Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Welcome to the program. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today we're kicking off a four-part conversation series between Dr. Steven Meyer, author of Among Other Books, signature In the Cell DNA, 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. Dr. Tura and Farina also conducted a formal debate at Rice University in May, 2023. But for those who were not satisfied with that debate or still have questions about the origin of life, this set of conversations between Dr. Meyer and Dr. T should bring much needed calm and clarity.
Speaker 2 00:01:15 In part one, Dr. Meyer starts by asking Dr. Tu to provide a basic definition of life. Behind every question about the origin of life says Meyer is a deeper question. What is it that we're trying to explain? The origin of the payer then discussed the basic problems that plague Origin of Life research before moving into a discussion of the work of Origin of Life researcher Steve Benner. Along the way, they also review the r n A world hypothesis, the problem with Hands-on Chemistry and why the challenges Facing Origin of Life Research increase every year. As our understanding of the cell gets more complex, these conversations were recorded on video. So as each begins, you'll hear an introduction over some background music. The first voice you'll hear is Dr. Tu, followed by Dr. Meyer introducing the series. You'll also hear the voice of YouTuber Dave Farina a few times in the introduction as well. Without further ado, enjoy part one of Stephen Meyer and James Tour discussing the state of Origin of Life research.
Speaker 3 00:02:20 What's being shown now with Carlin Duc spin cell activity is that you have to have had mere perfect curity at the start of life. It's not something that could, you could have evolved into. Dave in his video, likes to just say, oh, he just blows it off. He says, this is something esoteric that tour talks about. No, just because you can't answer it doesn't mean that it's esoteric. It is a real thing.
Speaker 4 00:02:42 Hi, I'm Steve Meyer from Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture, and we have taken a particular interest in this, uh, spirited exchange that's been taking place on the internet between, uh, Dave Farina, uh, also dubbed Professor Dave and, uh, professor James tour of Rice University. Dr. Tour is one of the most distinguished scientists in the world. Rated one of the top 50 scientists in the world. He has 600 peer-reviewed publications or more, and 150 some odd patents. He's a specialist in organic synthesis and nanotechnology. So
Speaker 5 00:03:15 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 carbons.
Speaker 4 00:03:18 Professor Dave is, uh, an internet blogger who has a tremendous following online and has brought to the attention of many the controversy over the origin of life and what's called Evolutionary a biogenesis. Hey,
Speaker 5 00:03:31 Everyone. It's been quite some time since my two-part series demolishing every last one of James tour's, ridiculous talking points,
Speaker 4 00:03:38 Aims. He's been a staunch critic of Dr. Tour and some of Dr. Tour's videos. And I wanted to just start, uh, Jim, by asking you about this controversy, why you decided to weigh in in the first place. Um, some might have seen it as a bit of a mismatch between, uh, a person of your eminence and a an internet blogger. Why did you, uh, decide that this, this, uh, issue needed to be engaged in the way you've engaged it?
Speaker 3 00:04:02 Well, I, you know, I have nothing in particular against, uh, Dave Farina. Um, I was just minding my own business, giving my own talks, and he came out with a video called Elucidating the Agenda of James Tour, as if I had some agenda behind, uh, speaking on a biogenesis. And, and my work is always just, just trying to expose the current work in, in, in, uh, a biogenesis and origin of life research and, and I think do the work that reviewers should have done when those papers first came out, because I felt that, uh, uh, actually that work screamed out that, uh, uh, this could not be how life actually formed. And so, when, when, uh, uh, when he came out with this video, every slide that he showed in the video was wrong. Every slide was wrong. And, uh, um, he has, he has many viewers, and, and I thought, well, it, it'd be good to, to straighten this out.
Speaker 3 00:05:02 And so I came out with a 13 part series on a biogenesis, but I had to go through a lot of the background chemistry. And in doing that, you know, I never called, uh, Dave Farina stupid. He says, I called him stupid over and over again. I never called him stupid once. I never, never did. And, uh, uh, I just talked about the science that was there, and I said that Dave was wrong. Uh, uh, he was wrong on, on every point that he had made on that series. And so, so, I, I just pointed that out
Speaker 4 00:05:32 So you Oh, yeah, sorry to interrupt. So you, you, you had a series of, uh, I think from what we've seen, very informative videos about the problems facing attempts to explain the origin of life from simpler non-living chemicals. And maybe we should actually start there just for our, our listeners and viewers. Uh, this is, there, there are two branches of evolutionary theory. There's the, uh, chemical evolutionary theory, which attempts to explain how you get the first living cell from simpler non-living chemicals. And then there's biological evolution, which attempts to explain how you get new forms of life from simpler preexisting forms. Your, uh, videos addressed only that first issue, the origin of, of the first life from simpler chemicals. Um, and so anyway, you put that, that series out, and then, um, Dave Farina came back with a, with some more videos challenging you, but this time he cited a lot of experts in origin of life research, origin of life, biochemistry. And I think that's given you a little bit more of a, an opening, I think, to, um, have a, a scientific discussion at a high scientific level. I think you, you were probably not wanting to have to engage an internet blogger on these things, but due to the misinformation, I think you felt you had to, but now you're able to address some of the, the leading figures in the field, because those are the people he cited in his critique of you is that, is that where we are in the discussion?
Speaker 3 00:06:51 Right. So the good thing that Dave did is he, he brought on three experts to address the chemistry, uh, that I had talked about in my videos. And, uh, those three ex and then he, he, he brought on three, and then he cited several others. And, and, uh, so that, that's good because now I can engage particularly with those three that were, were presumably addressing my video and, uh, and, and I could go right after their science and talk about that.
Speaker 4 00:07:24 Oh, and that's, that's what we wanna talk about. And I think I, you know, just, uh, again, as another preliminary, I would say that another good thing that, uh, professor Dave has done in, in, uh, citing these experts in, uh, critique of your work is that I think it enables, uh, his viewers and our viewers to really assess the, the standing of these arguments that are being made in support of evolutionary a biogenesis. I had a supervisor in Cambridge when I was doing my PhD on Origin of Life Biology, and he used to say that, he used to say, 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 you really can't assess, he said, the strength of an argument until you, you see how well it withstands criticism. And I think that applies to the, uh, to, to your critique of, uh, evolutionary a biogenesis, but also, uh, professor Dave's critique and the experts, he cites critique of yours. So we have the, the arguments out there and let's, so let's, let's, let's, uh, revisit them and let's let our viewers hear your side of the story. And, and then, uh, people can begin to evaluate this for themselves as both sides of the story are, are increasingly out in public.
Speaker 3 00:08:42 A biogenesis is the origin of life from non-living matter. And, uh, to construct any convincing theory of a biogenesis, we must take into account the condition of the Earth about 4 billion years ago. These are not my definition. These are textbook dictionary definitions.
Speaker 4 00:08:58 You, you've given a lecture, and it's a very detailed lecture with a lot of science in it. And the, the expert on the other side of the question that you, you critique and cite is, uh, a man named Steve Benner. So we're gonna get into some of his work and her, his claims, but maybe we could start with just a basic, uh, definition of, of, um, life. I mean, because my supervisor used to say 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, or as Alexandra o Parin used to put it, one of the, the early chemical evolutionary theorists, the question of the origin of life and the nature of life are, are inextricably linked. We can't ex, we can't come up with a good origin of life theory unless we know what we're shooting for, what life is. So how do, how do origin of life researchers and how do molecular biologists or cell biologists define life today?
Speaker 3 00:09:53 Well, I, I think that defining life, as you know, as a philosopher is hard, uh, defining the characteristics of life is actually a much easier thing to do. And, uh, uh, we know that, that all life, as we know it, is made out of cells. And you have a membrane on the outside, and you have, uh, DNA inside and, and, uh, you have a lot of machinery going on in there. And you have to have four classes of chemicals. You have to have the amino acids, which are the building bo blocks of the proteins. You have to have, uh, um, poly, you have to have carbohydrates or sugars, which are the building blocks of the poly carbohydrates or the polysaccharides. Uh, you have to have, uh, the lipids, which are, are the membrane. And then you have to have the nucleic acids, which are the DNA and the rna.
Speaker 3 00:10:44 So you have to have those four, four classes of chemicals. And then you have to have a functioning system that, that observe that has something called homeostasis. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, where there's, there's this, this internal functioning and operation of the system. It is not just throwing a bunch of molecules inside a lipid. It is, it is a whole functioning together. It is a system, it is a factory in a sense. These are the characteristics of life as we know it. And what some people are trying to do is, is they, they have said for years that, that they'll address this and they'll make this happen, and they've not been able to get close. So now they're trying to redefine what life is. Even the same people that have defined it, the very same way that I have, uh, these characteristics are trying to, to now change the argument, which is, as you know, they effectively physical philosophical approach to Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:11:35 To do that. Yeah. So they, they attempted define life down to some, some simpler essence or some simpler combination of molecules and say, well, that's all we really need to explain. But the fact is that life in with the characteristics that you described exists on this planet. And if we want to even get the biological, the biological evolution going, we've gotta, we've gotta start with at least a functioning cell. So, and those cells have membranes, they have carbohydrates, they have proteins, they have nucleic acids, and they have intricate, uh, interactions. We've got an, uh, an information, uh, storage transmission and processing system inside the cell. So that's what exists. We have to get to that point if we're really gonna provide an explanation. I think that's been a great point that you've made. So let's discuss some of the general problems that origin of life, uh, simulation experiments have encountered as they've attempted to simulate the origin of those four classes of molecules. What are, you have, um, noticed that there's an awful lot of what's called in the field investigator interference. Can you describe some of the, the, the problems that have been encountered under that heading? Well,
Speaker 3 00:12:44 Certainly investigator in interference means that investigators are doing all the work. And even with all the investigators doing all the work with very intricate work, they have not been able to make any of the four classes of chemicals that are needed for life. Nobody, nobody has made the chiro lipids, the lipids that are needed, where you have, have made the two and atopic hydroxyl groups of, of, uh, of, of glycerol, uh, into, in, you've been able to distinguish those two and atopic groups. Nobody's ever been able to control any of the stereo centers there. Uh, anything that anyone has made is, is not hoole. And even what they've made is with talking about interference is with this deep hands-on chemistry, using many, many steps that it's very hard for nature to use. And their synthesis are all cheated. They cheat at every step of their synthesis, meaning they will make, they'll mix A and B, they'll get a series of compounds, they only want one in that series, and they'll identify a little bit of it, a very small amount in a machine in A H P L C, but they won't take that and carry it on because it's too messy.
Speaker 3 00:13:58 It cannot be used. So they'll buy that fresh material from a manufacturer that isolates that from cellular sources, from something that has, has had life already. And then they'll take that onto the next step, and they repeat that over and over again. So every step,
Speaker 4 00:14:16 And Jim, is that, is that to, is that to prevent what are known as interfering cross reactions than in the, in, in prebiotic synthesis? So you got, you, you have a couple of reagents who combine them, and then you get lots of byproducts. And if you allow, and maybe one of them is something you want, but if you allow that to continue to react with all the other things that have been produced, you're gonna end up with a sludge, or I think one of the products was called melanin, and one of those reactions I remember studying. So you have to, you have to purify and remove those, those other byproducts, or else you just go and, and buy the one you want and start the next stage of the reaction all over again. Is that kind of what goes on? And
Speaker 3 00:14:55 That's exactly what goes on. They put upon early earth constraints that they themselves cannot even deal with and with all their instruments, they will make it in such a mess that they themselves cannot even isolate it. But they leave this to early earth. That's early earth's problem, not my problem. They will say, mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and, and, uh, well, they won't say that, but they'll infer that, and then they'll move on. So every step is a cheat. Every step screams out that this cannot be the way that, that, uh, early earth did. This synthesis cannot, and by cheat, even with all their work, they have never made homo chiro material
Speaker 4 00:15:30 Well, yeah. And let's talk about homo chiro. What does that mean? I, uh, I remember from chemistry, you've got, uh, amino acids come in left-handed and right-handed forms and sugars come in left-handed and right-handed forms are all the four basic, uh, chemi, uh, types of chemicals that are necessary for life. Are they all chiro in the sense that they have, have two different types of forms or more?
Speaker 3 00:15:52 Yes. Every one of them, there's only, there's a couple of amino acids that don't have steri genetic centers, but everything else has a stereo center. Actually, there's, there's, there's an amino acid that has a, that doesn't have it, but everything else, all classes of compounds have this, all amino acids save one, uh, uh, all the carbohydrates, all the, the, the nucleotides are, have multiple stereo centers, not just one. And then the, the, uh, the lipids have multiple stereo centers, and they've never controlled any of those in any, any synthesis. That's, that's prebio relevant meaning
Speaker 4 00:16:28 That, and what did, yeah. What, yeah, go ahead. I was gonna say, what does that mean practically? Why, why are the, why do they need to be controlled? What's the,
Speaker 3 00:16:34 What's pre right? So prebiotic relevance means that I cannot use the, the very sophisticated protection groups, schemes and catalysts that I've designed over a period of 150 years in modern chemistry, uh, uh, particularly in the last 50 years. We can control stairs centers. Now we can do that sort of thing. We can separate, uh, uh, uh, these sorts of mixtures using our very sophisticated instruments. But when we say early earth would never have that advantage, then, then we have to use only the chemistry that would be available on a prebio prebiotic earth. In other words, we're not using any of the sophisticated, uh, uh, car inducing agents that, that we have available to us today in our modern laboratory. That's what I mean, that a synthesis that has prebiotic relevance, they haven't even made ribos you, if you can't make ribos, you can't make any of the meat
Speaker 4 00:17:27 To a sugar form of sugar. Right. The ribo
Speaker 3 00:17:29 Sugar's a form of sugar. You, you can't make any of the, the, uh, um, the r n A or the dna n a, you're done. You're toast. That's it. And so what everybody starts with, they buy ribos and the syntheses that they have of ribos, they don't even use themselves. If you use very, very sophisticated hands-on chemistry, uh, like the, like what John Sutherland has done, you can make ribos, but it is not homo caryl, meaning that you have both mirror images of it and,
Speaker 4 00:17:58 And, and, yeah. And why is that? Why is that a problem? Why is if you have both, if you have both mirror images of the sugar or of the amino acids, or any of the other fundamental molecules, why, why, why is it a problem to have both mirror image versions of those molecules?
Speaker 3 00:18:14 Right. So if, if you don't have just the one air mirror image, rather than both of them, you cannot do the assemblies that you need to do to make the life type forms that you're going to need. And this is actually more recent work that's just come out in the last few years, uh, worked by Ron Naman and some of his associates at the, at the Weissman Institute, that many people said, well, you know, you had stereo mixtures, you had the R and the s, you had the left-handed, the right-handed. And then over time, it evolved, and it purified cannot be. And what he has shown, there's something called chio induced spin selectivity. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, meaning that if you didn't have this from the beginning, you could never have gotten this chemistry to work, because these act as what are called spin valves, the electrons have to go down particular chiro environments. And when you have the mixture of isomers, it cannot work. So you have to have had the ality at the start. It's not something that could have been evolved into
Speaker 4 00:19:11 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So you can't form a protein with a mixture of left and right-handed amino acids. You have to have exclusively left-handed amino acids. And there's an underlying, uh, physical reason for that, that is, uh, necessary to, to, to forming a functioning protein.
Speaker 3 00:19:29 That is correct. Because these proteins, as you know, are catalysts. These are the enzymes or the nature's catalysts for, for designing experiments. What we thought is that, that all of this was just affected by the structure so that it, it, it would influence how something came into it, how a substrate came into a cavity. What we've learned now is that there are electron transfers, and those electron transfers have to go down the, the prescribed chiral environment. So you could not have had this without having controlled that steroid chemistry to begin with. This is, its constraints get more difficult every year because we're learning about more about the cell and the chemistry involved in the cell. So the constraints become harder. So the task
Speaker 4 00:20:16 And what, what's necessary to, to provide function then Yes. For all of these molecules.
Speaker 3 00:20:20 Yes. Yeah. And so the, the origin of life researcher is, is for any step forward that they think that they have made, they haven't made a single step forward for, for every step forward. They think they've made, there are many steps back every year as we understand more about the chemistry that is going to be needed for a living cell. And this nonsense, Steve, this nonsense that people say, well, cells were much simpler back then. No, this has already been computed by biophysicists, how simple a cell could be.
Speaker 4 00:20:49 What is the machine? Very important work on minimal complexity. That's, that's established that, that, that minimally complex cell is awfully complex in ways that are quantifiable. I remember your, your, your comments remind me, Jim, of, uh, my last year doing PhD work on origin of life biology. And my supervisor had just come back from the Isol conference and she said, you know, unfortunately, our field is becoming populated by, by, by cranks. Everyone in the field knows that everybody else's hypothesis doesn't work, but they're unwilling to admit it about their own. That was 1990, you know, so, and things have only gotten much worse in the ensuing 30 some years. So, um, I feel your pain. Um, but in general, I think what you're saying is that these simulation experiments, um, they don't take what sometimes the experimenters claim, they're taking a hands-off approach, but they're actually taking a very hands-on approach at every step along the way. So in order to move the chemistry in a life relevant direction, there has to be a, uh, uh, repeated interventions by intelligent agents to restrict the degrees of chemical freedom to move things along in a, in a direction that's gonna be relevant to, to, to the actual origin of life. Is that, is that the, the general problem is with these interventions?
Speaker 3 00:22:06 Yes. That, that, that, that's the problem. For example, if you take Steve Benner's work where he says he al always uses a hands-off approach. First of all, when he has his hands off approach, he gets billions, billions of compounds mixed together. He will never use it. He will go onto the next step, having bought totally pure material chiro, homo chiro material, he will buy from a manufacturer that's isolated this from a, from a cellular source. And so, so he cheats at every step. And then when he has to have hands-on chemistry, he relies on the hands-on chemistry of others. And so it's, it's, it's just a big cheat all along the way. And I've told him this to his face. I mean, this is, this is what what we're dealing with here. And, and
Speaker 4 00:22:53 There's in, in your little video that will, we'll embed in this video or link to it, uh, of your lecture, uh, to the student group at Rice. You show a, an interesting, uh, scientific figure. Is it an an MR scan, uh, of, with lots of different peaks? What does that, what does that show? Is that making the point you're making now, that when you, when you do these simple reactions, you get not just the thing you want, you got a whole bunch of things as indicated by that, this NMR scan. Is that right?
Speaker 3 00:23:19 Right. And it's totally useless, and he is able to identify ribose in that mixture. And so he claims ribos and he goes onto the next step having rib, but why, why
Speaker 4 00:23:29 Doesn't rib he rib? Why, why doesn't he just let it go forward naturally then with all the compounds? Is are they they're gonna interact? Is that they're
Speaker 3 00:23:35 Gonna interact? It's, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:23:37 You, you, and you won't get what you want if you let that interaction take place.
Speaker 3 00:23:40 Not at all. Okay. Not at all. And he knows that. He knows that. And so, so he
Speaker 4 00:23:44 Is very, he very smart chemists. That's why he circumvented the problem by buying the, the ribos off the shelf for the next phase. Is that
Speaker 3 00:23:51 Correct? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And this is, this is Dave Reina's expert. So Dave Farina brings us on, and in many ways, Steve, Dave Farina is the victim. He is a victim of what these guys are, are putting out there. All of this goes back to the origin of life researchers themselves. It is not the press, it is the origin of life. Researchers themselves, they get on this YouTube channel and they talk about what they've got. Dave Farina buys into it because he cannot read the actual paper and makes sense out of it. He doesn't know how to read the paper and make sense out of it. So he is deceived by this. And this happens to many people. It's not just Dave Farina. The thing about Dave Reina is he's got a big audience. And so all I'm doing is I'm not, I'm not coming against his audience at all.
Speaker 3 00:24:36 And in many ways, I'm saying, poor Dave Farina, he's the victim. He buys into this so that when Benner says he's done hands off chemistry, and he's got these long, long, uh, uh, uh, uh, nucleic acids, he's got the, this long, this RNA that he said he has made. Dave can't assess this. He bought the precursors in highly pure form. He never made these precursors. No way. He says he made them, he never did. And then what he actually made, he never made rna, he made it had both the three five linkage and the two five, which means that it was hooked up the wrong way over and over again. And it even had branching. None of this could be usable. None of this. Yeah. Yeah. Let, let's, and let's, Steve Benner knows it. Steve knows it, but, but Dave Farina doesn't, and Dave Farina buys into this. The poor guy is a victim.
Speaker 4 00:25:28 So, so, so the origin of life, researchers, researchers overhype this stuff to the press and to others, and then people pick this up and, and then, uh, spread, spread the hype, and then, uh, the, you come along and critique the overhyping of these things, and then you're the bad guy, right?
Speaker 3 00:25:43 <laugh>, I, I'm, I'm the bad guy for
Speaker 4 00:25:44 You get criticized
Speaker 3 00:25:45 For exposing this. I mean, even what Steve Banner did is he, he, when he says so things in his paper that are way overhyped, and then when he goes to the press, he says, and now we have a consistent model for how you can get, uh, uh, Darwinian evolution. I mean, to go from the junk that he made. He didn't even make ribos. But then when he bought Ribos, then he brought it on the next step, quoting hands-on chemistry. He didn't even use that. He ended up buying the entire nucleotides that, that have a tri phosphate on there that are ready and preloaded to polymerize. That's what he bought. And he then, these were isolated from cellular sources from something that was already living. He bought that. And then he got these things to string together, but in a way that could never work because the zipper wasn't zipped together.
Speaker 3 00:26:37 Right. He had the wrong, the wrong connections here. And then he goes on to make these extrapolations and say that that, uh, um, uh, this, this is even the shows how you can get Darwinian evolution, it's a bunch of nonsense. It's such nonsense that even Jack Sawtek, who himself can hype a lot of things, said that, that Benner has gone with the hype rather than with the science. It's not just me saying this now. And, and, and Jack Sawtek is one of the other experts that Dave Farina refers to. He doesn't even realize that Jack Sawtek is contradicting the work that is, that Dave's other expert, Ben is, is doing. So, so Dave doesn't even have the perception to understand that his own experts are not ag agreeing with each other in many ways, as they critique each other. They agree with me.
Speaker 4 00:27:29 So, yeah, that, that's very interesting. It just is a dynamic in the, in the discussion here. Can we go back a little bit with, because I know what Benner is trying to do is to, to produce an RNA molecule. And the reason that RNA is so important now is that, is that, uh, there's been this chicken and egg problem that's been involved in origin of life research forever. The realization that you need information, which is stored today in a DNA molecule, uh, to produce proteins, but you need proteins to process and express the information on the dna. So you have this chicken and egg, which came first, and in the 1980s, it was thought that, well, maybe, uh, the RNA could help us solve the chicken and egg problem, because RNA stores information, but it also catalyzes at least a few of the kinds of, uh, uh, a few of the reactions that some protein molecules will, will catalyze.
Speaker 4 00:28:22 So maybe RNA could be the, the holy grail, the information storage molecule, and also, uh, at least some kind of a catalyst that would be analogous to what proteins do in modern cells. And so the idea was that we'd get RNA that could self replicate copy itself, have variations on that rna, that's the reference to the Darwinian evolution getting going on a molecular level. And then we'd be off to the evolutionary races. So if we could just build rna, we'd be in good shape. I think that was the sort of the background to all of this. And so Benner is weighed in and said, Hey, I, I can do that. I can, I can show with not with hands-on chemistry. I can show hands-off chemistry how to build rna. And as I recall, there's three main parts in the rna. There's the sugars, the phosphates, and the basis just like in dna. And, and, but you're saying he can't even get the sugars, let alone the, the bases hooked up in the right way. So tell us just a bit more about that now that I've given a little background to,
Speaker 3 00:29:18 So, so yes, you have to have the sugar, you have to have the ribose, and then you have to have the nuclear base. The nuclear bases actually are pretty simple structures. And those, those can be gotten fairly simply. But now putting those on the, on the ribose is not easy. And then hooking on a triphosphate is not easy. Very difficult chemistry to do this, very hard to do this by hands off chemistry, even with hands-on chemistry, it's hard. But by hands off by what Benner says, he never did it. He says he does it with hands-off. He never did. He bought it. Why did he buy it? Because his hands-off chemistry doesn't work. It doesn't work. It just doesn't work. And I, I'm the bad guy for, for, for saying, I'm just
Speaker 4 00:29:57 Pointing that out. You are a
Speaker 3 00:29:58 Bad guy, Jim. I, and, and poor, poor Dave Farina is, is the victim here. I mean, he's really the victim. And, and
Speaker 4 00:30:04 Now is part of the reason, Jim, that it's so hard to get these molecules to produce life relevant compounds, is that there's so many ways to hook them up that there there's more ways to go wrong than there are ways to go, right? Is that the essential problem?
Speaker 3 00:30:19 That's, that's, yes, that is the problem. Because, because the it with the nucleotides, you can have both the three five linkage, which is what you want, but you can also have the two five linkage, and that two five linkage throws you off. In fact, the two five linkage can act
Speaker 4 00:30:32 Get off at an angle or something.
Speaker 3 00:30:34 Yeah, it, it, it's not the right orientation. Plus it acts as something called S I R N A, meaning small interfering rna. It, it interferes with the whole translation process. So, so the thing shuts down because it, it, it, it forms these, these, uh, uh, duplexes, which are too sticky. So, so you, when you get the wrong attachment there and, and you see this sort of thing, in fact, I got Dave Rina to come around and, and to, in his second video and to confess that yes, you cannot get poly carbohydrates. You cannot get these polysaccharides unless you have enzymes. He says, I knew that all the time. That's what I meant in my first video. No, that's not what he said in his first video.
Speaker 4 00:31:14 But wait, stop, stop press, that's ver a very important concession because enzymes in modern cells are built their proteins, and they're built with the information that's stored on DNA and transferred to RNA and through the ribosome and the whole, the whole protein synthesis process. So if you're relying in prebiotic chemistry on something that's only built by proteins, you're presupposing the existence of genetic information, the origin of which you have not explained
Speaker 3 00:31:42 Exactly the origin of the information. He doesn't even know. So, so, but he said that you can get the, these poly carbo, these, the, these, uh, uh, carbohydrates just keep hooking onto the end there. And then when I pointed out to him that just that there's all these different tentacles, these ways that you can do it, then he comes around and is next video, he says, yeah, yeah. But what I meant was that you couldn't do it until you first have enzymes. But what do you mean enzymes? Where did the enzymes get the information to hook these things together in the way that you want? Uh,
Speaker 4 00:32:12 Uh, well, and and if I may interrupt up again. Yes. Because this is even more, the more you talk about this, the more I realize how appalling these claims are because, uh, the whole point of the RNA world was to build a self-replicating information storage molecule that could also function as a catalyst without enzymes and without dna. So that we were gonna circumvent the whole chicken and DNA protein, uh, chicken and egg problem by proposing an original synthesis of information rich RNA molecules that could copy themselves and produce variants and get the evolutionary process going. But if you have to invoke enzymes to make the RNA world plausible, you have defeated the whole, the, the whole approach. Well,
Speaker 3 00:32:55 In deference to Dave, he doesn't suggest that you need enzymes to make the rna. He said you need enzymes to make the, the, the poly carbohydrates. But, but, uh, uh, but the same problem happens with rna. You get, you get the wrong type of attachment. If he's gonna concede that you cannot make poly carbohydrates because there's too many variability in the coupling. If he's now conceded to that, which he did in his, in his second series, in his second set of videos, if he concedes to that, why doesn't he have to concede to it with RNA as well? Because RNA can link by the three five versus the two five. So if you're gonna concede on the one, you have to concede on the other that, because you have the same problem
Speaker 4 00:33:35 For the need for specificity in all these biopolymers is ubiquitous. It's everywhere.
Speaker 3 00:33:40 Exactly. Yeah. Any of the biopolymers, you have this need for specificity. You have to have the specificity. You can couple in these different ways. And if you're gonna going concede that you're gonna have to have enzymes to make the poly carbohydrates, which Dave has conceded to, then why don't you have to have it also to make the, the polypeptides? Because the polypeptides, half of them have active side chains that if you don't watch those, those end up participating. And then you get, you get some, you get, you get things that are, that are not, uh, your proteins anymore. Yeah. Right. Because you can get these opposite ways of, of, of attaching mm-hmm. <affirmative>. That's the problem. Yeah. You get these opposite ways of attaching. So if he's gonna concede on the sugars, he has to concede on the r a, if he has to concede on the rna, he's going to have to concede on, on the peptides as well. But the poor man does not realize it. He's a victim because he believes what these guys say. And he's unable to read the papers to see what they really say. He, he's unable to discern them. And then he concedes with the carbohydrates, but he won't concede on anything else. But it's the same problem. The specific, it's the same problem, problem.
Speaker 4 00:34:51 The
Speaker 4 00:34:51 Specificity problem. Right. So let's go back to, to Benner's claim then. Who is, who is a, a serious scientist? Uh, he's trying to make rna, um, but he, it, in the first instance, as I understand it, he's just trying to get a stable RNA molecule. He's not worried about getting the nucleo bases in the right sequence so that you actually would get self replication, cuz there's an information requirement for that. He's just dealing with the, the more primary problem of building the parts and getting them the link together in some stable configuration that would represent an RNA molecule. Is that right? And what are the problems associated with just those steps if, if I'm understanding it properly?
Speaker 3 00:35:32 Well, he hasn't made rna, first of all, he didn't make the, the ribose that you need for the rna. He didn't make the nucleotide that you need. He didn't put on the trip phosphate that you need. He bought it. Alright? So that's the first problem. Earlier earth,
Speaker 4 00:35:44 He bought all of those constituent parts
Speaker 3 00:35:46 All put together. He bought them <laugh>, he bought those constituent parts all put together in one piece. He bought it that way. And, uh, uh, uh, poor earlier earth, I don't know where early earth is gonna buy this from. And, and then, and then what he did is he allowed these things to polymerize, but they polymerized with no specificity. So not only did he not have the order, he had the three five linkage and the two five, and he didn't even tell us how much of the two five. He just said it had a, a significant fraction of three five, which is what you want. What does significant fraction mean? Does it mean two-thirds? Does it mean nine-tenths? Does it mean one-third? He didn't tell us. Why wouldn't he tell us? Probably because it wasn't very good, because many people have made this random polymerization to make, make, uh, uh, uh, what could be rna. And they come out and they tell you they've characterized it and it's 70% of the wrong linkage or 30% of the wrong linkage. Uh, let, let, let, let's give him on that low number. Let's say he only has 30% of the wrong linkage. So he has, he has, uh, uh, uh, 60%, 66%, uh, two thirds of the right linkage. What does is
Speaker 4 00:36:56 A moot mean? Is, is it a moot point? Either way, Jim,
Speaker 3 00:36:59 It's a moot point either way, because you need three bases have to be aligned in order to define what one pro, what one amino acid is gonna be. He can't even define one, not even a single one. And the other problem is, as you know, you can't just make one RNA and say, Hey, I have this one rna, and it it, it just happens to be the right order to start building some amazing enzymes. And then you say it copies itself. RNA has never been shown to copy itself. The most it's ever shown in primed systems that were designed to copy themselves. Mm-hmm. Not more than 10% has been copied.
Speaker 4 00:37:33 10% is the, the limit.
Speaker 3 00:37:33 And that 10 10% is too short to be to, to make any copies
Speaker 4 00:37:37 Of it. But even there though, that 10% is only, uh, vi will only ensue if there's a very specific arrangement of the nucleo basises on the r n a molecule. In other words, there's a prior information requirement, um, to get even that limited degree of, of self replication. Yes,
Speaker 3 00:37:55 It's primed to do this. Now let's think about the stability of one r n a molecule. Cuz even Joshua Swami says, all you need is one, one molecule of rna. How long will that one molecule of RNA last? Well, if there's magnesium chloride, it doesn't last long at all. They, so they want magnesium chloride when they wanna do synthesis. But magnesium chloride will destroy RNA very, very quickly. It'll cleave because of this. So let's say there's no magnesium chloride in there. How long will that last? If it's half-life, if the half-life of say, a 600 mer of RNA that will prescribe for, for, for just a 200 mer on, on, on, on a protein, just, just the half-life of that 600 mer. Let's just say the half-life is a year. Well, how long will that molecule last? That molecule wouldn't even last more than a couple of days under the best of conditions, just by the normal hydrolysis rates.
Speaker 3 00:38:47 When you have one molecule, you don't have enough to last you because these things are gonna cleave. It's the only reason we can work with RNA is because we make billions and billions of them at a time. We deal on AGA's number type systems. But when you only have one, it it's, it's, it's half-life. It's, it's how long it's going to be retained. We'll be not more than a day or two. That's it. It's gonna cleave. So, so it, it's toast. It's over everything. I'm Steve, this is frustrating to me. I hope, I hope you can feel my pain because at every step nothing works. Nothing works at every step that these guys talk about. I urge your your folks to watch this. Go to Dr. James tour on YouTube and watch the Sears because I expose every one of these and I expose now the actual researcher's claims.
Speaker 4 00:39:39 Yeah. And, and I mean, in the, in the simplest terms, the chemistry acting on its own does not wanna move in a life friendly direction and never. So to get it to move in that direction, you need repeated interventions from intelligent chemists who pretend that they themselves played no role in this or that their interventions were in a prebiotic, uh, environment unnecessary. And yet the whole logic of what they are doing in performing simulation experiments is the uniform and, uh, uniformitarian logic of Charles Lyle that the present is the key to the past, but if in the present they are actively intervening, they are not showing that undirected chemical processes would've been sufficient in the past. So there's the kind of deep problem. And you, you show so brilliantly in this, this lecture that we're gonna embed in this video, the, the, the multiple ways in which those interventions are, um, accomplished by the chemists. Um, could you just say a little bit, just there was a, uh, you had quite a lot in the video about relay synthesis. Can you explain what that is and how that relates to this problem we've been talking about?
Speaker 3 00:40:44 Right. So, so relay synthesis is you take A and B and you mix it together. You wanna make A coupled to B, well, you get A coupled to B, but you get many, many different products along with that. You get a couple two itself. You get aa, you get B, B coupled two itself, you get a b, a. So you get many different compounds. What the chemist does, and what we do in our laboratory is you fish out the compound you want just say ab you fish out that compound, you purify it. And when I say you fish it out, you use a lot of complex tools to be able to isolate that. And then you take that ab compound and you mix it in the next step. That is how synthesis is done. The way these guys do it, they'll make this mixture and they'll say, well, we can identify it in there, but we can't isolate it cuz it's, it's too, it's too messy. So what we'll do is we'll buy that ab it's
Speaker 4 00:41:33 Too, it's too messy and not something that anything, not anything that would happen on it unusable on a prebiotic earth. Right. Without intelligent intervention.
Speaker 3 00:41:40 Yeah, it's unusable and they know it. Okay. And so they buy it pure and they go onto the next step. So at every, every step they don't use the product that they've made. This is cheating it every step. You could never do this in a real synthesis. The early earth could never do this. So they cheat at every step. They cheat at every step. And it's not just Steve Benner. If, if you look at the work of, uh, of, of, of Lee Cronin, his lab is the most user in input system. He has tubes and things piping in at exact times. And it's just so much information that is being put in there. And all he gets is junk. All the man gets is junk. He gets junk. He doesn't make the polypeptides that he says he makes, because when he ha uses real polypeptides that have active side change, those interfere tho the, and so you get different hookups, it doesn't work anymore, the chemistry doesn't work.
Speaker 3 00:42:36 And it's auto catalytic junk that he says that he uses these auto catalysis. He's making a bunch of rust that has nothing to do with life, nothing to do with life by his own standards of what life is. And then he mixes a little bit of oil and water and he says, Hey, those are like cells. They're not like cells. This is a marone effect that has been around for a long time, has nothing to do with cellular life. And they make these bold claims that this is life, it is not life it by the own, his own standards of what life that he has talked about. And so, so it it it's all a game. It's all nonsense that these guys are putting out there and I'm exposing this poor Dave Farina is a victim where he listens to what these guys say and he just nods there.
Speaker 3 00:43:18 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Jim Tour doesn't know any of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and he doesn't know. He just doesn't know because he doesn't go to their papers. And so what I do on my video series is I actually take not just the, the title page of the paper and show the title that Dave Farina does. I actually open the paper. I open the paper, and we go through it. We go through the experimental section and we see what these guys have done. When they say that they've purified it. When, when Lee Cronin says that, that the more material he keeps adding in more material, well how, how on earlier earth do you just keep adding in more pure material? Well, even when he throws in more pure material, he says it cleans up the system. It doesn't clean up the system. It's only because he took out the ones that had polymerized and fallen out. He's taken off the supernatant. So 30% of the material he's taken off at each cycle. And he says, well, you see, it's self purifying. It's not self purifying. You purified
Speaker 4 00:44:08 It. You did it, you did it. The supernatant is you did, yeah. What's the supernatant?
Speaker 3 00:44:13 Naate is the part that that's in solution on the top. And all the other things went to the bottom, bottom. It's waste product. They came,
Speaker 4 00:44:18 It's the essentially a waste chemical waste product.
Speaker 3 00:44:20 The reaction. Yeah. All his material keeps going. Yeah. And he says, you see, it's self purifying. It's not self purifying. You purified it at every step. And even then it was just a, a mixture because he himself, in, in, in that series that Dave Farina put out that two part series, he, he put, he put, uh, Lee Cronin in there a lot. Lee Cronin even said, when you do the foremost reaction, you get billions of compounds in seconds to hours, billions of compounds. And here he, Dave Farina says, oh no, you can use the foremost reaction would make these things. No, I've, I've said all along, they make junk. They make absolute junk. And poor Dave Farina, Dave Farina says, uh, uh, Jim Tour says, uh, uh, uh, calcium hydroxide would be relevant. It's really not relevant. But then he himself shows a synthesis of calcium hydroxide. Then he brings on an expert Lee Cronin, he uses calcium hydroxide. He brings on an expert Steve Benner who uses calcium hydroxide. And Dave Farina doesn't even notice it. The guy doesn't even notice it. He doesn't understand chemistry. And the poor guy projects him himself. Like he understands the chemistry. He does not, he does not understand chemistry. And he thinks in his own mind that he understands the papers, but he doesn't.
Speaker 4 00:45:32 Yeah. And he's got, but he's got a big megaphone. And I think that's why you feel that you've had to, you've had to, uh, expose some of the, the, the, the hype and the false scientific claims that have been made. Um,
Speaker 3 00:45:42 Yeah. And, and he and his, his listeners are not stupid. Not at all. I mean, but they do. They're not getting the true story. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So all I'm doing is, is trying to, to to show that there's a whole way that you look at this and then you see what's exposed here. They're not getting a, a true story on this.
Speaker 4 00:45:59 I did wanna, before we close today, just put this in maybe, uh, again, contextualize it a little bit with these experiments because to, to explain the origin of life, as you were talking about our understanding of the characteristics of the cell, there's, there are kind of multiple levels of problems that have to be addressed. The first is to build the monomers, the small, uh, constituents and, uh, the constituents of parts of the molecules, the amino acids and the proteins or the sugars, the phosphates and the bases and the dna or the, um, the, um, the, the different, uh, parts of the, of the sugar molecules and the lipids as well. But once you get those, uh, that does not by itself a cell make, there's a another layer of problem. And that is, especially with the DNA and the proteins, there's the sequence specificity of the constituent parts.
Speaker 4 00:46:44 That's what we mean by the information. It's the, cuz those nucleotide bases on DNA and RNA are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or like digital characters in the machine code. This was the, the great insight of Francis Crick and his sequence hypothesis that these are literally containing information or instructions for building other molecules, the DNA for building the proteins and so forth. But then that's the second level. But even if you get the information rich DNA and proteins, and there's specificity of arrangement involved in the, in, in the lipids and sugars as well, we now know. But even if you get all those molecules with all the information they need, there's still an additional problem, which you discuss in your video, uh, about Steve Benner. And that's the, the 10, the 10 to the big number, 77 billion possible ways. Can you tell this huge combinatorial huge number of combinations that are possible for the arrangement of just the protein, protein interactions? That that's a, that's another getting that, getting the right one of those possibilities is an additional problem as well. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Speaker 3 00:47:50 Yeah. Origin of life researchers never, never reflect on this. They, they, they don't want to go near it. So it turns out that there are other types of interactions. So of course we've been talking about the information interaction where molecules are hooked up to other molecules by a covalent attachment, by a chemical bond. There's other types where molecules are just non-attached by a chemical bond, but they're interacting, they're close enough to interact, and they're these arrangements, these are called the non-covalent interactions. Those are turning out to be exceedingly important because information flows through these packages, through what are called electrostatic potentials. We've written papers on electrostatic potential interaction. And what happens is when you get this, this non-covalent interaction that goes down, these, you have to have a proper arrangement. Well, how can these non-covalent interactions, there's so many different combinations, how do you get the right ones?
Speaker 3 00:48:46 Well, the number of con of, of, of ways that you can align these is astronomically high, exceedingly high numbers on the ways you can do this. And only a small number of those are going to work properly. The arrangements could be between protein, protein, between protein, d n a, between d, n a d, n a, between between, uh, uh, uh, amino acid, uh, peptide chains, polypeptides and, and other polypeptides. So you, you have all of these interactions going on that, that have non-covalent interactions, again, between different carbohydrates, STRs or carbohydrates and proteins. How do these align? Nobody ever addresses those. So
Speaker 4 00:49:26 Even is, is this what's meant by the so-called ome problem? Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3 00:49:30 This is the ome problem. It's called Leventhal 2.0 Paradox. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, first Leventhal paradox was how does a protein fold, right? That's a big paradox. How do they fold without having other enzymes to act on them, to help them to, to right. To chaperone them into a fold. This is the 2.0, which is orders of magnitude, many orders of magnitude more difficult to think about how this could have happened. So you can't just take components and throw them into a lipid bilayer and expect them to ever work because you don't have this information. And what happens is when a cell is going to divide, it passes some of this information rich material to each half mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and then it clamps down on the middle and it keeps propagating this and then this to the next cell and this to the next cell. So that's how the information propagates. It's not a random arrangement of these things. That's why if you ever take a cell and you dehydrate it such that you've even lost the, the waters of hydration between them to allow for this hydrogen bonding, then you can never bring this cell back to life because you've lost all of this non-covalent interaction of arrangement. So
Speaker 4 00:50:39 It's a Humpty Dumpty problem as well.
Speaker 3 00:50:40 It's a huge problem. It's a huge problem. Yeah. And so origin of life, researchers don't even want to talk about this. And most of them don't even know about the interact on problem. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, most of them don't even know about Carole Induc spin selectivity, which demands now that you had everything Homo Carole from the beginning, they want to avoid this. This is the problem, Steve, the target, what we're shooting at to make a sell moves further away from us every year.
Speaker 4 00:51:05 Every year. The more we understand about the complexity of the system that we're the origin of which we're actually trying to explain exactly probably this harder and harder and harder,
Speaker 3 00:51:14 The cell is not getting more complex. Our understanding of it right. Is getting more complex. Because a hundred years ago we thought a cell just had a bunch of protoplasm in there. Yeah. We have no idea of the complexity. And every year we're finding more complexity and we're like, wow, I gotta, I gotta deal with this problem too. I gotta deal with this problem too. These guys who work in Origin of Life are absolutely clueless on all of these issues and even on the issues that they think they have figured out. It, it doesn't work. And that's why when people like, like, like Lee Cronin say the, the, the primordial soup model is a good model. And then when I pin him down and say, y y you know, where is the goodness to your model? How do small molecules get to big molecules that can then form a cell? He has no idea. So he starts agreeing with me, yes, we're clueless on this, this how this happened. All we know is there was no life. And then there was life and what happened in between, we don't know. So he ends up agreeing with me when you push him enough. But then when he gets on the program again, he says, the primorial soup model is a good model. He has no idea. He has no idea. This thing doesn't work. It absolutely does not work.
Speaker 4 00:52:21 When, uh, it reminds me of some conversations I had when I was doing my PhD on Origin of Life biology in Cambridge. There were very famous labs there, the MRC lab and people, uh, uh, doing, uh, lot of chemistry and molecular biology and biophysics and so forth. When they'd find out I was working on this, oftentimes they'd, they'd kind of take me aside and say, that's fascinating. He'd say, what, what, what, what's the status of this? And I'd say, well, really, pretty much no one has any idea how life arose by undirected chemical processes. And, and people would say, I, you know, I've always thought that myself, I haven't, you know, the, the, what we get in the textbooks is so far removed from what seems like chemical reality. I've been deeply skeptical. So, but you, it would always be kind of in hush tones.
Speaker 4 00:53:01 Like no one wanted to admit that, that the emperor had no cl no clothes. But, uh, you're doing a very good job, Jim, in, in, in exposing these deep and propound problems, uh, at the level first of building the, the constituent parts of those four classes of molecules of the problems associated with getting the constituent parts arranged in the right way. And then the problem of getting the, the, the molecules to interact with each other in the right way. Every level you have these specificity requirements that haven't been solved. Um, one last question. Uh, and this is for some, I think perhaps the most counterintuitive thing that you are known for saying about this because people have long thought that if there was just enough time we could build anything by chance or by some sort of undirected self-organization process. Uh, there was a famous scientist in 1950s, George Wald, who used to say that chance was the hero of the plot. That, uh, given enough time, the possible, uh, that the improbable would become possible. The possible would become inevitable. And voila, you would have life just because you had had so many interactions. But you've actually reversed that and says, time is not the hero of the plot. It's not even working in your favor, it's working against you. Can you explain that? Yes.
Speaker 3 00:54:22 Because organic molecules decompose, they decompose rather rapidly under the very conditions in which they form, they decompose. And, and we show this over and over again. Even Steve Benner shows it in his own work that these things decompose under the very reaction conditions in which they form. Typically in a, in a, in a foremost reaction, uh, ribose half-life under the very conditions in which it was made is five hours. That means you have, you have half the amount of ribose that you had five hours before just because of its decomposition under the very reaction conditions that it was made. So time is your enemy. That's why chemists who like to go home for the weekend and let their reactions just run, always get bad yield. You have to watch that reaction and you have to stop it. As soon as, as the material that you want starts decreasing, you've hit the optimal, you hit the peak, you gotta stop that reaction cuz it's gonna decompose under the very reaction conditions in which it forms and poor.
Speaker 4 00:55:20 Then you have to inter and then you have to intervene to scoop out what you want. Is
Speaker 3 00:55:23 That Yeah, yeah. And poor Dave reads a paper and the paper says, time is on our side. That <laugh> the author, was using that as a, as a colloquial expression, just using that as an expression, meaning that you had a, a thermodynamic product rather than a kinetic product. And he thought that where she was saying, time is on your side. He said, see, now Jim tour's gonna have to pay attention to this. The poor guy didn't even understand. He doesn't even understand a poetic expression when it's used in this paper versus what, what's really there. I mean, it's, it's just, it's just so painful for me to listen to his interpretation of these papers. But I'm gonna come out with all of this. So, so have, have your, your, your, your viewers, keep an eye on Dr. James tour. Go go to that YouTube channel and subscribe and you'll see when these things are coming out, cuz they're gonna start coming out very soon and it's gonna be one after another after another that's gonna expose all of this that I think is going to change the argument on origin of life.
Speaker 4 00:56:24 Well, you know, Jim, I think it already is changing the argument and a lot of, a lot of people at various conferences that I've talked to recently are, are aware that this debate's going on and that you have been calling out the, the over-hyping of these prebiotic simulation experiments. There is a huge disparity between what is told to the press and what is conveyed to students in textbooks and by popular YouTube bloggers and what the actual scientific evidence shows. And you've done a great job in exposing that disparity. And I think, uh, as a result of that, you've done a great service for science and, uh, I know it is uncomfortable to have to take on someone who might not seem to be a worthy scientific interlocutor because he simply lacks the credentials and the expertise that you have. But it, it's necessary because, uh, some of those people operating in the internet environment have access to millions and millions of viewers, and they are conveying that very misinformation that you've been, uh, committed to, to exposing.
Speaker 4 00:57:25 So we, we commend you for that and thank you for this really spirited interview. And we will be promoting the videos that you have, uh, coming out in including this first one in which you address the claims of Steve Benner in this larger or in this longer lecture that you've given. I think it was at Rice with the student group. Correct. And, and we'll be, we'll be promoting that and hoping that, uh, we'll doing our best to get the word out about what the real state of the science is. So thank you. Thanks very much for, uh, a good, a good, good interview and we'll cut. We'll, we'll, we'll do this again and talk about your next, uh, series of videos about the work of, uh, Lee Cronin. And then, uh, I think there's also some videos that you've done about how Professor Dave and others have, have misused the work of one of your former colleagues. Uh, uh, Bruce Lipchitz, I think. Uh, yes, it was,
Speaker 3 00:58:11 It was terrible with, with Dave Farina did to him da how Dave Farina portrayed his work.
Speaker 4 00:58:17 Yeah. So we're gonna sort all that out, but this, this video will, uh, will be promoting your, your, your lecture on the work of Steve Benner and the whole controversy about building r n a molecules and, uh, we'll, we'll call it good for, for today. Thanks very much. Thank
Speaker 3 00:58:31 You.
Speaker 2 00:58:34 That was Dr. Steven Meyer and Dr. James tour discussing some of the major problems inherent in a biogenesis and the state of Origin of life research as a whole. Stay tuned for parts two, three, and four of this series where Dr. Meyer and Dr. Tour critique other origin of life experts, including Lee Cronin and Bruce Lipshutz, as they continue to bring clarity to the debate over chemical evolution and the origin of the first life. Folks, even if you don't have a background in chemistry or haven't followed the debate much so far, this is, as Dr. Meyer says, a question of immense scientific interest that has larger philosophical implications. So it's worth the back and forth to get to the heart of the issue. And if you'd like to watch the video versions of these conversations, you'll find them also posted weekly at Dr. Meyer's YouTube channel at Dr. Steven Meyer. That's at Dr. Steven Meyer on YouTube. For ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening, Nick.
Speaker 1 00:59:42 Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org. This program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its Center for Science and Culture.
