[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. Im your host Andrew McDermott. Today were pleased to share a new discussion between Doctor James Tour and Doctor Steven Meyer about recent critiques of Origin of life research published in the prestigious science journal Nature. The interview originally aired on the science and faith podcast hosted by Doctor tour. In a recent nature comment, biochemist Nick Lane and bioengineer Joanna Xavier give a sobering assessment of the origin of life research field, advising fellow researchers that brash claims for a breakthrough on the origin of life are unhelpful noise if they do not come in the context of a wider framework.
Here, doctors tour and Meyer discuss the article's findings. They also comment on a recent book review by Oxford emeritus biologist Dennis Noble, calling for a major rethink of biology in a piece titled it's time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life. Doctor Meyer thinks the nature articles represent a healthy corrective to a research field besought by hype and empty promises. He also reminds us that the more we learn about how to build an animal, the more challenging the origin of life problem becomes. If you want to evolve one animal body plan into another, he says, youve got to change the developmental gene regulatory network which is responsible for the building of body plans. But the one thing we know experimentally is that thats the one thing that doesnt happen. So just how do you get from one animal body plan to another in light of new things weve learned?
Currently, no theory of evolution can answer that question, which explains why creating life from non life in the lab is such a thorny and still unsolved proposition. Now enjoy this informative and engaging discussion between doctor tour and Doctor Meyer as they review new critiques of the origin of life field from mainstream researchers.
[00:02:08] Speaker A: Welcome. I'm here again with my friend Steven Meyer. So he has his PhD in philosophy of science from Cambridge in the UK and he also has a master's from Cambridge in the philosophy of science and history. He has a bachelor's degree in physics and geology and he worked as a geophysicist for several years before he went forward and got his PhD. He's presently the director for the center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute and he's a senior research fellow and he's written a number of books. Probably the most popular one is signature in the cell, and we might mention some of that today. But he has a newer book. I'll let him tell us something about that. Welcome Stephen.
[00:02:51] Speaker C: It's great to be with you, Jim. Thanks for having me on.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: So, and your most recent book, just.
[00:02:58] Speaker C: A monument, Return of the God hypothesis, three discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: And I'll tell you, Steve, I've never told you this before. I read it twice, actually. And there's so much that I. There's so much. There's a lot there, but I really liked it.
[00:03:14] Speaker C: Well, that's been one of the fun things about our friendship. We've gotten to learn a lot from each other. So I've been following your work, particularly the stuff on your critiques of abiogenesis. But I love your work on nanotechnology, too.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: So thank you. Let me just mention at the top, since you bring that up, I'm recording right now, the lectures that I'm giving this semester to my undergraduate class on nanotechnology. It's a very general class on nanotechnology and talking a lot about, we talk about some of the basics, but talk a lot about the discoveries we've made in my own lab over the past 15 years or so. So we cover topics from carbon nanotubes to graphene to molecular machines and bringing this into medicine and materials and aircraft and communication systems. And then we talk a lot about translating this into companies. How do you translate it into a company? Those will be coming out probably within a few months. We'll start putting those out. But recently I was reading something that came out of the Discovery institute. It was on evolution news. First of all, one of the things I want to point out is that the author of that said that, I'm paraphrasing, Stephen Meyer speaks about origin of life much nicer than Jim tour speaks about origin of life in the way I address people. So you're the nice guy and good cop, bad copy, and you're the good cop. I guess I'm the bad cop because I point things out differently.
[00:04:40] Speaker C: Well, you have a predecessor in that role in origin of life research. I got to meet Robert Shapiro at a conference in 2010, and I'd met him once before, very early in my career, but he wrote a book in 1986 called a Skeptics Guide, something like that. And he was an origin of life researcher, a chemistry. But he got a reputation in the field as doctor. No, because people would come up with fanciful scenarios and he would say, that doesn't work chemically. The chemistry isn't going to do what you want it to do to get you to where you want to go. So start over.
So you're following in a good tradition because he would hold people's feet to the fire. No wishful thinking allowed. The scenarios have to be consistent with what actually will take place when you interact certain chemicals with other chemicals under specified conditions, so.
[00:05:35] Speaker A: Right. Well, I never had the pleasure of meeting Robert Shapiro, but, you know, I didn't get into this until about six years ago when you and David Berlinski put me up to it. I was blissfully unaware of the minefield that I was stepping into.
But now I've thrown my hat in this ring and I'm in it, and I'm not backing out, so.
[00:05:55] Speaker C: But you're responsible, valuable service for science by making, bringing, bringing your chemical insight to bear on these many, many scenarios that people have spun.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: Well, you know, in that article on evolution news. And remind me, what's the gentleman's name that writes that?
[00:06:11] Speaker C: Probably David Klinghofer is the senior editor there.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: Okay, so what David wrote is he was writing about an article that came out by Nick Lane and Joanna Xavier. The title of this article is to unravel the origin of life, treat findings as pieces of a bigger puzzle. So the. The subtitle is, explaining isolated steps on the road from simple chemicals to complex living organisms is not enough. Looking at the big picture could help to bridge rifts in this fractured research field. And so it's interesting that they're describing this now as a fractured field. Many people have described it that, oh, no, these people all are in unison. They're all going down the same direction. And this is written not by Steve and myself. This is written by Nick Lane, who's an origin of life researcher. He loves these hydrothermal vents that are under the ocean. He likes metabolism, first type of theory. And Joanna Savior, who has worked with him on this, she's writing from the Imperial College London. He's writing from University College London. And I want to, right, read you a few quotes from this so you can see where now researchers in the field are coming up with other thoughts on this. One of the things they write is the origin of life is one of the greatest challenges in science. So I would agree with that. They write, there is no consensus about what to look for or where. Isn't that interesting? There's no consensus on what to look for or where in this field of origin of life. This is origin of life researchers writing this, again, they write, most scientists agree that these nanomachines are a product of selection, but selection for what, where and how? This is what I've been saying. I say, you know, you say there's selection, but for what? Molecules don't know to select to life. They don't have a brain. They don't know that, hey, let's select this. This is going to be better for when we build an organism. They don't know. So what are you selecting for? So these scientists are seeing the same thing, and then I'll read one more quote. Refraining from hype might seem unrealistic, but could work if researchers implemented this practice in their roles as peer reviewers for papers and grants as well as authors. You know, I'm the one who's always stressing that the researchers themselves are overhyping this and making great projections. And here these researchers in the field are saying that people are going to have to stop coming out with the hype. They're going to have to refrain from hype. And they say that it almost seems unrealistic, which means because they're terribly engrossed in this, and as researchers, they're hyping this stuff up. So all the people that are claiming that, oh, there is no hype by the researchers, there's a lot of hype by the researchers, and then when it gets into the press, they hype it up even more. And this is a February 2024 article in Nature, February 26, 2024, in Nature, page 948. And Steve, what are your thoughts on this?
[00:09:25] Speaker C: I think incredibly confirming of some things that you and I have both been saying for a long time. Here's another quote. The origin of life field faces the same problem with culture. Incentives that afflict all of science, overselling ideas towards publication and funding, too little common ground between competing groups, and perhaps too much pride, too strong an attachment to favored scenarios, and too little willingness to be proved, unwillingness to be proved wrong. As you know, I did my PhD on origin of life biology. That was the topic of my PhD in the philosophy of science department at Cambridge in 1989, when I was working on the PhD. My supervisor, younger, came back from the Isall conference, the International Society for the Study of the origin of Life, and she said, steve, I fear our field has become dominated by quacks and cranks. And I said, that's pretty damning. Why do you say that? And she said, well, everyone at this conference that year, she said, everyone seems to know that the other person's theory won't work, but they're unwilling to admit it about their own.
You have this, you just mentioned, you have people who like hydrothermal vents. You have people that like metabolism. First, what I've seen in the study of the field over now quite a number of decades is that there tends to be a recycling of ideas that have failed before, but we bring them back when the subsequent ideas are also shown to fail. So you had DNA first models. They gave rise to protein first models. They gave rise to metabolism first models, they gave rise to rna world models. And now we have people bringing back metabolism first, and you have theories that are based on chance. Then they give ways to theories that are based on natural selection, and then they give rise to theories that are based on self organization and underlying physical laws. And none of those three approaches have worked, and none of those different models as to which came first have worked. And so you have some very fundamental problems that are very often being swept under the rug. And what will happen is, as these authors describe in their nature article, the origin of life, researchers will latch onto small, little incremental results that allegedly illustrate one small step in what would be needed to go from simple molecules to a fully functionally integrated complex cell. And they'll focus on, well, we produced a nucleotide base under realistic conditions, or we got something to happen in a hydrothermal vent that seems life relevant or whatever.
And what these authors are saying is, that's not sufficient. You need to look at the whole scope of what's required.
My supervisor, who wrote a fairly definitive history of the origin of life research up until the 1980s, said that she had a very succinct way of putting it, that behind every question about the origin of life lies another question, which is, what is it that we're trying to explain the origin of? And what defines success is not a molecule that you might allege is somewhere on the path from simple chemicals to a fully functional cell, but instead a fully functional cell, albeit the simplest one that we can observe. But still, you've got to. You have to explain life as we know it. You can't simply say, well, oh, here's a transition from state a to state b, when you've got to get all the way to state Z, and there's a whole bunch of steps in between. So I think this is a healthy corrective that these authors have offered. And I.
They're obviously working in the field.
Johanna Xavier apparently read my book and said she appreciated the questions that I raised and the.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: Actually, she said more than that. I think she said it was one of the best books she's ever read.
[00:13:25] Speaker D: I read signature in the cell by Stephen Meyer. Is that his name? Yes. And I must tell you, I found it one of the best books I've read in terms of really pointing, putting the finger on the questions.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:13:43] Speaker D: What I didn't like was the final answer, of course, but I actually tell everyone I can listen, read that book, let's not put intelligent design in a spike and burn it. Let's understand what they're saying and engage.
[00:13:58] Speaker C: It was very kind of her to say that, but what I thought was quite interesting was that she said, but we have to fight a naturalistic answer, because then she said, otherwise I wouldn't have a job. She said, which is another way of saying we're firmly committed on an a priori basis to working within a particular framework. We're not going to consider the possibility that, for example, the digital information that we all know is necessary to build the proteins that make cells stay alive might have come initially from an intelligence that's off limits. Okay, that's the way you want to play the game, fine, but recognize that it's a game, that there are limits to your inquiry. And what is so striking is that we've now had 60 years of inquiry played within that framework. That game has been played within a particular framework. And it's not that it's just made no progress. It's that we're further from a solution than we were in 1953, when Miller and urey synthesized amino acids under allegedly but not actually prebiotic conditions. And the reason that we're further from a solution is that we've learned more and more and more about the complexity of life. It's not just amino acids. The amino acids have to be arranged into proteins. The proteins have to be arranged into biosynthetic pathways and molecular machines. They have to be integrated into a fully into a complex, functionally integrated information storage, transmission and processing system. We used to think that the membrane, the cell membrane, was the simple part. We could have these little things that Alexander oparin called coacervates, and they simulated membranes. We now know that membranes are incredibly complex, they have channels and gates, and the goal is receding out of view because of our increased knowledge, knowledge that increases every year of the complexity of the cells. So they have hopeful things to say within their framework at the end of the article, like, well, if we keep the big picture in mind, it'll help us make progress. Well, I think, at least in the sense that if you keep the big picture in mind, we'll be able to judge more quickly how trivial are many of the alleged advances that are being touted and hyped. But whether or not keeping the big picture in mind actually helps solve the problem, I don't know. At least it defines the problem, clearly.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. And so this 70 years now since Miller Urey, what's happened is the way I describe this is that you think you're getting closer, but the target moves further and further away, not because the cell is changing, but it's because we're recognizing all of these pieces within the cell that are operable, that we didn't even know before. And so there's all of these layers. And this gets back to another article by Dennis Noble, and he's at Oxford in the UK, and he's commenting on a book by Philip Ball, who's an editor for Nature or was an editor for Nature. And nature is probably the most prestigious scientific journal there is, that along with science. And Philip Ball wrote a book called how life works, a user's guide to the new biology. And so Dennis Noble writes this article, and it's, it's, says it's entitled it's time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life. Now, this is something that is commonly said, and I've even said it, you know, DNA is the blueprint of life. He's, what he's saying is it's really much deeper than this. He says the view of biology often presented to the public is oversimplified and out of date. Scientists must set the record straight, argues a new book. And here's what Dennis Noble writes about this. And so he's quite a senior biologist there at Oxford. And here's what he writes. We are at the beginning of a profound rethinking of how life works. It's time to stop pretending that, give or take a few bits and pieces, we know how life works. Instead, we must let our ideas evolve as more discoveries are made in the coming decades. Sitting in uncertainty while working to make those discoveries will be biology's great task for the 21st century. So let me key in on a few words here. He says we need a profound rethinking about how life works. He says it's time to stop pretending something that I've been saying quite a lot. You know what these people pretend that they've got when they're so far from having a living system. And then he says, we are sitting in uncertainty and we're going to have to learn how to work in the 21st century. In this realm of uncertainty. While working on discoveries, we have to confess that we're working in this realm of uncertainty. So it's really interesting to see mainline folks coming and saying this. This is not me, this is not coming from the Discovery Institute.
These are mainline folks that have worked in biological systems, work in origin of life, and so this is what we're seeing. So what are your thoughts on this, Steve, with how we're making progress?
[00:19:16] Speaker C: Yeah, this sparks a lot of thoughts that what Dennis Doble, who's a fantastic biologist, by the way, developmental biologist, and he's one of the kind of prime movers in what's sometimes called the third way. People looking for a new theory of evolution, they don't want to embrace intelligent design, but they are so done with neo Darwinism. I'm very interested in the whole question of information and how it functions in life. And when he's talking about the blueprint for building life is not solely resident in DNA. He's talking about something that's been known now for quite a while. I wrote about this in my second book, Darwin's doubt, in 2013. And there's been many layers, many discoveries about the layers of information that are present in life that are crucial to building an animal, for example, an animal body plan. So we know that the genes are there, the genetic information is necessary to build proteins, but we're learning a lot just about how that genetic information is processed. The framework that he's talking about that gave everyone sort of security was the sort of neo darwinian explanation of biological origins and something like the Francis Crick central dogma, the idea that genes make proteins, or DNA makes rna makes proteins, makes life. So we had an idea of how life works. It's all in the DNA, and it produces the proteins, and the proteins produce the living systems. We do know that DNA is crucial to producing proteins, but there's a whole lot more to the story. And so we had one of our top scientists here last week, Richard Sternberg, who's working on a book about why the central dogma is not correct and why there are many, many other layers of information. You have processing of that genetic information both before and after translation. You have information for interpreting the DNA. What we used to think of as junk DNA is actually functioning like an operating system that's coordinating the timing and expression of the parts of the DNA that code for proteins. So you've got informational regulation that is resident in other portions of the DNA, sometimes on other chromosomes, and then you have yet higher levels of information that's often expressed structurally.
The distribution of membrane targets on cells conveys information that's crucial for the function that proteins end up playing. There's intracellular signaling that's being conveyed by sugar molecules, the cytoskeletal arrays made of tubulin proteins are arranged differently, and that conveys important structural information. These are just some of the sources of information beyond the genome that we know about. And those sources are sometimes called epigenetic or onto beyond the genome sources of information. There's a really important corollary to these discoveries for the discussion of biological origins. Neo Darwinism has always affirmed that the source of variation is taking place at the lowest levels of the biological hierarchy in the DNA molecule. Changes in those a, cs, g's and t's, random changes in the sequential arrangement of nucleotide bases, neo Darwinists have long argued, is the source of variation that natural selection acts on. But we now know that you could mutate a DNA molecule indefinitely without respect to any probabilistic limits. And in the best case, all you would get is a new protein. But proteins have to be organized into biosynthetic pathways. Those biosynthetic pathways will characterize different cell types. Different cell types have to be organized into tissues, tissues have to be organized into organs. Organs and tissues have to be organized into whole body plans. And the instructions or the information for affecting those higher levels of organization beyond the simple protein are not stored entirely in the DNA. And therefore, what that means is the neo darwinian mechanism is simply inadequate to generate a body plan. If you need information beyond the DNA to build the whole organism, then mutating DNA as much as you want is never going to enable you to build a new organism.
This is just one of the many reasons that you have people like Dennis Noble and James Shapiro and others saying, hey, we need a new theory of evolution. Neo Darwinism is not sufficient. And so part of what noble is talking about is a revolution in our understanding of how biology works, about what a cell is made of, what an organism is made of. But it's also implicitly a challenge to the framework by which we have for now, nearly 100 years, explained where new organisms came from. So it's a wide open discussion in both areas, the description of biological systems and also where biological systems came from.
[00:24:35] Speaker A: That's right. So these things are becoming more complex and even the origin of life researchers are seeing this, and sadly, sadly, youtubers that talk about this just don't see this at all. They think we're getting closer because origin of life researchers have been saying, no, we're getting closer all the time.
I've even heard origin of life researchers say that, we're almost there, we've got all these pieces, we're almost there. And this really throws off the press and the press comes out with wild things.
[00:25:07] Speaker C: Well, Jim, I was just to interject and to build on your thought. We were just saying how the target keeps receding for origin of life researchers as we discover more and more about the cell. I have inaccurately described research on the cambrian explosion the same way, saying the cambrian explosion keeps getting more explosive. Well, the explosion isn't getting more explosive. Instead, what we're learning about how explosive, the first appearance of most of the major animal body plants in the cambrian explosion or the cambrian period, what we're learning about that is getting more explosive. And to extend that thought further, what we're learning about what it takes to build an animal, what it takes to build a fully formed animal body plan, is also our knowledge of that is growing. Our understanding of the complexity of the processes that are involved is growing, and that is creating a crisis, not just in chemical evolutionary theory, not just for origin of life researchers, but for people doing biological evolution. That is to say, advocates of neo Darwinism, or for that matter, any of the more recently formulated post neo darwinian theories of evolution that are coming out of the third way. So just one example, the work that Eric Davidson has done, the late now Eric Davidson has done on what are called developmental gene regulatory networks, the intricate circuitry that's involved in producing a fully formed animal. What Davidson learned was that there's an intricate interrelationship between genes and gene products, and the way those gene products, in turn regulate the expression of the genome, such that as the organism is developing, going through cell division from one to two to four, to eight to 16 to 64. And on the geometric expansion of the numbers of cells as an organism is developing occurs.
And as that's occurring, there's differentiation of different cell types. Some things have to become bone cells and other nerve cells and other muscle cells. And when that differentiation occurs, then new proteins are required to service those cells, which those distinct cell types, which means certain parts of the genome have to be turned on, expressed, and others have to be down regulated. And that whole process is being beautifully choreographed. And when you map the way that process is being choreographed by the interplay between genes and gene projects and the parts of the genome they regulate, it all looks like an integrated circuit. And what Davidson found was you cannot change the core elements of that circuitry without shutting down animal development. And that poses a huge problem that none of the models, the current models of evolutionary theory have solved, which is, if you want to change an animal body plan, you want to morph one animal body plan, evolve one animal body plan into another. You've got to change the developmental gene regulatory network, which is responsible for the building of body plans. But the one thing we know experimentally, Davidson has told us, is that that's the thing that doesn't happen. Those developmental gene regulatory networks cannot be significantly altered without crashing the developmental program, shutting down the development of the organism, and terminating any possibility for further evolution. So how you get from one animal body plan to another in light of new things? We've learned about how difficult it is to build an animal body plan and the intricacy of the choreography, the integrated choreography that's taking place because of this. Essentially molecular circuitry is an unsolved problem with all theories of evolution. So that's where we are, and that's. I think that it's. And that's just another level of complexity that's been discovered. It's the kind of thing that noble is talking about life.
[00:28:58] Speaker A: Life is becoming more complex, and that's what Dennis Noble is talking about and becoming more complex because we see, we're seeing these things. It's not that life itself has become more complex. It's that we're realizing.
[00:29:11] Speaker C: It's appreciation of how complex life is, is growing.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: Yeah, right. And so this what, this is what makes origin of life efforts become all the harder. Year by year, there might be a tiny little increment where somebody comes up with a said, oh, here's a new molecule that can be made, but the cell is just moving away from us, this target. So it's a very difficult thing to think about. And I think origin of life researchers are beginning to see this. Hence the article by Nick Lane, who in many ways, is a traditional origin of life researcher. In fact, there's things that he's taught that I couldn't agree with at all, but I've never really gone too much after his work. Interestingly, there's certain people that have gone after the work a lot, and they're contacting me and say, hey, how about lightening up on me a little bit?
Certainly getting their attention. And this is what I say. If I write an article and I say, this work isn't doing it, it doesn't really get their attention. That article goes away very quickly. But when I put it out on YouTube now, it gets their attention that they asked me to lighten up. I will say that many origin of life researchers, they're thoughtful people, and I think they're seeing exactly what I see. There was one origin of life researcher, and I said, look, you are a synthetic organic chemist. You see exactly what I see, but you don't have the ability to say it because you're so engrossed in this field. Now, his reply was telling. His reply was nothing. He said absolutely nothing. And so remember, no response is a response in itself. He didn't contest with what I was saying. I think he just felt convicted because organic chemists see what I see. Synthetic chemists see what I see, because we know what molecules do and what they don't do, and they're seeing it. And so, for example, if you take, for example, Lee Cronin, a thoughtful guy, he's morphing the traditional work that he was doing, say, in autocatalysis. Because now we know autocatalysis is not getting there. Even, even Jack Sawztech is his autocatalysis. You know, they thought it was going to be the end all, be all. Just a quick reminder, this organization is run totally by volunteers, but we do have to pay for the production work. If you could help us out by going to give jesusandscience.org, we'd appreciate it. Or you can click in the description box below. If you can't give, we certainly understand, but please just give us a thumbs up and click subscribe. Thank you.
[00:31:57] Speaker C: All these models, the problem of error, catastrophe. You go back to hyper cycles of Manfred Eigen. I mean, this is another example of repeating cycles of the same sorts of approaches. And they get, when one approach seems to reach a dead end by consensus and you bring back another approach that reached a dead end years ago, you slightly update it, and then you find out that similar problems attend to the new approach as well.
[00:32:24] Speaker A: Right, right. And so this whole idea of autocatalysis, which again, youtubers have said, you know, all the catalysis changes everything. It brings up your enantiomeric excesses and it solves the yield problem. That is real nonsense. And even in RNA, where people have promoted it, RNA has never been known to duplicate more than 10% of itself. And that is with extreme work. I went over that with Doctor Sattler on a recent YouTube video, and he went through the step by step games that they had to play to try to get RNA to duplicate itself. And even then, it was just tiny little piece. It wasn't a duplication at all. So even with RNA, it doesn't work very well. So let me just read, for example, what Lee Cronin has said when he was on Lex Fridman's podcast, so that you see how he's seeing what we're seeing now. He's seeing what I'm seeing. And I've even said to Lee, I said, you're sounding a lot like me. Here's what he says.
[00:33:28] Speaker E: Let's now make this other molecule another molecule, and how many molecules are going to be enough? And then the reason I say this is when you go back to Craig Venter, when he invented his life form, Scindia, this minimal plasmid is a myoplasma, something. I don't know the name of it, but he made this wonderful cell and said, I've invented life.
Not quite. He facsimiled the genome from this entity and made it in the lab or the DNA, but he didn't make the cell. He had to take an existing cell that has a causal chain going all the way back to Luca. And he showed when he took out the gene, the genes, and put in, his genes, synthesized, the cell could boot up. But it's remarkable that he could not make a cell from scratch. And even now, today, synthetic biologists cannot make a cell from scratch because there's some contingent information embodied outside the genome in the cell. And that is just incredible.
[00:34:31] Speaker A: This is why I say Lee's sounding to me like he ought to be joining your center for science and culture at the Discovery Institute. What do you think about that, Steve?
[00:34:41] Speaker C: Well, I'll invite him and see what he says.
Well, it's interesting, Jim. I think in your. A lot of the work that you have done in engaging people in origin of life research has been offering a chemical accounting and saying, look, if you're going to offer that as an explanation for how life began, you've got to explain how you get from step a to step b to step c chemically without massive amounts of human intervention. And you've shown, I think, very persuasively that there, in even the modest successes that people report, there's always a cheat, there's always an intervention from the chemist in simulating one allegedly relevant step in a prebiotic simulation. A lot of what I've done in signature, in the cell and writing sense is to provide a kind of informational accounting. So the RNA world is a really good example of that. In the Lane and Xavier article, they mentioned that most scientists agree that somehow these significant biologically relevant molecules were selected for in the passive voice. Selected for by whom? No, not by whom. By a what, by natural selection. But there's been a problem with that in origin of life research since the 1960s. In 1968, oparin formulated a model of prebiotic natural selection, and no less a figure than Theodosius Dobzhansky, famous neo darwinian evolutionary biologist, said in response. He said that prebiotic natural selection is a contradiction in terms. Natural selection presupposes organisms, already living organisms, that can self replicate and produce offspring that can in turn compete with each other for survival, and then where variations within those organisms can be differentially preserved well before there's life, what could do that? And to Dobzhansky's point was, it's incoherent to talk about prebiotic natural selection, but origin of life theorists and biologists have applied the concept of natural selection prebiotically to biomacromolecules, in particular rna, because they think that rna has these two capacities. It can act as an information storage molecule and also as a catalyst that's at least roughly analogous to a protein enzyme. That's debatable, by the way, but let's set that aside. Turns out that so then they're saying, okay, the first big step is to get an rna molecule that can self replicate, that can copy itself. But then, as you pointed out, that hasn't worked out very well, because to get an RNA molecule that's capable of even limited self replication, the prebiotic chemist has to sequence the bases in the RNA, and even then, they only get a molecule that's capable of sequencing 10% of itself. What's the key .2 points? They don't succeed in getting a fully self replicating RNA molecule, but to the extent they do succeed, they had to themselves input the information into the molecule. And so there's an informational requirement to get any kind of self replication going. And their own experiments show that that information is coming from outside the system, from an intelligent chemist. So what are they simulating?
Unwittingly, they're simulating intelligent design, and they've made no progress, therefore, on advancing their purely naturalistic models for the origin of life. And so the article can say something very facile like, well, most scientists assume that these biomacro molecules were selected for, but they don't. That assumption is completely ungrounded. They have no idea how they were selected for. Naturally speaking, if they mean by an intelligent agent. Well, maybe, but that's not what they're talking about.
[00:38:39] Speaker A: Right. And this is what I've argued all along. There is no selection before you have the biology, before you have life. There's no selection. It doesn't know. And it's just like Nick Lane and Joanna Xavier said, selecting for what? Where? Going toward what nobody knows. How does it know what to select for? You're selecting for something that you don't even know the target to select for. So. So it makes no sense to me. But now what they're doing. You know, I had offered this challenge and I challenged ten people who work in the area of origin of life to do some very simple steps. To begin with. One was to just hook together two amino acids. You didn't have to make a polypeptide peptide, but use prebiotic roots to hook together two amino acids, each of them having an active side chain, one with a carboxyl side chain, one with amino side chain. I said, if you can answer that question, I will get out of the area of origin of life. I will take down all the content on my YouTube channel on Origin of life, and I'll never speak publicly about it again. And I sent it to you, Steve, and I said, what do you think about this? And you were a little worried that, hey, you know, you're risking a lot here.
[00:39:52] Speaker C: You were putting the bar awfully low, and I worried that people would claim results that would be disputed. But apparently it's been crickets for you, so it's been crickets.
[00:40:06] Speaker A: Look, I'm an organic chemist. I know how to write a problem that cannot be solved.
[00:40:12] Speaker C: That's your area, man.
This is something we talked about in that series of videos we did a while back, this whole idea of the prebiotic soup, which is discussed in the Lane and Xavier article, or for that matter, the idea of the hydrothermal vents. Both of those alleged prebiotic or hypothesized prebiotic environments have lots of water, and amino acids do not polymerize in water. And yet, I mean, from Darwin's time forward, it was the idea of the warm little pond, the prebiotic soup. One of the most obvious problems with these models is that you got to build proteins, and proteins are made of amino acids and they got to be linked together. That's called polymerization, and that does not occur in an aqueous environment. And yet we are with prebiotic thermal vents.
[00:41:06] Speaker A: Right? That's under.
Yeah, not without activation. And it's what's called the free energy is positive. This is the chemist's terminology. The free energy is positive. So it's not going to go. It favors the starting material and not the product. And even if you had the product, if it's in water, it's going back to the starting material. So that's the problem with that. And then I tasked them with making, because they keep saying that they can polymerize this and they can make rna on surfaces so I said, just make a 200 mer, which is a very short rna, but it can't have any branching and it can't have any two, five linkages. Can you do that? Nobody came forward. I said, just make a disaccharide, two sugars, just hook them together at a certain place. And I knew they couldn't solve that. Nobody came forward with the answer. And then I said, okay.
[00:41:56] Speaker C: Interesting, too, Jim, that in life, the disaccharide is either made or broken apart with the help of an enzyme.
The processes that they're trying to simulate from simple chemistry will take. Things are polymerized in cells, but they're polymerized with the help of enzymes, which are complex proteins that are the consequence of prior genetic information.
And so that's the real problem. Where do you get the information to build the complex molecules that make all the biological processes possible?
[00:42:33] Speaker A: Yes, that's it. And actually, that enzyme which couples them is called phosphorylase. It has 842 amino acid units. And so there's ten to the 1094 possible combinations of how that thing could be ordered if you had that many amino acids. So remember, if you're more than ten to the 40th, you're beyond all time available in the universe. And this is ten to the ten to the 1094. 1094. So you, a thousand universes are not long enough for this to have the right sequence. And then even if you had it, it wouldn't be able to fold properly, because you all need all sorts of foldamers to help this thing to fold. So this is what nature has to go through. If nature could do it simply, it would be there. So, yes, that's exactly the problem. And then I put before them the information problem and the cell problem. And so this is what's been said here, is that I put these problems before them. They couldn't solve it. And so, interestingly, so Professor Cronin has said on a youtuber's channel, he says, actually, he was commenting on my challenge, which he didn't answer any of the questions. He said, I don't agree with the questions. But then he came back and he said that the questions were inverted, that actually what happens, he says they're actually connected together, and you should start at the base, meaning the cell. And that is, he says, quote, that is why James is doing it the wrong way around.
[00:44:06] Speaker E: So it kind of happens. He put that one as cell as last because he thought it was the hardest. Ironically, it's probably one of the first things that has to happen, because if you just have a big primordial soup with lots of molecules.
You just get it diluted out and so you need concentration, mineral surfaces. So, no, absolutely. There's ways to produce information content in cells.
[00:44:31] Speaker A: He wants us to start with the cell. So the cell somehow forms and that cell then causes the information to evolve, and that information system then is going to build these molecules. That was his answer to this.
So it's just all fluff.
So what I presented just not long ago was, okay, I challenged him, okay, why don't you do that? Start with a simple cell. You make that first, because he's come up with a new theory, and he calls this theory assembly theory, and I don't understand it. And I've confessed to him that I don't understand his assembly theory. Now it's gotten a lot of pressure. It was in a great journal, the journal Nature, and this was just published in October of 2023. So it's recent, and people have, lots of news articles have come out. They say it's a groundbreaking new theory of everything. Can you imagine the theory of everything that unites physics and evolution? Other articles have come out saying assembly theory bridges physics and biology to decode evolution and complexity. And I couldn't understand the article. Talked to him about that. I said, I don't understand the couplings there, but I said, okay, you've got your assembly theory. I'll give you that. Let's just say that I'll concede you've got assembly theory. I concede you've got that. If it's a real theory that's good for anything, it's going to make predictions. And based upon those predictions, you can go in the lab and try something, because remember, a prediction just out by itself that that is untestable is utterly useless. Make a prediction. Go in your lab and test the prediction. So we'll take the same set of questions I put before you. You want to start with the cell? Okay, ask your assembly theory. Go ahead. Make a simple cell that bears the characteristics of life. You have the characteristics of life. You've even defined, Professor Cronin, what the characteristics of life are. You said for any living system, you're going to have to have a cell, it's going to have to have a genetic code, going to have to have mating, it's going to have to have metabolism, it's going to have to have adaptation, it's going to have to have homeostasis. So taking your own definition of life, which is close to the textbook definition, let's do that. Have assembly theory. Deliver on these five things and then go in your lab and do it. Even if you can have it, your assembly theory, deliver on any one of them. You want to start with the cell? Okay, make the cell first, and then have it refine information and then have that do the selective chemistry to make the decay dipeptide, make the disaccharide, the glucose coupling from the four position to the anomeric center of the other one and deal with the rna synthesis. You're going to have to make predictions. And I gave him three years, three years, because he's already got the program. So just ask the program how it solves it and then go in the lab and make it happen. You got three years to do it. So, Steve, what do you think of that challenge? Is he going to be able to solve that one?
[00:47:36] Speaker C: I can see why you're annoying a lot of people. Jim, remember those old commercials, where's the beef? And when I read the paper by Cronin about assembly theory, I had that exact reaction, where's the beef? Because there's nothing wrong with what he's putting forward. It's just not actually a theory. It's not a theory of how life began. It's a formalism for measuring how difficult it is to build life, because he's got a crucial equation where he wants to quantify the number of steps that it would take to build a given structure. And the more complex the structure, the more steps would be involved. And he shows that if you've got, if you have a structure that has two elements, then you've got four possible ways of organizing it. Then it's going to be e to the n number of steps. And as the number of elements increases, the number of steps increase exponentially. So that's one term in his equation. Then he multiplies that by the number of times that particular element occurs or that particular structure occurs in a living cell, because that shows that it's really important and you got to have a lot of them.
So then that gives you a measure of the number of steps that would be required. And so he's got to, he's got a term for that. Well, that's just defining the degree of difficulty of the problem.
It doesn't give you any indication about how to solve the problem. And secondly, it's actually a measure of what we've been calling specified complexity. Because if something's very complex, it's going to take a lot of steps to search a space randomly to find it. And if there are a lot of, say, a given protein in this cell, there are a large number of them. That's an indication of how important it is functionally. So what you've got is complexity and functional specificity combined in his measure of the number of steps, his assembly theory. And so that's just another way of talking about what we've been talking about. Life is very complex, and there are certain functional requirements that have to be met in the complex molecules of life if they're to actually advance or preserve life. So that, and that's the key thing that, as researchers have understood for quite a while. When you go back to the coining of the term specified complexity, that was coined by a mainstream origin of life researcher in the seventies. And that's the idea that we're dealing with not just a random or complex array of chemical constituents, but things that are arranged in very specific ways that are necessary so that life can survive and maintain and function. So I think he's done a good job of defining or using a formalism to characterize the difficulty of the problem. But I don't see anything in his work yet that advances a solution or that tells us how these complex structures, like proteins or membranes or DNA molecules or rna molecules, or the whole information processing system was built in the first place.
[00:50:51] Speaker A: Doesn't he even suggest that if you have a certain level of complexity, that it must have had a causal history, there must have been something there to have made, that once you have a certain number of.
[00:51:04] Speaker C: Evidently, I mean, everything that exists must have had a cause. I suppose that's not a theory, that's just an a priori principle by which we reason about the world. I mean, what we need is, what we need is a causal scenario.
What was the first step? What was the second step? How did that lead to the third, 4th, 5th, etcetera? And I don't see that in his.
[00:51:25] Speaker A: Work yet, Steve, in my opinion, we're going to find out in three years. But in my opinion, it's a bunch of fluff. When I hear Lee talk about this, and Lee is a smart guy and he's a thoughtful guy, but I hear him talk about this, and he sounds to me like a biologist. Biologists say, oh, that could have happened, that could have evolved this way. And then when you point out to them, well, it can't happen because of this, immediately, well, then it did this. It is all these just so stories. You and I have been in the audience when one person was suggesting this sort of thing. And I remember you looked at me and I looked at you like, what is this biologist talking about? And it's this. So Lee has moved from trying to make molecules to talking about this fluff. And this is what I'm seeing in the origin of life. They've gone from very specific things to this fluff.
[00:52:20] Speaker C: Yeah, this is where I'll be a little nicer, Jim, but it's. And you can be the bad cop here. But I mean, I think what he's done is he's with a formalism, found a way of characterizing the degree of difficulty associated with the origin of life problem, or the origin of a novel protein, or the origin of any other significant biological structure that has to be produced in order to produce life. So his assembly theory looks like a formalism for characterizing the effect and the degree of difficulty associated with building the effect, but it is not providing a causal explanation of how the effect was built. The entity of interest came to be, and that's essentially, it's not offering anything. We need to solve the problem of the origin of life, other than defining the difficulty of the problem in new terms that are analytically interesting but not causally sufficient.
[00:53:17] Speaker A: So you are very nice. You are very nice.
It's not sold as that.
[00:53:24] Speaker C: Well, I think you're exactly right about that. It's sold as a theory, right? Not as a formalism. It's an analytical formalism, not a theory.
[00:53:30] Speaker A: I don't think it's going to lead to anything that you're going to be able to say, hey, here's what we've learned. Here's what assembly theory has given us. Let me go in my laboratory and check that out. And I don't think it's going to lead to anything that has anything to do with prebiotic relevance or the origin of life. But we'll see. I mean, I gave him three years. Three years is a long time. In 2011, he said he'd have life. He'd hoped to have life in his lab in two years. So in 2011, he thought he could make life in two years. He hasn't made it yet. And so we'll see what happens.
[00:54:04] Speaker B: That was Doctor James Tour hosting doctor Steven Meyer on the science and Faith podcast for a discussion on two new critiques of origin of life research from mainstream researchers and published in the mainstream science journal Nature. It is indeed a sobering assessment for the origin of life field, but it also confirms arguments that both Doctor tour and Doctor Meyer have been making in their own work about the origin of life problem.
We're grateful to Doctor tour for permission to share this interview on id the future and a special thanks as well to Doctor Tour's video editor, Eric Herron at philosopher Films for the excellent video production. Learn more about Doctor Meyer and his work at his website, stevencmeyer.org dot. That's stephencmeyer.org dot for id the future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:54:57] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org dot this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
