Speaker 0 00:00:00 <silence>
Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:13 Welcome to ID The Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today we're happy to share the third installment of a four-part conversation series between philosopher of Science, 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. Tour released a series of videos in response to YouTube science communicator Dave Farina and his videos attacking Dr. Tour's research. But for those who are not satisfied with that debate or still have questions about the origin of life, this set of conversations between Meyer and Tour should bring much needed calm and clarity. In part three, Meyer and Tour continue their critique of the claims of Chemist Lee Cronin, including his experiments on the foremost reaction auto catalysis, his attempts to conjure up lipids in oil and more along the way.
Speaker 2 00:01:23 Tour explains how he got into the debate in the first place, providing some background on his interactions with Farina, and how it gave him the opportunity to call out the work of experts in the field tour. And Meyer are careful to remind us just what life is and what it takes to build it. And on several occasions, you'll enjoy Meyer's insight into the big picture. These simulation experiments says Meyer are actually showing us the difficulty of making life relevant molecules via undirected process. In other words, origin of life researchers are doing sophisticated chemistry with multimillion dollar equipment that can only be done in a modern lab. In the process, they're showing us just how implausible chemical evolutionary theories actually are. A quick note, these dialogues were recorded on video. The first voice you'll hear this time is Origin of Life chemist Robert Shapiro, followed by Dr. Meyer, introducing the conversation and stick around to the very end for a great quote on Origin of Life experiments from Shapiro. Now, here again is Dr. Steven Meyer and Dr. James tour,
Speaker 3 00:02:33 And a lot of people would put forward stories of how life began, or even R n a began as a narrative saying first this happened, and then that happened. And then another thing happened and another thing happened. And my friend Graham, Karen Smith would call them just so stories <laugh> because they sounded like the tale of how the leopard got its spots.
Speaker 4 00:02:56 Hi, I am Steven Meyer, the Director of the Center for Science and Culture here at Discovery Institute. We'd like to highlight for our audience a fascinating debate about the origin of life that's been taking place online. Before we get into that, I'd just first like to, uh, I, I'd like to find out a little bit about who you are and your background. Uh, you're an organic synthesis specialist in the field of chemistry, and you're also a nanotechnology, uh, engineer. Can you tell us about, uh, your, your work in science? Okay.
Speaker 5 00:03:28 I'm a synthetic organic chemist. That's what my PhD is in. And I've been working in that area for, for, uh, 40 years. Uh, I also work in the area of nanotechnology, uh, everywhere from drug design, uh, through interaction with cells, our, our, our little machines, nano machines interacting with cells through materials, all the way to, um, uh, electronic memory. So over a large area of, of, uh, systems.
Speaker 4 00:03:55 And, and you do some material science as well. I understand.
Speaker 5 00:03:59 Yes. And so that, that's gotten us into the electronic memory and the molecular electronics and those sorts of things over the years.
Speaker 4 00:04:06 And, uh, now I've read in your bio, you have, uh, over 600 peer reviewed publications. Is is that, is, could that possibly be true that anyone would've published that many scientific papers? Well,
Speaker 5 00:04:17 A actually you're reading an old version of the bio, but, but yeah, it's true. Is
Speaker 4 00:04:21 It, is it more than that? It's more than that. <laugh>. Absolutely. That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, we've, we've been fortunate to, to Discovery Institute to be able to, uh, provide some funding for a small portion of your scientific work. But I know the work that you've done on, uh, on the nano machine design has just been spectacular. And these, you've been able to design some little tiny, uh, nano machines that can actually kill cancer cells. Is that, why don't you tell our audience a little bit about that? So,
Speaker 5 00:04:48 These are single molecule machines. They're about one nanometer in diameter. They have a, a stator and a rotor, and we shine a light on them, and they will spin at about 3 million rotations per second. Uh, we had originally designed, uh, these are based under a ingal motor design. We originally put them in our nano cars, then we took off the wheels and the axles, and we just directed them to certain cell types. Could be cancer. We've done it with bacteria. We've super bacteria. We've done it with fungi, and they'll drill and the
Speaker 4 00:05:20 Viruses as well as I understand. Yeah,
Speaker 5 00:05:22 Yeah. That's some other newer work going on. And these will drill right into them and, and kill them in the, in the case of a virus, it'll deactivate our deactivate a capsid. But in the case of cells, which are far more robust, uh, it will, it will kill them. And so when we have a whole new generation of nano machines that, that we've redesigned so that they're, they're activated by light, they're always activated by light, but in this case, they're activated by near infrared light and they work more like a molecular jackhammer than like a molecular drill.
Speaker 4 00:05:54 That's fantastic. When you say we, is this, uh, your research group at Rice University?
Speaker 5 00:05:58 Correct? Correct. Uh, uh, I, when I say we, it means that I don't do anything <laugh>. My, my, my students in lab
Speaker 4 00:06:06 Director postdocs and
Speaker 5 00:06:07 Are the ones that do this.
Speaker 4 00:06:08 Yeah. Well, we all know how science is done, right, <laugh>. That's great. Um, and you have, you've generated quite a number of patents from your inventions as well. I, I read, uh, and this may be underestimated as well, something like 140 patents. Is that right?
Speaker 5 00:06:22 Yeah, it's, it's, it's some number like that and Okay. And, uh, uh, yeah. And, and again, it's, it's over a broad array of areas. And we've started, I think it's 12 companies now. And, and they're, they're moving along. Some, some are moving along better than others, but, uh, they're all moving.
Speaker 4 00:06:40 That's fantastic. And so, um, as I understand it, some of your interest in the origin of life question is derivative of the work you've done on these nano machines, uh, in particular learning just how hard it was to make simple nano machines, and then realizing that inside cells there are much more complicated molecular machines. And, uh, got to thinking about how plausible some of these chemical evolutionary scenarios actually are. Can you tell us a bit about your, the development of your thinking on that?
Speaker 5 00:07:10 Right. So the, the thinking was actually at a, at a meeting that, uh, you had invited me to, I guess it was about six years ago. And, and I started looking at, at, uh, cellular structures through some presentations and claims that people were making. And it, it turned out to be really frustrating to me that none of this could, could easily have happened as, as, as the way that people were, were supposing. And, and, uh, then, then, uh, it was actually David Linsky that asked me to write an article, and I started looking into the origin of life and, and the chemical systems of, of, and the chemical claims on Origin of life, and what people who work in the area of origin of Life have done. And, uh, uh, the claims went way, way beyond the work that was published. And so that's what got me writing about these issues. And then the more I would write about this, the more the, the people in the origin of life community would, would contest with me. And so it, it's just kinda taken off from there.
Speaker 4 00:08:17 You've found yourself in a debate <laugh>.
Speaker 5 00:08:19 That's right. Yeah. I mean, be because of you. Actually, I, I very, very
Speaker 4 00:08:23 Sorry to have ruined your life.
Speaker 5 00:08:25 Drs. I, I, I had a very pleasant life just minding my own business and doing my own research,
Speaker 4 00:08:30 Inventing cool stuff, right? Yeah,
Speaker 5 00:08:32 Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 00:08:33 Just, just for our audience's sake, let's, I, I use the term chemical evolutionary theory, but let's provide a little background. Most of us are familiar with the theory of evolution, so as you say, with Darwin or modern neo Darwinism. And we can think of that as biological evolution in which, uh, the scientists are attempting to explain how new forms of life has have arisen from, uh, simpler earlier forms of life. But chemical evolution is the attempt to explain the origin of the first life from non-living chemicals. And so what you were reacting to was, uh, papers by scientists who were claiming to simulate some part of that process in the laboratory. Is that right? Getting from the, the simple molecules to, uh, an actual living cell,
Speaker 5 00:09:16 Correct. And then claiming that they had done everything that needs to be done. And now Darwinian evolution could take over from here. It was, I was, it was really a bunch of nonsense. And even the term chemical evolution, I had never even heard until I came around you. And then you started mentioning these things that are in the literature, and people use this term chemical evolution and just a bunch of nonsense, because chemicals don't move toward life. They have never been shown to move toward life unless you have a living biological entity, which could be a person pushing them in that direction. And human beings have never been able to make life in a laboratory. And so, surveys, you know, we took surveys after that. And, and the world thinks that that scientists have made life in the laboratory, uh, both simple cellular life, which is wrong. And even larger organisms, like even frogs, many, many educated people think that scientists have made in the lab. So
Speaker 4 00:10:15 When you say, when you say many, Jim, I mean, what kind of percentage of the general public, I mean, how large a percentage of the general public has been beguiled by these claims?
Speaker 5 00:10:24 Well, uh, about 30% of the general public, when I say general public, I mean 80% of the people having at least some college education, e either an associate's degree, right through to a PhD. 30% believe that they've made frogs. Scientists have made frogs, uh, two thirds believe that, that scientists have made simple things like a bacterium in a laboratory. So, uh, we're not even close. I mean, not even close. Uh, we haven't made any, any zero, it's, it's actually zero. We've made zero structures that are needed for a cell when we are using what's called prebiotic chemistry, chemistry that would be available on an early earth. What people have done is they've taken a cell and they've added genetic material to a living cell, but nobody has taken a, a, uh, uh, taken the, the basic chemicals and put them together to form any of the needed structures of the cellular system.
Speaker 5 00:11:25 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, none of the building blocks. There's four classes of compounds. They haven't made any, any of those four classes of compounds. They haven't even made the building blocks to build those four classes of compounds. When you're using what's called prebiotic relevant chemistry, meaning chemistry, where you're not using human made additives, uh, uh, pieces that you've taken from biological systems. Now, even if you take pieces from biological systems, none of that. Nobody's ever gone from no life to bring about life. Nobody's even taken a dead cell and brought it back to life, because you would certainly think that a resurrection has got to be easier than a de novo synthesis. Nobody's ever done that.
Speaker 4 00:12:05 So, um, here's a quote I'd like to get you to react to. This was, um, as you know, I did my PhD in, in, uh, the philosophy of science. Uh, but my PhD was on origin of life biology. So it was an, it's an interdisciplinary subject. And my, uh, master's advisor and one of my PhD examiners was a historian of this field of the origin of life research. And she said this, at the heart of the, of Origin of Life research lies a fundamental question. What is it exactly that we're trying to explain the origin of? And you mentioned just a minute ago that there were four fundamental classes of molecules inside cells. So, uh, my, my advisor's name was Mka Minga, and her point was, uh, if we wanna explain the origin of life, we have to look at what life is like today, because that's the thing, the origin of which we're trying to explain. So what have we learned about, um, the, the, the cell itself since, uh, say Darwin's time, and what are those four classes of molecules out of which cells are composed?
Speaker 5 00:13:03 Well, the four classes of molecules, one is the lipids, and those form a lipid bilayer, the outer structure around a cell, the cell membrane or the cell wall, depending on whether you're speaking about a, a, uh, mammalian cell, like a, a eukaryotic cell or a prokaryotic cell, like a bacterium. Uh, and then, then you, you, you have to deal with the amino acids. And the amino acids are the, there's 20 basic amino acids that are found in nature. You have to make all 20 of them, uh, 19 of them have steroidogenic centers in them that, that have to be controlled. And then you have to be able to polymerize them into the proteins and enzymes that are needed. Uh, you, you have the sugars, uh, these are often called the carbohydrates, and then the polymers of those, which are the polysaccharides, uh, that, that make up the cell. And, and, uh, and then you have to have, uh, the nucleic acids, which is the D n A and the R N a, which involve first taking a sugar ribose or a modified sugar, a deoxyribose hooking on it, a nucleo base, and then having a phosphate group on it, and then polymerizing those to get d n a and r n a. So the four classes of compounds are those, those nucleotides, uh,
Speaker 4 00:14:25 Make, that make, that make the nucleic acids of r n a and d n a, correct.
Speaker 5 00:14:29 Yeah. And then it's the sugars or the saccharides, sugars or saccharides that make up the polysaccharides. Uh, and then you have the amino acids, which make up the proteins, and you have the lipids, which make up the lipid bilayers. All of those classes of compounds have to be made. None of them, I'm telling you, zero, have been made in homo chiro form, which means one in antier, which is what you have in nature, using a prebiotic synthetic method. Okay. So none of them. Then on top of that, you have to build lots of higher order structures, and those have to assemble, be assembled into more higher order structures just to get this out
Speaker 4 00:15:09 Of those four classes of molecule.
Speaker 5 00:15:11 Correct. Just to get the simplest of cells, you'd have to have that. We don't know how to build any of those higher classes of structures using anything that's pre biotically relevant. Now, even if you were to use non prebiotic, relevant, just human ways of construction, we can't even build those higher order structures. So, for example, we don't know how to make a lipid bilayer where the outer layer is different than the inner layer. The outer layer has mostly, uh, uh, saturated systems, which means alkyl systems. The inner later have has a lot of unsaturated systems, which means a lot of, uh, double bonds or alk keyes on the inside in nature, that's done using enzymes called lipase enzymes. We don't know how to do that in our, in, in, in laboratories. So there's all these control structures, and then you have to have, uh, synthetic systems that can build polynucleotides, that can polymerize these, you have to have enzymes to do this.
Speaker 5 00:16:13 We don't know how to do any of this. So we're, we're just really stuck. And, uh, and the, the general public has been duped into supposing that this has already been done because of the claims of the scientists themselves. And then after they publish their papers that have very wild claims in them that go way beyond the, the data in the paper, which is what I'm exposing in my series, they will then ramp it up by speaking to the press, making really wild claims that are an order of magnitude even higher. And then linking this to Darwinian evolution as if they've got this thing solved. And that's what I'm calling out, and that's what I'm gonna do. And that's what we're doing in the series. We're just calling it out.
Speaker 4 00:16:57 Excellent. So five or six years ago, you're, you start looking into these claims about origin of life research and these prebiotic simulation experiments. And as an organic chemist, an organic synthesis specialist, you say, the chemistry doesn't do what these guys are claiming it would've done on the early earth. And, and so you began to critique this, and you made some, uh, you had some lectures online, and then some people started to push back. And one of the guys that pushed back apparently was, uh, someone who has a handle online as Professor Dave. His name is actually Dave Farina. Uh, can you tell us a little bit about him? Because the, I know that the new series that you're coming out with is responding in part to him, and I'm wondering, what is Dave Farinas background in this debate?
Speaker 5 00:17:46 So, Dave Farina is, he calls himself a science communicator. So he makes videos, a lot of scientific videos that explain things to the masses. And I've always said good things about the fact that he's making scientific videos for the masses and explain to, to school kids that the different scientific topics. I never watched any of his videos, uh, uh, uh, up until recently. I never watched any, I didn't even know who he was, but he came. So
Speaker 4 00:18:17 You, so you didn't <laugh> you didn't start this argument. Apparently, he, he attacked some of your lectures. Is that how it got started?
Speaker 5 00:18:23 Right. Well, actually it was because of you again, Steve. Oh my goodness. You, you invited me to, uh, a Discovery Institute talk in Dallas a few years ago, and I gave a talk that I guess really teed him off. Okay. And so he made a 45 minute video based on my 30 minute video, uh, saying many things that were just categorically wrong scientifically, and I, without any ad ho attack, I just spoke about, I made a 13 part series, actually, it's, it's 14 parts. One, one of the parts is A and B, but say a 13 part series where I went through a basic teaching on the chemistry that's needed for origin of life. And that's been up for, for, uh, two years now. And based on that,
Speaker 4 00:19:09 Something we highly recommend, by the way, it's excellent. Yeah.
Speaker 5 00:19:11 Right. So if you wanna learn about the chemistry that's needed for origin of life, you can, you can learn it there. And then, uh, uh, based on that series, he came out with a two part series critiquing my, my 14 part, or 13, or 14 part series <laugh>, where he came with a lot of ad Hom attacks. But I'm not going after him anymore, uh, at, at, at all with Ad Hom attacks. I'm just critiquing his signs. But amazingly, Dave Farina got every slide wrong in his first presentation.
Speaker 4 00:19:45 Is he an origin of life expert himself? What are, what are his qualifications to be weighing in on this discussion in this, in this issue,
Speaker 5 00:19:53 He has as much qualifications as we have pieces made for building cells. Zero. He has no qualifications for this. What he's very good at is speaking extremely authoritatively and, and, uh, in many cases, that that, that, that's an advantage. But let me
Speaker 4 00:20:09 S So, so he doesn't have a, a, a, a PhD in a relevant field chemistry or biochemistry or anything like that, or No,
Speaker 5 00:20:16 No, no. No. Okay. He does.
Speaker 4 00:20:18 So he's a, um,
Speaker 5 00:20:19 He's a musician, actually. He's a musician, but,
Speaker 4 00:20:22 But he's a science. Is he a science teacher? Is he
Speaker 5 00:20:24 Background? He calls himself a, a science communicator. Okay, I see. Now, now, now I'm not critiquing any of his other videos. All I know is that the man doesn't know any chemistry because he succeeded in getting every slide wrong. The science on every slide in his first series, in his first lecture was wrong. His, his sec, second one where he had a two-part series, he succeeded again in getting the science wrong on every one of his slides. Now, think about this, Steve, how hard it is to get every problem wrong on an exam. Uh, and he's trying to get it right. But let me, let me say upfront that I have to thank God for David Farina. If it had not been for him, I would've just continued doing my own thing. But because he came out with this, I had to come with this 13, 14 part series describing everything so that the general public can understand the problems.
Speaker 4 00:21:21 Well, that's, that leads to my next question, because at some, if, if he's not a qualified expert, uh, and that would be fairly obvious maybe to people watching these videos. Why did you feel the need to respond to him? Aren't you punching a little bit below your weight class as one of the leading organic chemists in the world?
Speaker 5 00:21:40 Right. So, so at, at the time, I had a YouTube channel with about 10,000 SCR subscribers. He had a YouTube channel with nearly a million subscribers since so, so, uh, uh, I thought, wow, this has to be responded to. He has a million people that subscribed to his channel. Now since then, mine has gone up to, to, to, I don't know, just something around 40,000. His has gone up to oak for gone up over 2 million. So his is more than doubled. Mine has about quadruple So <laugh>, but, but our, our,
Speaker 4 00:22:19 But it's gonna take a while for you to catch up with something that, right?
Speaker 5 00:22:21 Yeah. Very different. So, so only, only because he's speaking to so many people, I thought it was worthwhile. And, uh,
Speaker 4 00:22:30 So you held a kind of scientific responsibility to combat a disinformation campaign that he was single-handedly waging against you and others who are critical of these experiments. Is that,
Speaker 5 00:22:41 That that is correct. Now, I will say on his second series, he brought in three so-called experts in the area of origin of life. Each one of them was a synthetic chemist, two synthetic organic chemists, one synthetic inorganic chemist. And he had them talk about their own work. Two of them came on, and he, he spoke to them, uh, conversational format, and they described the work. One of them had made a video for him on some previous topic. He had inserted it as if that expert were responding to my video, which he was not. And I know that because he's a friend of mine, and I talked to him, and all of this is going to be exposed. I don't think he was, he was very honest in the way he made the presentations. But in any case, bringing on the experts was good, because now in a social media, uh, social media forum, I could then contest with them and show how their own data, uh, so
Speaker 4 00:23:39 You don't have to punch below your weight class anymore. Right. You can take, take on experts. And which has been your concern from the, the beginning, as I understand from the beginning, is that the experts who present their prebiotic simulation experiments to the public through the media are, are grossly overstating the significance of what they've achieved in the laboratory. Is that correct?
Speaker 5 00:23:59 That is correct. And, and, uh, so Dave Farina has all, has contested that it's the press that ramps this up, not the origin of life researchers themselves. So this was perfect. I could go after the very articles that I'm not in this new series that's coming out, that that, uh, is, is already launched. And, and, uh, several of them are already out now in this new series, uh, there's, I'm, I'm looking at the exact papers that Dave Farina put up there, and the exact experts, what they put up there and critiquing their own work, doing the job that the reviewers of those papers should have done,
Speaker 4 00:24:40 Should have done as things
Speaker 5 00:24:40 Should have done. Right. And, and just exposing from their own work, how their own work screams out. This is not how life could have formed. It couldn't have happened this way.
Speaker 4 00:24:51 'cause the chem, the chemistry doesn't move in the direction that they, uh, say it does without extensive intervention and, and assist from intelligent human chemists is that is the essence of the problem.
Speaker 5 00:25:04 Uhhuh, that's one of the, one of the, one of
Speaker 4 00:25:07 The problems.
Speaker 5 00:25:07 One of the problems because, because it, it's even with all their human interaction, they don't get what they say that they've gotten. They've, they, they'd never get homo chiro material. In most cases. They get vast mixtures that they themselves are unable to use. Yet they suggest that if this were on early earth, early earth could take it and take it on from there. You can't use it from there. Because what happens in chemistry, if the compound that you want is heavily contaminated with a lot of compounds that you don't want even lightly contaminated at times, you can't use it because it gums up the works. It interferes it's interfering chemistry. And so chemists go through great lens to purify it. But in these cases, their mixtures are so bad that they don't even go to the great lengths to purify it. They just see it, they notice it with, with very hot,
Speaker 4 00:26:00 They, they notice the compound that they want is in this vast mixture of other things that have been produced by their simulation experiment. And they say, since it's there, I'm just gonna go buy that off the shelf and start over in the next step. As if you could get from the, the, uh, conglomeration of all those different, uh, co compounds to the purified starting point that they need without some intervention of an intelligence.
Speaker 5 00:26:29 That's absolutely right. They're buying it. And the compounds that they buy have been isolated from already living biological sources or sources that have been made using biologically relevant chemistry. Meaning that you, you have, you have enzymes that have been made biologically and you're using that. So it's a, it's a total cheat. You go along and it's a
Speaker 4 00:26:51 Total cheat. Well, it, yeah. I wanna stop press right there. That's really significant because the whole idea of prebiotic simulation experiments, uh, is that they are simulating how you get from non-living chemicals to living chemicals. But if in order to do that, you have to take a compound derived from a living cell and use that to simulate how you get to a living cell, that's a profound sheet. Because the whole idea is you're trying to, you need to show how you get from simple non-living molecules and, and chemicals to, uh, chemicals that are relevant first to life, and then finally to a living organism. But if you get, if you're pulling stuff out of a living organism, um, you're, you're defeating the whole purpose of the the experiment itself.
Speaker 5 00:27:38 That's right. It's a cheat at every step. They cheat at every step. It's, it's chemically cheating at every step. It's scientifically cheating at every step. In no other field of chemistry could you get away with this. And yet every step,
Speaker 4 00:27:52 'cause after all, what they're trying to simulate is how undirected chemical processes could produce life. But if to produce even the, uh, substrates of life, the, the, the, the compounds out of which life, uh, the different classes of molecules out of which life is formed, they have to themselves intervene repeatedly and intelligently. Then they're not simulating an undirected process. They're arguably simulating the need for a directed process. And you might call that intelligent design.
Speaker 5 00:28:23 Yeah. But, but even with all their intelligent design, what I'm saying is they don't get it.
Speaker 4 00:28:27 They still don't get there. They still don't
Speaker 5 00:28:28 Get there. They still don't get it. And so the next step, they have to buy some more of the next thing. Okay. And the next step, they have to, because in every step that they do, they don't get what they want. And this is what I'm exposing on the series, watch this thing and just watch the, the, the, the, the things that they put forth as if it's intelligently, as if it's done without undirected. Yeah. Without any direction. And then even with all their direction, they can't use what they get. Chemistry is really tough. And then they make these crazy, wild claims that I'm calling them out on.
Speaker 4 00:28:59 Yeah. You know, you, you had a predecessor in this role in Origin of Life Research. Uh, he died a few years ago. His name was Robert Shapiro, and he was also an organic chemist. He wrote a book, a skeptic's Guide to The Origin of Life back in the eighties, but continued to publish papers in Origin of Life research right up to the time of his death. I attended a conference with him in 2010, I think, and people in the field, uh, respected him, but they didn't like him because <laugh>, he was constantly exposing the kind, the same kind of things that you're exposing. And they used to call him doctor. No, but his point was, the chemistry doesn't do what you claim it must do to, to spontaneously or, or in an undirected fashion form these essential, uh, building blocks of life and the essential, uh, categories of, of, of molecules.
Speaker 4 00:29:49 So, um, you're in good company. He's just passed on. So <laugh> Shapiro would, I think, approve of what you're now doing. All right. So let up, let's talk about your, your, you're new, you've taken up his mantle. Let's talk about your new video that's just come out. I've just seen it. It's, it's, uh, fabulously, uh, engaging because there's a lot of back and forth. You definitely give the other side a chance to make their points. But in this video, you're responding, uh, to Professor Dave again, but you're also responding to one of his experts, because I think you feel a bit more comfortable taking on another, another chemist. Uh, 'cause uh, it, it's a more, it, it's a more fair fight. Right? Right. So, um, you, the, the, the chemist that you're challenging is Lee Cronin. And tell us a little bit about what he has claimed about the origin of, of life, and specifically the claims he's made, both in me media context, but also in his scientific papers about what, what he's been able to achieve in the lab.
Speaker 5 00:30:45 So Lee Cronin is a professor at the University of Glasgow. And, uh, he has made claims that, uh, these primordial soup model where you have a bunch of chemicals, uh, in a pond, uh, in a lake, and there's lightning strikes. And those chemicals could somehow come together to form the initial cells that are gonna then end up participating in Darwinian evolution. So I have called him out on that. I've questioned him on that. And on the first video, I give him plenty of time to speak because he, he feels that in my series, I didn't really give him a chance to speak because I cut him off. Well, the reason I cut him off is 'cause he doesn't say anything of any substance. And so this video series, I really let him speak, and the guy just hangs himself because he says nothing. He says nothing.
Speaker 5 00:31:38 He gives you no chemistry. No, he talks about royal flushes. He talks about flipping coins and I, and we keep wanting to see the chemistry. He doesn't give it to us. So I finally, in, in a debate, in a conversation that I had with him on Justin Ryley's unbelievable program. Uh, I had gotten to come around to the point where he confessed, there were small molecules, there was life, it happened, but we don't know how. And he comes around to the point where he says exactly to that. That was a big, big step for him to come around to the point and admit, we don't know between the small molecules that must have been present on an early earth to where life came from. We have absolutely no idea how that happened. However, even though he admitted to that, he continues to go around putting these papers out, speaking about these experiments. And so he brings on these experiments. And so that was in the first video. I got him to come around and, and to confess that we don't know how. But in the second video, I let him speak even more. And he speaks about his own work and as if it's somehow suggested of suggestive of life's origin. And I just dissect his work. So that, that's what I'm doing.
Speaker 4 00:32:56 Let's talk first about the interaction on Justin Brearley, and then let's get into some of the specific chemical claims that Cronin does make in his own work. I thought the interaction on Briar Lee's program was very telling, uh, because he, Lee was responding to a caller who wondered if, in portraying his understanding of how life began on Earth, he was conveying what was widely understood by the scientists. And essentially that there were, there was some kind of warm little pond on the earth. There were molecules in the pond. They interacted. And eventually because of these interactions, they developed some sort of self-replicating system, and finally a cell. And Cronin said, yeah, yeah, that's, that's basically it. And then you called him out on that and said, well, wait a minute. You know that that isn't it? There's, we don't have any idea how you get from those, those inorganic, uh, or small molecules in a, in a, a prebiotic environment to a first living cell.
Speaker 4 00:33:54 And then in response to you, he said, well, I didn't say that. We did know how. All I said was that there was this, there was a condition on the early Earth where there were the building blocks of life, some sort of small molecules. And then later after the cessation of something called the, uh, late heavy bombardment, the meteorite bombardment of the earth life arose very quickly after that. And those are established facts. And so you're, you're misrepresenting me. I didn't claim that we knew how, but you said, well, wait a minute. That's the entirely the point. Do we know how? And, and he finally admitted that We don't know how you get from A to B. He only acknowledged he only was, he said, all I was claiming was that there was a point A where we had small non-living chemicals, and then there was a point B where we have a living cell. But that's a trivial claim. And, uh, and by, by defending himself in that way, it sort of had the effect of obscuring just how important this concession was. Because the real important point is, do we have a theory about how you get from A to B? And he acknowledged that we don't.
Speaker 5 00:34:57 Correct. He acknowledged that we don't. And yet he continues to do his research as if it is pointing to a methodology to go from those small molecules to life,
Speaker 4 00:35:09 Or a, a plausible theory by, by which that could happen.
Speaker 5 00:35:13 Right. And he claims he's claimed on many occasions that he's going to make life in his laboratory. So he feels that he's, he's actually doing it, uh, in, in this direction. Now. It's heavily guided, but he claims he's going to do it. But he keeps at every of the way, he keeps his, he keeps missing his deadline.
Speaker 4 00:35:31 Yeah. Let, so let's talk about some of the specific claims that he makes as a, as a laboratory chemist on this. He makes quite a lot out of something called the foremost reaction and claims that, that, that, uh, that can be readily simulated and produce sugars. Tell us about the foremost reaction and what origin of life researchers such as Cronin are saying about it, and how they portray their work on it as giving plausibility to these origin of life scenarios.
Speaker 5 00:35:59 So with the foremost reaction, you take a small molecule, which is a, a a, a small molecule that, that like acid aldehyde, that has an extra hydroxyl group on it. And, and, uh, it's actually not easy to make that compound, uh, not that easy, but start with, so
Speaker 4 00:36:16 Even, even the starting compound is a difficult thing to,
Speaker 5 00:36:19 To make. Yeah. It's really not that easy. And in fact,
Speaker 4 00:36:21 Would it be readily available on the early Earth?
Speaker 5 00:36:23 Uh, some people claim that it's readily available through, uh, reaction of formaldehyde and sunlight. It's, you know, even Steve Benner, who's an origin of life researcher, has said that this is, this starting material is actually very hard to make mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And, uh, but we'll give him that. So he takes the
Speaker 4 00:36:42 Starting Okay. Concede that for the sake of argument. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 5 00:36:45 It, it, because it really doesn't matter. It's just gonna get hung on this thing anyway. And, and, uh, um, so, so he, he takes this and he reacts with calcium hydroxide, and he keeps feeding in more material. And he confesses that within seconds, within sec, he says, his exact words are, within seconds to hours, you get billions of compounds. This is exactly what I have been saying. You get so many compounds, it becomes in unusable. He even says,
Speaker 4 00:37:13 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Just a sec. So getting billions of compounds is not a good thing that it sounds like it's a good thing initially, but that's not a good thing if you're not. No, no, no, no. Why not?
Speaker 5 00:37:21 It's a, it's a, it's a very bad thing because now you have so many compounds in there. Even if you have a little bit of the compound you want, it's unusable because it's in a sea of many other compounds that would gum up the works that would interfere with any of the next steps that you wanted to do.
Speaker 4 00:37:38 Oh, so it's gonna react with others, other compounds that are also present and go in a direction that's not life relevant. Is that right? Right.
Speaker 5 00:37:44 And so what I have long said is that when you, when you have this sort of chemistry, you get so many compounds that what you get is absolutely unusable. So he shows, he, he shows this scatterplot, uh, using something which he's called ultra performance liquid chromatography, where you see lots of the little dots that each one of those dots is actually multiples of compounds. And his argument is, well, I can just keep adding the starting material, and it gets itself purifies, it gets less messy. So I went right at his own data, and I showed that what he was doing is he says that he was, he was, uh, uh, decanting off. He was using the supernatant, meaning the material that remained in solution. He didn't analyze what had polymerized and fallen out of solution. And he says that it was self purifying, but he was only taking 70% of the reaction mixture and leaving 30% of the reaction mixture untouched, because it was precipitating out. So he was going under, undergoing a self purification by the researchers were doing this, yet he argued that it was self purifying, even if it's like, so
Speaker 4 00:38:53 The super, just to interrupt Jim, sorry. The, the, for our audience, it's sake, the supernatant is,
Speaker 5 00:38:58 Is what's in solution. Okay.
Speaker 4 00:39:00 Remains in solution. This is, this is not something you want, is this the
Speaker 5 00:39:03 No, no. He took that, he didn't take any of the polymerized garbage that was at the bottom. So he says, you see, it's purified. Oh, I see. Okay. Well, you left 30% in the bottom.
Speaker 4 00:39:12 So it wasn't self purifying. The chemist was doing the purification. Right.
Speaker 5 00:39:16 And even with all his purification, he still had billions of compounds. At least billions. If he had analyzed the other parts, he would've had trillions of compounds. But yes, the researcher was doing the purification, not the chemistry itself. But even if I give him just the, the supernatant, the one, the portion he wanted, did he ever use any of those compounds? He could not, because it was not even with all his tools, he couldn't separate it. He even confesses later in the paper that I couldn't even check the authentic standard against that mixture because it was too complex. Hmm. This is so complex. It's totally unusable. So what he did is he showed that the chemistry that he was using was totally unusable. And interestingly, he used calcium hydroxide, which is available, would be available on earlier Earth. It's a fine system to use. But Dave Farina didn't even notice. Dave Farina tried to discount the use of calcium hydroxide earlier on in his video. And then he brings on this guy who uses calcium hydroxide. It's really kind of ironic.
Speaker 4 00:40:25 And, and what's the significance of the calcium hydroxide?
Speaker 5 00:40:27 You need a base. You need a base. Okay. It's, it's, it's the base that you need for this, this all ligamentization reaction. He was, he was trying, uh, uh, to make ribose, ribose is the key sugar that you need in order to, for r n a make d, n a and r n. Okay.
Speaker 4 00:40:42 Okay.
Speaker 5 00:40:43 Right, right. And, and, and for, for d n a, you need deoxyribose. He was trying to make ribose because he wanted to ultimately make r n a and he could not access any of the ribos. Sure, there was ribose in there, but he had all the other nan tumors and so many other compounds. It was totally unusable. It was
Speaker 4 00:40:59 Jumbled, a jumbled mess then. Yeah. Correct. And correct. And so it,
Speaker 5 00:41:03 It, it's, it's, it's like if you, you,
Speaker 5 00:41:07 You wanted to write a book and you dumped out a bunch of letters, I mean, a big box of letters. And you said, you know, my book is in there somewhere, because if you were to arrange those properly, you would have my book. But, but, uh, no, it, it's totally unusable. It's unusable because, because you have such a mess in there. And that's exactly what it's like. So you, you take your book signature of the cell and you cut it up so that you brought it back down to all the base letters. You cut out every letter. Have one of your kids do that or something, cut out every letter and then throw it in a box and claim that your book is in there. No, it's totally unusable because in a sense, yeah, your book is in there, but you, you can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Speaker 4 00:41:54 The the material, this is the problem. Yeah. The material substrate is there, but the arrangement, the specificity of arrangement of the parts, which constitutes the important part of the book, namely the information is, uh, is not there. It's not there. Um, there's, um, oh, okay. So this is the Ribos, uh, uh, he's trying to get ribos, and then he is, he also wants to show how it could be linked together to form d n A and r n a. And that step also poses a problem for him,
Speaker 5 00:42:21 That that poses a big problem. He doesn't do it on this video. That's something that Benner does in the video. Okay. And we'll get to that later. Okay. The other thing that he does is he tries to make polypeptides. He tries to take amino acids, which he buys, which come from, from a source that's using biological like chemistry to make these, and he's saying it's not hard to polymerize these. He says, in fact, it was easy for him to polymerize these. Uh, and, and I've long argued that they don't polymerize in water. Dave Farina says they do polymerize in water. So I show So, so what, what he invites on Lee Cronin and Lee Cronin himself confesses in the very article that Dave Farina showed that, that, uh, Lee Kron incites in his very article, it says, these don't polymerize in water. And he shows
Speaker 4 00:43:13 A re. But this is, this is not a contested point in chemistry, is that people know this, that, uh, that water has a, uh, a negative impact on polymerization reactions, especially
Speaker 5 00:43:24 With amino acids. Yes. And everybody knows this, except poor Dave Farina doesn't know this. And he keeps contesting that it does polymerize in water. It does not polymerize in water. And he says the reaction is exergonic. In the very paper that Lee Cronin shows, he shows that the delta G, this is the free energy of formation of the reaction, is positive. It is the opposite of exergonic. It's endo gunner end. And so, so,
Speaker 4 00:43:51 Which means it's not gonna happen spontaneously. It's
Speaker 5 00:43:54 Not gonna happen spontaneously. Lee Cronin says it in words. He says it in, in, in equations. And Dave gets it the exact opposite. This is what I'm saying, the poor man, the poor man is a victim. Victim. He's a victim, victim of the things that these people say. And he's a victim of his own inability to translate these articles. He's to read these articles and make sense of them. And he says something is, is exergonic when he's looking at a paper that says it is not exergonic, the equation's right in front of you, that is like looking at a page and saying it is black when it is white.
Speaker 4 00:44:30 So an exergonic reaction is one that would happen spontaneously. Yes. Because there's enough happen, enough energy available in the constituent parts of the, the, the constituent chemicals to drive the connection between them. Is that
Speaker 5 00:44:42 Essentially what we're talking about it, the, the enthalpy and the entropy, uh, together along with the temperature would allow this reaction to occur. The delta G zero would be a negative. It would have a negative sign in front of it, a minus sign in front of it.
Speaker 4 00:44:56 And so it would occur roughly spontaneously or Correct.
Speaker 5 00:44:58 Correct. It would occur under these conditions. But it has a, a positive sign. It is right there in the paper. It shows a positive
Speaker 4 00:45:05 Sign. In fact, it has a positive sign, which means it's, it, it's
Speaker 5 00:45:08 Endo, it's endodonic
Speaker 4 00:45:10 Endo, and therefore it's not gonna occur spontaneously.
Speaker 5 00:45:12 Right. And Dave thinks he's arguing that it's going to occur spontaneously. So what Lee Cronin does to get around this, 'cause Lee Cronin knows that he's smart guy, that Delta G is positive, smart guy. Right? So what he does is he dries it out. He takes away all the water. Dave never noticed it. Dave never noticed it. He's saying these are polymerizing water. In fact, Lee Cronin says, when I dry it out, I force the molecules together by taking away all the water and I'm heating it up. He says he's heating it up to simulate how it's warm in the daytime and then cooling down cooler at night. But if you read the paper, which Dave was unable to, he's heating it up to 130 degrees centigrade. That's over 250 degrees Fahrenheit. There is no daytime nighttime like that because if there were daytime nighttime like that on early earth, daytime got up to 130 degrees centigrade, that is sterilization temperature that kills everything. So you could never get life to begin with. If life ever tried to form, it would be over game over it's toast. And, and
Speaker 4 00:46:19 So you've got a classic chemical. You got a classic chemical. Catch 22. If you do, if you try to, to, uh, achieve polymerization in, in an aqueous solution in water, the presence of water is going to make it energetically unfavorable. And you're not gonna link up the amino acids. Correct. If you heat it up and Dr. To dry it out, to get rid of the water, you're going to ster, you're gonna reach sterilization temperature, and you're gonna destroy anything you might have linked together. Once it's, once it's linked together, y
Speaker 5 00:46:47 No, you, you're gonna destroy any life that would want to form. If you're gonna argue that your days get up to, to 130 degrees, then everything is gonna end up decomposed. And, but even the polymers that he got, were not polypeptides mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Because what happens is, is, is, is you have, you, you, you have a, a, a carboxylic acid and an amine on the other end. And what happens is these might begin to hook up, but you also have an extra, an extra linkage there. That extra linkage competes with the position of these two. So you get a mess, you get something that nature will never make you. It, it's something that, that that is not used and which is
Speaker 4 00:47:30 Not life and not, not life friendly, not, it's not not life usable.
Speaker 5 00:47:33 It's, it's not life usable. Now, nature might have some of those cross linkage linkages, but never by ribosomal synthesis, never in order to begin to make the cell. It's in the higher order structures that you might get some of those linkages to occur, but never at this stage, because now you've changed the whole, what would've been the polypeptide chain. It's gone. It's toast, it's game over exclusively. You need exclusively, what you demonstrated exclusively is that it could not have happened this way. Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:47:59 Right? Right. So, uh, tho those linkages that you want, I think are called peptide bonds. Is that correct? Correct. So you want exclusively peptide linkages. So you get a
Speaker 5 00:48:09 Niceistist to end terminus. It's called the C to the end terminus.
Speaker 4 00:48:13 Excellent. But the
Speaker 5 00:48:14 Seed,
Speaker 4 00:48:14 But you need to have those exclusively if you're gonna form a functional protein. Correct. And you're not. And what he, what he generated in, in his simulation was not exclusive peptide linkages, but other things coming off at odd angles that were connecting at that other linkage site.
Speaker 5 00:48:29 Correct. It was a bunch of nonsense. It was like your book cut up into pieces again, and then, and then your child started gluing the letters together and saying, daddy, here's your book. You'd be like, and
Speaker 4 00:48:41 Some, some of the letters are at, at odd angles to the other not even lined up in the way we
Speaker 5 00:48:46 Exactly. They're upside down. They're backwards, they're flipped over. Everything doesn't work. Good
Speaker 4 00:48:50 Analogy.
Speaker 5 00:48:51 Good analogy. Yeah. And, and so, so you can say, if, if they gave your book dead, you know, I did cut it up, but here's your book back. I glued it all back together. You'd be like, uh, that, that's just, just, it's, it's not the way it works. And that's exactly what Lee Cronin did. And he speaks about this as if he's made polypeptides. That's the problem that the researchers themselves, uh,
Speaker 4 00:49:13 Uh, so the simulation is actually showing the difficulty of making life relevant molecules. It's not showing the plausibility of making life relevant molecules via an undirected process, starting with, with plausible prebiotic conditions.
Speaker 5 00:49:28 Right. So Lee Cronin's own work, own work screams out, this is not how life has formed. This could not be how life has formed. So one of the papers that he talked about was, was, uh, uh, the foremost reaction, which showed that he, it was totally unusable. The next paper, he, he, he made, what he was saying was, was polypeptides first was sugars. The next one was, was proteins or polypeptides or enzymes. He showed what he showed that it could not have happened that way. And if he wants to argue that early earth is heating up reactions to 130 degrees, no life could have ever formed anyway, because under
Speaker 4 00:50:09 Those conditions, yeah. For
Speaker 5 00:50:10 Sterilization, you heat up to, to under 130 degrees centigrade, you heat it up for 15 minutes and it's sterilized. He's heating for 15 hours at 130 degrees. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a joke is what it is. It's an absolute joke. And for him to have spoken about this, and for this to have been accepted in the chemical literature as if it were prebio relevant, it's because that community, the origin of life community is self reviewing. They're reviewing each other's papers, and they're getting these things in. Never, never would this be accepted. And and I had it. I had it.
Speaker 4 00:50:46 Yeah. That's an Yeah. Oh, sorry to interrupt, Jim, but that's an interesting point because Farina attacks you for not having the right kind of expertise to be, uh, weighing in on, on, on this subject. But it is often people from outside of a research community who can spot some of the, the assumptions and the methodological practices that are either inconsistent or incoherent, or in this case, contrary to, to basic knowledge that we have about chemistry. So is, is your expertise relevant, or what should we say about that
Speaker 5 00:51:20 <laugh>, if you're gonna make molecules, organic molecules, that's kind of what I do. Yeah. I mean, this is what I've been doing for, for 40 years. More than 40 years. And so, uh,
Speaker 4 00:51:29 So they're, they're actually, they, they are doing simulations of chemical processes that they say move you from simple non-living chemicals to life, relevant chemicals that would be necessary to make a cell. And it's not true. And so, and, and, and that is in this, in essence, a matter of organic synthesis. Right? So this is, and
Speaker 5 00:51:49 This is right in your
Speaker 4 00:51:50 Wheelhouse.
Speaker 5 00:51:51 And, and Dave says, orga synthetic organic chemists can't get this. But then what does he do? He says, synthetic chemists can't get this. So he invites on three synthetic chemist experts. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, two of them being orga synthetic organic chemists, one being synthetic inorganic chemists. So it, it, it's full of irony throughout the whole thing. The, the poor Dave, I mean, he's a victim of what these guys write, and he's a victim of his own lack of knowledge that he tries to talk about this.
Speaker 4 00:52:15 But, but you know, I think both you and I appreciate the fact that he's taken this subject on, um, there, and I appreciate you having taken it on at the beginning. I had a, a, um, a supervisor in, in, in Cambridge who said that, beware the sound of one hand clapping. If there's an argument on one side, there's bound to be an argument on the other. And we've had for years, these, these, uh, these claims offered to the public as a kind of, um, uh, uncontested scenario about how life began. And you challenged them, uh, taking up the mantle of Robert Shapiro and others. But you, you challenged these guys. And, uh, and that was good because now we had two hands clapping. We had an argument, we had a counter argument, and we could evaluate the strength of the initial claims in light of your critique.
Speaker 4 00:53:02 But even better than Dave Farina came along, uh, enlisting some experts, but challenging your critique of the original claim. And now with the both of those arguments out there in the public sphere, I think our audience and your audience and people interested in this topic have the ability to evaluate the arguments for themselves and to see who is more credible and, and, uh, if they know a bit of chemistry to, to find out, uh, who whose claims about the chemistry are more accurate. Um, so I, I actually appreciate the fact that he's weighed in. Um, sometimes his language is a little salty, and he does get a bit personal and insulting, but we now have a spirited exchange about a really important debate out there in the public. Whereas before, as you've pointed out, it was a matter of a few experts making claims and technical papers that went, would then get exaggerated in media reports, and then into the textbooks they would go. And we all had the, the, the sense that, you know, the Miller Yuri experiment in 1953 heralded a series of experiments that showed, uh, exactly how life arose from non-life without any intelligent direction whatsoever. And in fact, we don't have any, any experiments that demonstrate that that's the case. But, well, Dave Farina says we do. So we now have a debate, at least
Speaker 5 00:54:24 That's right.
Speaker 4 00:54:25 And I think that's a good thing. Yeah.
Speaker 5 00:54:26 Yeah. And, and the third article that Lee Cronin brought in was he talks about auto catalysis, which Dave?
Speaker 4 00:54:33 Is this the bit about the, the, the oil droplets and the No, this
Speaker 5 00:54:36 Is, this is before the oil droplets. Okay. He, he, he, he does, he takes an inorganic complex and he does something called auto catalysis where it makes a certain structure. And that new structure becomes a catalytic template for the structure, for the building of a larger structure over it. That becomes a catalytic template for a larger structure over it. And Dave feels that this has high relevance for origin of life. The very claims of this are going to be debunked by some of the other experts that he brings on to cite it. And Dave didn't even notice it. But let me just say that what Lee did is with an inorganic complex that he calls rust, it's very much like rust. It has nothing to do with the compounds that are life relevant. With an inorganic complex you can get because of the symmetry. It allows you to do this more easily. And this was demonstrated 100 years ago, about a hundred years ago by, by a man named Oswald demonstrated this Lee is now doing this and saying it has something to do with it. It it's relevant to origin of life. It has nothing to do with origin of life. This class of compounds because of their symmetry, allow this type of thing with much higher fluidity to form, uh, uh, to, to undergo the, these, uh, um, auto catalytic reactions. But it is really a bunch of nonsense.
Speaker 4 00:55:58 Well, what, what's being produced by these, these auto catalytic reactions, um, at, at the end point, uh,
Speaker 5 00:56:04 Nanoparticles and then micron sized particles at best, which he calls houses and skyscrapers. So he's, he gives the impression to the lay
Speaker 4 00:56:13 Person. Are they, are they sugars, nucleic acids? No. Proteins or, or lipids? No. Any of the four major, are they the building blocks of those? No,
Speaker 5 00:56:21 They're, they're metal oxides. They're just, just like rust on a piece of metal.
Speaker 4 00:56:24 So, so why are, are any claims being made about prebiotic relevance for these, these, these products of these reactions?
Speaker 5 00:56:32 Because it's nonsense, because it's utter nonsense.
Speaker 4 00:56:35 I mean, is there some, is it, is it viewed as in some way analogous to, to some process that would have to happen? Is, is that why the, it's being claimed to be pre biotically relevant.
Speaker 5 00:56:44 There's zero relevance. Zero relevance. There is no relation. No relation at all. And then we can get into his, his, uh, little bubble things.
Speaker 4 00:56:52 Yeah. I wanted to ask you about the, the, the droplets. 'cause a looks superficially relevant. You got a little droplet. It looks like it might be a cell. Uh, hey, Presto. Now we're, now we're cooking. What's, what's wrong with, first of all, what does Lee Cronin claim about these experiments that he's done with the oil drops and, and why are they, or are they not relevant to prebiotic processes and actual lipids for? Okay,
Speaker 5 00:57:15 So Lee Cronin is claiming an auto catalytic reaction to make something that's analogous to an oil. An oil, uh, uh, or where, where he would have a, a non-polar tail and a polar head. Polar head, meaning that it would dissolve in water. Non-polar tail does not dissolve in water. This is sort of like a soap. A soap has a polar end that dissolves in water and a non-polar end that interacts with the oil that's on our hands, grabs that oil, and then the head pulls it into the water solution, and that's what washes it off our hands. He wants to make something that's analogous to a lipid that is gonna be needed for lipid bilayer. You have to have a d ace, you have to have two tails coming off. The one tail would never be stable enough. He makes it with one tail. He calls it lipid, like it's not lipid like, but let's just give him that
Speaker 4 00:58:10 It's not lipid like, because it doesn't have two tails, doesn't
Speaker 5 00:58:12 Have two tails. And also also, so, so he says that this is prebio relevant, and then you go into his own paper and you read the steps that it took him to make that lipid like molecule. It took him 10 pages of synthetic organic chemistry steps using all modern techniques, multimillion dollar pieces of equipment to make the molecule, to set up, to make that lipid. So that in, in the last reaction, he just reacted it in water and it did a condensation reaction. You see, he says, you see, it's such simple chemistry. This would do form on an early earth, but the chemicals, you needed to set up that key little step that happens in a condensation reaction that that could occur.
Speaker 4 00:58:59 So you 10 pages of synthesis,
Speaker 5 00:59:01 10 pages of synthesis, where is that gonna happen on an early earth? Who knows? It's not gonna happen on an early earth. So I'm calling them out on it. Poor Dave Farina, again, the poor man. He couldn't look at the experimentals. He had no way, he had no way to assess the experimentals. You have to click on that. The experimental sections come up and then you read it and you go, oh my goodness, this is all modern synthetic chemistry. That's what I do. And, and, uh, this is, this is the type of things my students, my graduate students, my postdocs do in the lab, 10 pages of synthetic chemistry to set up for the one little reaction that he says is gonna make this lipid. Then after he makes the lipid, they naturally assemble into these oil droplets. It's just oil and water. Now, the, what happens is when an oil droplet grows, it go undergoes something called the maron effect.
Speaker 5 00:59:52 It grows to a certain size and then it bursts. It bursts because the surface, the, the, the, the free energy of the surface, it's called the free energy of the surface is, becomes so high that now it minimizes by bursting open and going into smaller bubbles. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> in the process of doing this, it moves around in the solution. It is an it, it is an experiment that you do for, for children in an elementary school where you take a, a, a bunch of oil, you put a little bit of a surfactant on it, and it bursts up in, into bunches of, of little pieces. You can do this in at your kitchen sink. You take some oil that's in a pan because you were frying something and now you've put water in there and there's this oil layer on top. You put one little drop of, uh, of a surfactant and it'll breakup. This is in a sense, doing something similar to this. But here, you just, rather than using a surfactant, it's just a natural forces that these grow big enough, they're gonna burst. He says, this is like,
Speaker 4 01:00:56 So does he claim this? This is a, a analogous to cell division.
Speaker 5 01:00:59 Yes. He says, this is analogous to cell division. Oh, you know, in a cell division, there's a huge orchestrated series of events that has to occur. The D n A has to be duplicated and some goes to each side, and then all the different pieces have to be duplicated and go to each side. And then right in the middle, the thing begins to pinch down in this orchestrated event. So none of that is there. He has nothing inside these, nothing is moving to either side. And he says, because it exploded and went, this is like cell division, and you see that he's getting these things to form. And then cell division, it is, it is an elementary school marran effect, and he's calling cell division. He's not the only group to do this. It was a group a few years ago at Harvard that did the same thing, Marran effect, and he said that this was analogous to cell division. That's what these guys do. And their lipid bilayers could never be used because their in inner layer and their outer layer of the lipid bilayer is the same. You don't get a proton gradient that could never be within a cell. None of this works. And he, he, he speaks
Speaker 4 01:02:06 About, and the proton gradient is I, is important for passing the correct materials through the, the lipid bilayer in and out. Correct? You correct.
Speaker 5 01:02:14 Can't correct. You can't have a living cell. This
Speaker 4 01:02:16 Isn't an optional feature of a, of, of a a, of a lipid bilayer cell wall.
Speaker 5 01:02:21 Right? It's nothing that it could evolve into later as it, as it got better. It's not gonna work. It's not gonna work in the beginning. And this whole thing of just taking a a, a a a vesicle and having it grow to a certain size and then it bursts and starts moving in solution, you see these things wiggling around solutions. Wow. It must be alive. It's moving. I'm telling you, take a little bit of oil on water in, in your pan in your kitchen with the light shining on. Take one little drop of, of, of, uh, of the dish cleaner and just drop it right in the middle. You see this thing just scatter. This is the same idea in the sense that you're just getting an oil droplet to break up. And, uh, and, and he makes this amazingly wild claim that this has something to do with life and poor Dave Farina buys into it. And that's why he's the victim. He's the victim of what these guys are teaching. Dave Farina is the victim. We need to feel bad for him.
Speaker 4 01:03:17 And, and just to go back to the earlier step, these 10 pages of, uh, of specifications for synthetic chemistry, that's equivalent to a kind of recipe, right? And so essentially the claim is, uh, I've, I've, I've baked a cake without any intelligent design, but I've used this recipe to do it and I've followed the recipe step by step. But so they really are, they're not simulating an undirected process at every step of the way. They're directing it in accord with a, a a a plan or a blueprint.
Speaker 5 01:03:52 Uh, uh.
Speaker 4 01:03:53 Correct. Is that,
Speaker 5 01:03:54 Steve, you're being way too nice. When you look at the details of this experiment, many of the steps are done under inert atmosphere with no water, no oxygen around. They could never work with any water, with any oxygen around. They have to be done in a very pure, uh, uh, inert gas environment. And
Speaker 4 01:04:13 So there's, so there's really two problems. And they are not simulating in an undirected process, and they are not do, uh, simulating a process that could have taken place on the early earth because the conditions that they set up in the laboratory don't match what was on the early earth. So they're not simulating what they claim to be simulating.
Speaker 5 01:04:31 It's not even that it doesn't match what you couldn't do on an early earth. It, it's, it's doing chemistry you couldn't even do until the 1950s. It's that advanced. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it's chemistry that can be done only in a modern laboratory. Laboratory. I see. I mean, this is, this is crazy hard chemistry. Then in order, the other thing I've said, after every step, you always have to do the, the analysis. You have to analyze what you've got. So at each step, he's using several pieces of multi-million dollar equipment to do the analysis. First, they do the separation using advanced instrumental methods, and then they use multimillion dollar pieces of equipment to discern what they've got after each step. Where is that on an early earth <laugh>? It's not there.
Speaker 4 01:05:19 And it's, and it's, it's not
Speaker 5 01:05:20 There.
Speaker 4 01:05:20 It's, it's critical, right? To characterize what you've got because you
Speaker 5 01:05:25 To or us you don't know, or else you
Speaker 4 01:05:26 Don't dunno, you dunno. And then there, and then you don't know how to proceed to the next step, right? That's,
Speaker 5 01:05:29 That's correct. And you don't know if it's pure. None of this works. This is all smoke and mirrors, Steve. It's all smoke and mirrors put forth by, by these guys, and that's what I expose. So the first three videos in my series are dealing with Lee Cronin. Now, now, now Dave gets dealt with just, just this collateral damage along the way, and, and then, and then there'll be, there'll be others. It,
Speaker 4 01:05:54 It is nice, nice that researchers that he's brought these experts in to support his claims because it gives you the opportunity to have a, a, an expert on expert conversation and, and not have to pick on this poor guy because he does. I mean, he comes off rather, uh, aggressively, but, um, as you say, he, it's clear he doesn't know how to evaluate the underlying science that supports or doesn't support the claims that these experts are making. And fortunately you do, and that makes for a much more interesting discussion. So, um, it's, and I can't, I can't recommend to our audience enough this new series that you have coming out. It's not only scientifically really, uh, very, very rigorous, but it's pretty entertaining to watch as well. I, it's, uh, it's well produced.
Speaker 5 01:06:42 It's very well produced. I have a producer, Eric Herron, with philosopher films that, uh, just did a great job because my, my first series was a lot more mundane. I was just teaching. If you want a, a good teaching on, on the basics of chemistry that you need to understand origin of life, it's all there. It's up on the internet free. If you just go to my YouTube channel, d r James Tour, you can see it there. We have, you can either listen to it in the, in 14 different parts or that. Now there's just a, a one video, nine straight hours of video you can listen to. But this one, Eric's done a great job in, in just bringing in a little bit of humor in this. So it, it's, I think, much more watchable to the lay person.
Speaker 4 01:07:23 Well, we will be having a bit of a, a, a little writeup about the video on our Evolution news and Science Daily. We will win that writeup, embed the link to this video, and we'll also have a link to the new video that, that you're, that you're, you're the first of your series as it comes out. And we'll be highlighting the, the additional ones as they come out as well. One of Dave, Dave Farinas, uh, selling points is that he, he's a science communicator. And, uh, one of the things I love about the Origin of Life debate is, uh, that it is a debate that is inherently interdisciplinary. There's chemistry in it, there's biology in it, there's an analysis of thermodynamics in it. You have to understand something about the information sciences and information theory. And, uh, there, there was a famous scientist, uh, uh, Dyson Freeman, who said that the origin of light life is a debate for the scientist who has a little bit of everything, who's interested in all these subjects.
Speaker 4 01:08:14 And one book that we've done, uh, that highlights that is called The Mystery of Life's Origin. Uh, this was originally published back in 1984 by the authors Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsson, and we have recently re-released it with five supplementary essays, one by Dr. Tour, uh, addressing the organic chemistry, the organic Synthesis problems, one by Brian Miller, looking at the, uh, the prob the thermodynamic problems associated with the Origin of Life, one by yours truly looking at the information problem, uh, associated with the Origin of life. And then two other essays, one by Jonathan Wells and one by, uh, Guillermo Gonzalez, who is addressing, uh, the astro the field of astrobiology. So we have a, a, an interdisciplinary critique of these chemical evolutionary theories and a reflection on what it all means in this new book that nicely compliments, I think, what Dr. Tour's doing. So, um, we, we highly commend these videos to you, in part because if you're trying to think about the origin of life, you're gonna inevitably have to learn about a lot of different types of science.
Speaker 4 01:09:20 Certainly a lot of chemistry, but other fields as well. So we, uh, we're, we're delighted to be able to highlight those videos, and as I said, we're delighted that, um, this, this debate has broken out on the internet, because I think it will bring eventually more light than heat as we, uh, uh, think about this really profound mystery, which is how did life begin on planet Earth? Uh, Jim, we're really delighted that you took the time to talk with us today. We'll be doing a, a subsequent interview and, uh, and, uh, tha thanks for coming and we'll, we'll be hoping lots of people watch the, this new video series that you've produced. Thank you.
Speaker 3 01:09:55 The fact that the chemists in their laboratories were making it happen. They were mixing A with B and then mixing C in just the right amount. It's like cooking a dinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Recipe. It's one thing to follow a recipe and cook up a dinner. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, that's another thing to let a wild boar into the kitchen.
Speaker 2 01:10:14 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 the fourth and final conversation in this series as Tour and Meyer continue their critique with a look at the work and claims of American Chemist Bruce Lipshutz. If you'd like to watch the professionally edited video versions of these conversations, you'll find them posted at Dr. Meyers YouTube channel at Dr. Steven Meyer. That's at Dr. Steven Meyer on YouTube. For ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 01:10:57 Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org. This program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its Center for Science and Culture.
