad dressing, you get bubbles. And that's very important for the origin of life. Now, most of those bubbles are not formed, uh, uh, uh, necessarily through a lipid bilayer. They, they are not a vesicle. They, they're, they're just a, a single layer. But if you want it to form a lipid bilayer, you generally have to take, uh, lipids, which are, uh, which are a, a, a polar head group, which means something that's solubilizing the water. And you'd have two tails hanging off it. Uh, and it's, it's called the d ace lipid. You can take these things and you can, you have to put them under shear, which means that you put them between two plates and you, you drive them together, and you can form what are called vesicles, which are water droplets surrounded by two layers, two layers of these lipids.
Speaker 3 00:27:56 One layer is facing inward, one layer is facing outward. And, and, uh, um, there is something called a marinoni effect, which has been known for a long, long time. If you take oil and you let these oil droplets form larger and larger, they will eventually break to minimize the free energy of the surface, minimize the surface free energy, and they will break. And once they break, they form smaller bubbles. There are elementary videos on the internet that show this marran effect. Well, what Lee does is he makes a lipid. It's not a dal lipid, it's a mono. It's got one chain. And he says he makes this by an auto catalytic reaction. Even if it were auto catalytic, it's totally uninteresting. Even if the kinetics for the formation were shown to be auto catalytic, it would be totally uninteresting. But even if it were catalytic, auto catalytic, then he says, and these form, these vesicles, and these vesicles break and they divide much like a cell divides in, in life.
Speaker 3 00:29:00 No, he, he doesn't have symmetrical division. There is no d n a in these cells. There is no no splitting of the, the d n A to go from one side and the other. And then this cleavage right in the middle to have a duplicate copy of this, this, uh, vesicle. It's just a bunch of junk. It's a bunch of margon marran effect, where you're just taking these, these lipids and you're just breaking them by, by, you have this, this, uh, uh, natural breaking to minimize the free energy. This has nothing to do with life. This is not how cells work. Cells have a very orchestrated pattern for cellular division. They have to get ha, they have to duplicate the genome, put it on each half. They have to take the alignment, the omes that we talked about last time mm-hmm. <affirmative>, these have to split to each side of the cell, and then it divides in the middle. There's this high specificity that concentrates this, this reaction in the middle to make sure that you get an even division. What he gets is totally uneven division. And he says that this is showing some forms, forms of, of protocells. And these are dividing. Oh, look at them, how interesting they are. They're divided. They have nothing to do with life. This is like an elementary school video, really. So truly
Speaker 4 00:30:17 It's
Speaker 3 00:30:17 An elementary school video.
Speaker 4 00:30:19 He did, he de depicts a process that actually has no relevance to how life actually works. Right? And so he's done a good job of explaining what doesn't need to be explained.
Speaker 3 00:30:28 And the lipids, the lipids that he made for this, that he says, you know, these, these just forms spontaneously, 10 pages. 10 pages, single spaced of complex, modern, organic chemical reactions using modern chemical reagents to make, to set up the system, to make the lipids that form the, these vesicles. It's, it's 10 pages.
Speaker 4 00:30:53 Who makes who, who? So Lee Cronin makes the lipids through, he, he makes the complex through complex with a complex chemical complex recipe. Complex, complex
Speaker 3 00:31:01 Organic synthesis. Yes. So he has an army of people. He has a very big research group, and God bless those young people. Uh, uh, it's just a shame what he has them doing because they, they think they're doing something that's really relevant. He's trying to convince them of this. And I'm sure they're very smart because they can do really interesting synthesis, but 10 pages of organic synthesis they do in order to set a system up that would do possibly do his auto catalysis. It's been totally set up, and it's a really uninteresting, it's just a simple little condensation reaction. So it's
Speaker 4 00:31:35 A, so the mo the most interesting thing is the organic synthesis that's being performed by the, the, uh, the, the organic chemist in Lee Cronin's lab. It's not the, the, uh, what happens to the vesicles at the very end of the process. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:31:48 And he sets up, he sets up a, a, a, a little robot with an XY movable system that, that can squirt these little droplets into water from a chloroform solution and into water. And then he has a camera below it so you can watch these little droplets. And so he has a, a whole nother part of his team. Again, these, these are great analytical and, uh, chemist that can build this equipment really interesting. But everything is loaded. The organic chemistry is loaded. The setup is loaded to make his vesicles that's loaded. And all these showings, the simple marinoni effect, which is a bunch of ridiculous nononsense, but
Speaker 4 00:32:24 All the, all the pre preliminary steps to this are intelligently designed by the chemists in the laboratory to get to that point where then they can then, uh, demonstrate this marengo effect.
Speaker 3 00:32:35 Yes. And, and so the effect that they demonstrate,
Speaker 4 00:32:37 So this is not something that would happen on the early earth, absent, absent help.
Speaker 3 00:32:43 No, I mean, you, you might get a marran effect with a bunch of junk because marran effect effect happens all the time if, if you, if you have oil droplets in water. But what he set up, no way, this, this is totally ridiculous. This has nothing to do with how cells divide nothing. This is just a simple little experiment and what he had to do to set this up. So, so God
Speaker 4 00:33:05 Bless them. But the lipids that he use is using are actually in some way relevant or similar to the lipids that would be in the bilayer? No,
Speaker 3 00:33:13 They're totally, totally unlike what is in an actual lipid bilayer. In an actual lipid bilayer, you have what are called d ace lipids. You have a glycerol, a a glycerol that you are distinguishing the two ends of the glycerol that are an, an atopic. And you have to somehow distinguish those two ends. And then you have to put on lipid chains, many of them having steroidogenic centers that are, that are homo chiral. The lipid itself is often homo chiral, and it has two chains hanging off. He made ones with one chain without the glycerol component on it. And
Speaker 4 00:33:48 Were they, were they homo chiral or no?
Speaker 3 00:33:50 No, there was no, there was no ality to them. No. Okay.
Speaker 4 00:33:54 So they, they were at least at, at best weekly, analogous to the kinds of lipids that you find in the lipid bilayer in itself. No, no. And, and they were themselves, the product of organic synthesis produced by a whole host of very smart chemists.
Speaker 3 00:34:08 You, you are again, being too gracious
Speaker 4 00:34:10 By too nice <laugh> too nice.
Speaker 3 00:34:13 You're saying they're, they're, they're weekly analogous. No, they're not analogous at all. They're not two chains. They're one chain. And it's been shown, if you only have one chain hanging down, you don't have the stability you need for life. Secondly, secondly, his two layers is inside layer in his outside layer for his vesicle are the same. You could never have that in a living cell. You have to have a proton gradient. The inside layer and the outside layer of the vesicle have to be different. Nobody knows how to make them like that. Only only do you find these in nature only do you find these in cells. You don't find these when there's no life around. Only living organisms make this, we don't know how to do this in the laboratory. He didn't have the two in the inside and the outside different. If you don't have the inside and the outside different, there's no proton gradient. There's no life. So,
Speaker 4 00:35:03 Okay, so this is really fascinating. So let's just summarize here. So if we go back to our original idea that to explain the origin of life, you have to explain the origin of the kind of things that make life today that you have to explain the classes of molecules that we see in, in actual cells, and eventually their arrangement and organization and relation to each other. So in cronin's experiment, he purports to, to show how, uh, to purports to have found a process that is analogous to cell division. It's not analogous to actual cell division. He purports to do so with lipid molecules that are analogous to actual lipids that are used in the lipid bilayer in cells. But they're not analogous. And even to the extent he's been able to make those molecules, his, the process by which he's done that has been totally dependent, not on purely undirected natural processes of the kind that would be at work on a prebiotic earth, but rather by the intelligent design of organic synthesis, uh, chemists who do organic sym synthesis in the laboratory. Is that basically what we've got?
Speaker 3 00:36:06 Yes. Using, using modern methods of synthesis and using million dollar, multimillion dollar pieces of equipment to do the analytical separations and analyses.
Speaker 4 00:36:16 So that sounds like Dr. Cronin is cheating too. He's just all Dr. Cronin, he critiques other people for cheating, but it sounds like he might have been doing a little cheating himself.
Speaker 3 00:36:26 He cheats every e e every step. He cheats. Every step. He cheats. If you say that this thing could be valid for anything relevant to an earlier, and these not stupid, no way. Let, let, lemme
Speaker 4 00:36:36 Say. Well, it sounds like he's very intelligent. He's, to me, the very interesting thing is that the scientists seem to be enured or, um, unaware of the role. Their own intelligence is playing in the success, the, the claims success of their experiments. Yes. They forget that. They forget that, that that their own hands and minds are active in producing the results that they tout in their exper in their scientific papers.
Speaker 3 00:37:00 You're, again, being very generous. And let, lemme just say that Lee Cronin is not stupid. I am not suggesting that. Not at all. I think he's very smart. But I think that he, he's, uh, gone way, way overboard with his extrapolations from the simple little chemistry that he does that is not even pre biotically relevant. And then the, the, the suggestions that he then makes from that are just way overboard. And, and, and I don't think that Dave Farina is stupid. Not at all. I've never called him stupid. He's, he repeats over and over again that I've called him stupid. I have never called Dave Farina stupid. In fact, I don't think he's stupid. And, uh, uh, but he's bought into this, this stuff that Lee people like Lee Cronin are saying. So Dave Farina is a victim. That's what Dave Farina is. And he's an enabler by, by giving voice to these people because he's been so victimized
Speaker 4 00:37:50 Making these extravagant claims. Well, let's talk about one other scientific aspect of this, which I, I find think is so fascinating because we've all heard from high school biology on the story of the origin of life and the prebiotic soup. Um, uh, Darwin talked about life arising in a warm little pond. He couldn't give any kind of detail to that speculation in a letter that he wrote to a friend Joseph Hooker back in the 1860s. But it's been pretty much our kind of the, the cultural, uh, motif or icon about how this happened as we've imagined chemicals arranging themselves on the, in the early earth ocean or in warm little ponds or something. But, uh, it turns out that it's actually very difficult to make some of the key classes of molecules in the presence of water, um, in particular, um, amino acids that need to link together to form proteins. Can you explain a bit about the why that is the case chemically and what chemists have tried to do to simulate the origin of, of, of amino acids and proteins, given that we commonly imagined that there was some kind of prebiotic ocean or app or, or soup That was the, the, the place where life began.
Speaker 3 00:39:03 There was a very interesting reaction in the 1950s by Miller and Yuri, where they took some simple organic compounds and some voltage spikes, and they were able to get a number of organic compounds, some of those being amino acids. And they had several of the amino acids formed the relatively simple molecules. But in every case, their amino acids were not chiro. They were not homo chiro. They were so, they, they were all emmic, which means let's scenic, which means that
Speaker 4 00:39:31 You have the two. Let's, Jim, you don't mind, just, just to remind our audience, the ality idea is that there's a left-handed and right-handed version, there's mere image versions of the molecules. And for reasons that have been recently discovered, uh, the only one, one type of those, those key, uh, biomolecules, uh, are present in living organisms. For example, with amino acids, you only have left-handed amino acids that form actual proteins in living organisms. And so you're saying that when Miller and Yuri did their experiment, they got some of the protein forming amino acids, two or three, I think, as I remember, but more than that
Speaker 3 00:40:09 Might, might have been, yeah. Might've been as much
Speaker 4 00:40:11 As 10. They weren't, they weren't exclusively left-handed amino acids. Is that,
Speaker 3 00:40:15 Yeah. So people have gone back with better analytical methods and found more in these these, but, but yeah, they, they were not just left-handed. They were allic, so they would not have been good for anything. Okay. And and even if you could get some of them to crystallize separately from the others in a homo chiro form, how do you now get them to hook up? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So what Lee did is he bought all the homo chiro amino acids that had been made in living from living systems. They were generated from living system chemistry or from enzymes that come from living systems. So,
Speaker 4 00:40:49 But we're trying to explain the origin of life from non-living chemicals. Right? Right. Don't have to simul the origin of life, of non-living chemicals. He's having to get chemicals from already living organisms. Exactly
Speaker 3 00:41:01 The same thing. He accuses other people of doing that. He says, and you've created life using the such and such chemicals. Now he's doing the same thing. So he's, he's taking these chemicals. He's not making life. So what he does is he says that he's gonna get these things to polymerize in water, but he starts his paper out saying that they don't polymerize in water. He says, even the basic experiments where people have claimed this on surfaces, which Dave Farina references, he says, this doesn't work. You don't get anything longer than three because the, the thermodynamics are against you. Lee teaches that the, that the equilibrium lies to the left, lies to the starting material. Dave Farina, in the very same video, very same video, says it's not a matter of equilibrium. And then he brings on an expert who says, it's all about equilibrium. Dave didn't even notice. That's the amazing thing. I'm I I, poor
Speaker 4 00:41:55 Day. Wait, wait, Jim, just a sec. Let's
Speaker 3 00:41:57 Unpack it. He didn't notice.
Speaker 4 00:41:58 Yeah. Let's, I, I get the, the contradiction. But let's unpack that a little bit. So the presence of water in, if you have amino acids in an aqueous solution in the presence of water, they will not, for energetic reasons, hook up more to, more than polymerase means hook up into chains. They won't form chains longer than two or three amino
Speaker 3 00:42:20 Acids. And 'cause they keep breaking up, they, the, it, it's e it's it's preferred for them to break up rather than to hook up
Speaker 4 00:42:26 E energetically preferred
Speaker 3 00:42:28 E energetically preferred. And, and there's both thermodynamic and kinetic reasons for that. And, and Dave says that the system forms the polymers, forms the amino acids. He says the reaction is extra organic. He doesn't even know what extra organic means. The reaction is not exergonic, it's just the opposite of exergonic. It's endodonic. What happens is when, as soon as he said exergonic, exergonic means delta G, he's talking about the free energy, a term called delta G that gives free energy of the, the reaction. As soon as you reference delta G, it means you're talking about an equilibrium reaction. So in one breath, Dave says, it has nothing to do with equilibrium. He says the reaction is exonic. That's like saying it is black, it is white, and he didn't even notice it. If something's contradicted himself, if
Speaker 4 00:43:25 Something has
Speaker 3 00:43:26 A delta G, it has to have an equilibrium. But the thing is, he had it the wrong way. The equilibrium lies to the starting material side and Lee's own paper, which Dave puts in his video, says this. So what I did is I didn't bring in any more papers. No, I didn't bring in any more papers. I used the very videos that Dave brought into his, his, uh, uh, uh, into his series, or that his experts brought into those series. And I showed that every paper that Dave showed in his video, he interpreted wrongly, that very paper that he says, the reaction is exonic. As soon as you look on the first page, it says, it says the delta G is positive when delta G is positive. It's not. Yes, it's endodonic. It's not exergonic. Okay. So
Speaker 4 00:44:19 And so, and if he had to
Speaker 3 00:44:20 Total
Speaker 4 00:44:21 Equilibrium lies, if you're saying on the left hand side of the equation to material, right, with the starting materials, that means the starting materials aren't gonna arrange themselves into more complex compounds, is that
Speaker 3 00:44:30 That's right. They're not gonna go and, and they don't couple and, and so they don't couple, the amino acids don't couple. So what Lee does is he gets rid of the water. So Dave says, ah, you see Lee can have these form in water, but then Lee goes on to say he heats them up. Well, Dave had to read the paper to see how high he heats them up. Dave said, Lee says, we take these compounds, we heat them up, we, they form the polymers, and then we, we, we, he says we heat them up, we dry them out, we form the polymers, and then we add water. They depolymerize a bit, but then we do it again. And they keep getting larger. You read the experimental and you see he didn't just heat them up. He cooked them to absolute dryness. He heated them up to 130 degrees centigrade.
Speaker 3 00:45:18 What's magical about that number? Because if you are over 125 degrees centigrade, you are at sterilization temperatures. So if ever life wanted to form, not gonna be able to form, because Lee said your days warm up during the day and they cool down at night. That's the simulation. Okay. So you want your days to warm up to 130 degrees centigrade during the day, then there's no life could ever form because if something tried to form you sterilized it. Poor Dave didn't even know it because he never looked at the experimental. So he was hoodwinked by Lee Cronin's.
Speaker 4 00:45:55 This is fascinating, Jim Chemistry. Yeah. So, so, okay. There was a couple, let me put it this in a couple different contexts. First the scientific, and then we'll get to the rhetorical, okay? But the scientific is that we've learned for years that life arose in a warm little pond or in the prebiotic ocean. But rarely are we told that one of the most important, uh, organic molecules, uh, amino acids that form proteins will not polymerize, will not link up in the presence of water. The energetics are such that those starting materials, amino acids will not link the e energy. Uh, the thermodynamics is against that. Uh, so that's, that's something that's kind of sh shocking in a way because we have this cultural story about how life began, and the very most basic aspect of it turns out to be chemically implausible. Correct. Uh, so that's one thing. Um, then scientifically, what Lee Cronin does to overcome that hurdle, which he recognizes is real, is that he has these wet and dry cycles where he tries to heat things up and then cool things off to try to get the amino acids to link up, but the temperature to which he has to heat them is above the sterilization temperature, which would kill all life.
Speaker 3 00:47:17 Correct.
Speaker 4 00:47:17 So, so you can't, if you're, if that's what you're simulating in order to get the amino acids to link up, you're also simulating the destruction of all life.
Speaker 3 00:47:25 Correct. Correct.
Speaker 4 00:47:26 So that's gonna be kind of self-defeating simulation. Yes. It, it's not con it's not demonstrating what you actually want it to. You might have gotten two amino acids to link up, or three or four or five, but you're not getting any closer to life. You're actually destroying all life on the planet as you Right. As you move forward and destroying the conditions under which life, the further chemical evolution of life could proceed.
Speaker 3 00:47:45 Right. And you philosophers probably have some term for that.
Speaker 4 00:47:49 Well, we'll think of one, but I, I wanna get to the rhetoric of this now. So scientifically, I, I think we got a good idea of what's going on. Again, it sounds an awful lot like,
Speaker 3 00:47:57 But let, let me mention one other thing. Yeah,
Speaker 4 00:47:59 Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 3 00:47:59 He heats it to 130 degrees. So you, when you sterilize something, you heat to 125 degrees or higher for 15 minutes. He heated it for 15 hours at 130 degrees. This is just absolutely crazy. But we, we still have to talk about the, the, the specificity of the hookup, because I, I, I haven't Oh,
Speaker 4 00:48:21 Right, I haven't talked about
Speaker 3 00:48:22 That yet.
Speaker 4 00:48:22 It is not just good enough to get the amino acids to hook up. They've gotta hook up in the right arrangement so that
Speaker 3 00:48:26 They No, they have to hook up in the right way. So,
Speaker 4 00:48:27 So they form chains that will fold into functional protein. Right?
Speaker 3 00:48:30 Right. So half of half of the amino acids, instead of having just one end hooking to another end, just having, just having an A and a B that are hooking up together like this, uh, four finger to to thumb, no, a lot of them have another group hanging off. Half of the amino acids have another functional group hanging off that then competes for this main chain. As soon as those start competing, you don't have a polypeptide anymore. You have junk. You have junk. So when Lee used those amino acids, so generally people don't even use those amino acids that have the extra chain because they just can't deal with it. So when we make synthetic polypeptides in the lab, we will protect that so that it doesn't react. I see. When you're in nature, you, so these compete and as soon as one competes, so that's,
Speaker 4 00:49:20 So you, you get your whole chain some peptide linkages, but some non peptide
Speaker 3 00:49:23 Peptide linkages, linkages that, that, that are in there, that shouldn't be. And
Speaker 4 00:49:27 You can't form a protein if you have any non peptide linkages. If correct things are coming off at odd angles,
Speaker 3 00:49:31 Those never come, those are never formed by ribosomes. Those always form afterward during the protein folding step to get the protein to fold into a per a, a proper configuration. If you have those in the main chain in the peptide, the end terminus to the C terminus, you inject
Speaker 4 00:49:50 Those, you'll not make a protein. You're
Speaker 3 00:49:51 Gone. Just one of those, you're done. One of 'em, you're toast. You're toast. That's it. It's done. So again,
Speaker 4 00:49:55 Another specificity requirement that cannot be met by undirected chemistry or has not been
Speaker 3 00:50:02 Met. Right. And, and Lee notices this, Lee says, yeah, and, and, and, and he says, well, we did get some linear words. He doesn't know. He gets all of this junk. It's junk. That's why I say it's under junk. What Lee even made in his unreasonable conditions, first of all, buying all the homo chiro amino acids, buying them in homo chiro pure form. He didn't make them with some silly little, uh, prebiotic reaction, milleri reaction. The familiarity was so good. Why didn't he use that? He didn't, because he knows that that doesn't work. So he bought these. Then even when he bought these, he went ahead and he tried to polymerize these, he had to use these crazy high temperatures, which would never be relevant. And then what he got was junk. So every phase of it is cheating and junk, cheating and junk. That's what Lee Cronin did. Cheating and junk all the way along. And poor Dave Farina is the victim. And then he enabled Lee Cronin to put this
Speaker 4 00:50:56 Out there as specific. Well, and that's where I
Speaker 3 00:50:57 Specifically was relevant.
Speaker 4 00:50:58 E exactly. And I want to talk a bit about the rhetorical dimension of this, because, you know, a lot of people watching this will wonder, well, why is Professor Tour so passionate about this? Well, because first of all, he knows the organic chemistry, and he knows these guys are pulling the wool over the eyes of the public. But also, he didn't start this fight. I'm defending you now, Jim. You didn't, yes.
Speaker 3 00:51:18 You
Speaker 4 00:51:18 Were attacked by a guy with, you know, hundreds of thousands. Um, it is more than a million. I think some of his, uh, viewers who come to him for this is Professor Dave, comes to Professor Dave for science education, and he used that platform to specifically attack you for being ignorant and or dishonest in your critiques of these origin of
Speaker 3 00:51:43 Life researchers, both and dishonest, that's both ignorant and dishonest. So that, I'm, I'm actively lying. I am inept and I'm actively lying, Dave Farina says.
Speaker 4 00:51:53 But I think any, I I, and I'm going to opine here, but just having listened to you in the last episode and in the, in the time we've been together on this one, it's pretty obvious, you know, organic chemistry and organic synthesis, and also, you know, a lot about what would be required to build an actual living cell. And these, uh, these prebiotic simulation experiments are either producing things that aren't relevant to living cells, or they're cheating, or more likely they're doing both. Uh, cheating in the sense that the, the intelligent agent is using a, a, a complex recipe of his or her own design is buying purified reagents off the shelf and is using sophisticated organic synthesis techniques that would not be available to undirected, uh, simpler molecules on a prebiotic earth. So at, at every, every step of the way, this is, this is really suspect science.
Speaker 4 00:52:48 Um, so I think it's just, it's, it's fascinating. We're delighted to give you a chance to, to, uh, to provide the other side of this story. Um, the, the, the last thing I wanna ask you about is, um, well, actually is the, the deep, the deepest problem of all that's long fascinated me, which is the information problem. And this, we'll go back to the, we're moving back from the rhetoric to the science now, but, uh, you're showing that the, that the building homo amino acids under prebiotic simulation ex in, in, uh, in realistic conditions is, is, is not, it's not plausible. It's not,
Speaker 3 00:53:30 No. Nobody's
Speaker 4 00:53:31 Link linking the am linking the amino acids together is very difficult, if not impossible to do on prebiotic conditions. Even a little water messes the whole thing up. Uh, and we've heard about how <laugh> life began in a warm little pond, in a prebiotic ocean for years. Even if you get things to link up, they're linked up in the, in, in the, with the wrong orientation. Not, not with exclusively peptide bonds, but what about the even more difficult problem of getting the right sequence of the 20 different amino acids to form so that the right kind of, uh, interactions between them will cause 'em to fold into three dimensional shapes that will perform proteins. A prebiotic, uh, chemist made any prog progress on this sequence, specificity problem, or sometimes called the information problem. We call it the information problem, because in living cells, the information in the D n A directs the synthesis of the protein molecules, amino acid by amino acids to ensure that the right sequence of amino acids are linked together. But in a prebiotic context, is there any process that can help us solve that information? Problem
Speaker 3 00:54:40 Zero. They have made zero progress on this. And I mean, literally none. Nobody knows how to control the arrangement of these. Nobody knows how to control the arrangement. What they will say is that you, the, the proteins came from an R n A template, and that r n a template might've been the original form. But then how do you get the r n A to arrange with the information? And Dave says, I don't know what I'm talking about with information. Lee Cronin says, I don't know what I'm talking about with information. Yet, they have never put forward where the information comes from because you have to have specified information to have the arrangements of the amino acids for protein to fold. And as Lee Cronin has said himself, you might get one protein made, but that wouldn't do it. The one molecule would never be enough. It would never be enough. And these things don't mimic themselves. They don't make themselves, people will say r n a duplicates itself. It does not, it does not duplicate itself. What has only been done is you get very small portions of it duplicated less than 10%, and only when they've been highly
Speaker 4 00:55:52 Programed, engineered Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:55:54 Engineered to try to keep people, they
Speaker 4 00:55:55 Even call the, the, the, the scientists who do this work call themselves rib zyme engineers. Yeah. So they're engineering the molecules, which is, um, there's a, a, a quotation in origin of life research literature. That's o often taken as, uh, canonical in the sense that it really defines what has to be the problem that has to be solved. It's from burnt Olaf Cooper's, a German, uh, origin of Life biochemist. He says, the origin of life is basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information. Now you've shown that it's, it, it it's equivalent to actually far more than that. You've got <laugh> just, just building the molecules or the, the subunits out of which the information bearing molecules are formed is extremely difficult and has not been demonstrated under realistic prebiotic conditions. But the problem of the information at the higher level is, uh, has not, you're saying there's been absolutely no, no progress on that whatsoever.
Speaker 3 00:56:51 Correct? Correct. There's been no progress on this whatsoever. So, origin of life people, as far as I see, they never address it. They can't even get the medium made upon which the information is stored. Very well said. Have to, we have to, right. We have the medium Yeah. To store it. And the medium is secondary. The information is primary. We can't even get the medium upon which to store the information.
Speaker 4 00:57:17 That's right. Well, as you know, I wrote a whole book about the information problem called Signature in the Cell, but it's, it's, uh, extremely, uh, enlightening for me to talk to you about the problems at the lower levels of getting the medium made or the, the, the molecules, the, the, the smaller level molecules made. Um, we, we are delighted to, to host this series of videos because we think this, this content is so important. And, um, we want, we also wanna make clear that we are delighted that Professor Dave has, um, initiated this critique of Dr. Tour. I mentioned in the last video that, that we produce, that I had a supervisor when I was doing my PhD work in Cambridge, he used to say, beware the sound of one hand clapping. There's an argument on one side. There's bound to be an argument on the other, and that one of the best ways to test the strength of an argument is to see how well it withstands critical scrutiny.
Speaker 4 00:58:12 Now, uh, there's a, there's a complex dialectic here. I'm not sure who started the argument exactly, but Dr. Tour certainly has been critiquing publicly these origin of life simulation experiments. In response to that, uh, professor Dave has attacked Professor Tour. In response to that, there's been some back and forth. What we are delighted to do here is to, to, uh, present some of this back and forth so that you, our audience are in a position to evaluate who has the stronger argument. My views on this are probably pretty clear. I think Dr. Tour is one of the world's finest organic chemists. He knows what he's talking about, and the critiques he's making are very compelling. Um, but you can decide, and you can now, you now have the wherewithal to do that in that not only are we producing videos that are putting some of this discussion and context, but Dr. Tourer has a whole series of videos in response, not just to Professor Dave, but to the experts upon, uh, which he has based his critique. And so you can evaluate both sides of this argument for yourself. Right? And we're, we're hoping that lots of you, uh, have the patience to, to, uh, to view these and, and then, and then follow up with, uh, looking at Dr. Tour's videos and comparing them to the content that's already out there online from Professor Dave, Dave Farina. So, yeah,
Speaker 3 00:59:30 So, so if I could mention Steve that Yeah, go, go ahead. On my, on my YouTube channel, d r James Tours, if you go to YouTube, just type in Dr. James tour. You'll see this series. So I already had a series on Origin of Life. It's a, it's actually a 13 part series on Origin of Life where I describe all of these basic problems. In response to that, Dave Farina came out with a two-part, uh, uh, where he brought in experts. And so I go right after the experts, I think, but it, it may, our, our, my video series on these experts is gonna come out very soon. It might even come out before this video that we're making right now that I'm making with you, Steve. So, but in any case, it's it. This is gonna be out there. So if you just watch d r James Tour, go there and subscribe. You'll see when these things come out and I'm taking on the experts, we are going to take them out one by one. We are just gonna take them down because Dave, free
Speaker 4 01:00:25 In the, in the intellectual sense, of course, <laugh>. Yeah.
Speaker 3 01:00:27 In the intellectual sense, one by one, we're gonna take 'em out. And
Speaker 4 01:00:30 So the arguments, yes, and this is fascinating because what, what we have now is the internet has become a, a place where a very spirited scientific argument is taking place about one of the most fundamental questions that science has ever raised, which is what caused life on earth to arise. This is a question of, of immense scientific interest. It has larger philosophical implications, and so it really is worth the back and forth that's going on here. Uh, Jim Tour, professor Dave, right. Jim Tour, and now Professor Dave citing the experts doing Origin of Life research and tour responding to them. So
Speaker 3 01:01:03 Yeah, I'm responding to his experts and, and I agree with you. I wanna, I thank God for Dave Farina. I mean, without him I would've just, I I, I wouldn't have bothered with this thing. It's because of Dave Farina. We have Dave Farina to thank for all of these videos coming out.
Speaker 4 01:01:20 He's prema he's created a tremendous platform for discussing a really foundational and important issue that is both scientific and philosophical and character. I think it's one of the most interesting, uh, subjects in science that you could study. I did a PhD on Origin of Life Biology. I in, in a philosophy of science department. It's one of the really great questions. So we're, we're actually delighted that this argument has been, uh, joined on all sides. And, uh, we hope that people will follow up watching this video by, by having a look at the series, the new series that Dr. Tour has released, again, at the, say the, the, uh, d
Speaker 3 01:01:57 Site. Dr. James tour, d r James tour. Dr. James tour.
Speaker 4 01:02:01 Dr. James tour.
Speaker 3 01:02:03 Dr. James tour. Excellent. No, just, just, just go to YouTube, just type in, once you're on YouTube, type in d r James Tour. And my home, my, my my YouTube video page homepage will come up and you'll see the whole series will be coming out there.
Speaker 4 01:02:17 That's, that's just fantastic. So we highly recommend that we thank everyone for watching. And, uh, we'll sign off here.
Speaker 3 01:02:23 We do not know how life formed. We just do not know how. There's so many problems. We do not know. We know the types of compound.
Speaker 2 01:02:32 That was Dr. Steven Meyer and Dr. James tour discussing some of the major problems inherent in a biogenesis and the state of Origin of Life research as a whole. Stay tuned for parts three and four of this series as Tour and Meyer continue their critiques of the experts in Origin of Life research. As Dr. Meyer says, the origin of life is a question of immense scientific interest that has larger philosophical implications as well. So it's worth the back and forth to get to the heart of the issue. And if you'd like to watch the video versions of these conversations, you'll find them also posted weekly at Dr. Meyer's YouTube channel at Dr. Steven Meyer. That's at Dr. Steven Meyer at YouTube. For ID the future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 01:03:25 Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org. This program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its Center for Science and Culture.
