[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Where did life come from in the first place? Does Darwin's theory have an answer for the origin of life? And how does it stack up to the alternatives?
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today we're bringing you the first half of an insightful conversation between philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer and synthetic organic chemist Dr. James Tour as they unravel important issues around the origin of life.
Dr. Tour is a professor at Rice University, renowned for his work in nanotechnology and his skepticism toward the current scientific models explaining the origin of life.
Dr. Meyer is author of Darwin's the Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design.
In Part one, Meyer and Tour set the stage by highlighting the distinction between Charles Darwin's theory of biological evolution and the question Darwin never where does life come from in the first place? If and oh, what a big if, wrote Darwin in 1871, we could conceive in some warm little pond that a protein compound was chemically formed. For decades, many scientists assumed this first question was either trivial or or easily solvable, clinging to a primordial soup model for a long time. But what Meyer and Tour take pains to point out here is that the origin of life is anything but a trivial issue. In fact, it's getting more and more vexing and problematic by the year, as the target for understanding life's origin moves miles and miles further away with each new discovery of complexity. Meyer and Tour touch on the famous Miller Urey experiments of the 1950s, the discovery of DNA as digital code by Watson and crick in 1953, and why modern origin of life research amounts to what Tour calls a big scam. Let's turn to Peter Robinson now as he introduces his guests.
[00:02:08] Speaker C: Two questions. How do higher forms of life evolve from lower forms of life? Charles Darwin answered that question, or at least thought he did.
But the other question is one that Darwin never even attempted to answer.
Where does life come from in the first place?
Scientist and philosopher Stephen Meyer and chemist James Tour.
Uncommon Knowledge now welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. We're filming today in Fiesole, Italy.
Stephen Meyer earned his undergraduate degree at Whitworth College and his doctorate in the history of science at Cambridge. Now the director of the center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, Dr. Meyer's books include Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, and the Return of the God Hypothesis.
James Tour received his undergraduate degree at Syracuse University University and his doctorate in synthetic organic and organic metallic. I Can't even say what this field is in synthetic organic and organometallic chemistry from Purdue, now a professor at Rice University. Dr. Tour's areas of research include nanoelectronics, graphene electronics, silicon oxide electronics and carbon research into what the Rice website terms quote and environmentally friendly oil and gas extraction.
Dr. Tour has published more than 1,000 peer reviewed research papers and holds several hundred patents.
Steve and Jim Ben Bing Darwin A couple of quotations here.
As I mentioned earlier, there are two pieces to Charles Darwin and the second piece is evolution. His elaborate theory that random mutation and natural selection can lead to or did lead to the creation or origin of many different species. Now that we won't go into it, agree with it or disagree with it, it's an explanation, it's a body of thought, it's a kind of discipline.
But the other piece, the first piece is this.
Darwin simply assumes that life exists.
His theory calls for evolving from something that's there in the first place. Here he writes in a letter to a friend in 1871 if and oh what a big if, we could conceive in some warm little pond that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.
That's Darwin in 1871, more than two decades after he published on the Origin of Species and he's still wondering how life might have originated.
Now Richard Dawkins, contemporary Oxford zoologist, quote, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
But of course Darwin only made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. If you believe this is question but it's my surmise you can only say that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist if you believe that that prior question where does life come from in the first place is either trivially easy to answer or in some basic way doesn't matter. Is that correct?
[00:05:45] Speaker D: Or it has been solved but neither of those three conditions have obtained.
It's not trivially easy to solve, it hasn't been solved and it is actually quite an important part of the whole naturalistic story that Darwin and modern neo Darwinists have attempted to tell. And you're right, there's a distinction between what's called chemical evolutionary theory which attempts to explain the origin of the first life from simpler non living chemicals, and biological evolutionary theory which attempts to explain the origin of new forms of life from simpler pre existing forms of life. Darwin's theory was a form of biological evolution attempt to explain the origin of new forms from simpler forms. But he presupposed as he Put it in the origin one or very few simple forms at the base of his famous tree of life and did not account for where that came from, from simpler prebiotic chemicals.
[00:06:39] Speaker C: Before we continue, and I've got loads more to ask, obviously. Why am I a layman coming to this? A century and a half after Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, scratching my head and saying, fellows, first question, where does life come from in the first place? That's a pretty big one. How is it that a sort of interested layman can only suddenly realize, you guys have this elaborate. What about this?
Did science simply treat it as unimportant or so easy that they'd get to it sooner or later?
The question of the origin of life.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: Nobody knows the origin of life. Nobody has ever known the origin of life. But people assume, very much like the Babylonians assumed, that it came out of a stinking pond.
That's where they say their life came out of. And their gods came out of that same pond. And that's the primordial soup model. And that model persists today.
You look in any textbook from elementary school to advanced college textbooks and it will speak of the primordial soup model. Life came out of that. That there were molecules that came together and they formed higher order structures and that formed a cell and that led to life. That is a bunch of nonsense.
[00:08:00] Speaker C: Okay, hold on. I remember those textbooks with flasks and tooth. So let's take a moment. There's first of all, you said something interesting. Darwin's warm little pond. Darwin is working in a great tradition here. The Babylonians had myths involving the primordial soup. Let's take a moment here. The famous Miller Urey experiments of the 1950s.
Very simple. Two flasks, closed system with tubes. One flask has ammonia, methane and a few other elements to simulate the primordial atmosphere.
Another flask has water to simulate the primordial ocean.
And then electricity gets introduced to simulate lightning.
What do you know?
Amino acids seem to settle out of this. In early experiments, according to my reading, there were five amino acids which could be described as central building blocks of life. I'm told in later experiments they refined it, improved it a bit and they got up to 22amino acids.
And there it seems to have stopped. The science says, oh, that's close enough. We can extrapolate from what's going on there. Keep this up for a billion years and you'll end up with life.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: And James Tour says it's garbage that doesn't work. Yes, they made a number of Amino acids. They also made amino acids that are totally unnatural. And so they had many amino acids. I think that there may have been a dozen or so of the amino acids, but it doesn't matter. All of them were achiral, which means they didn't have the handedness that one wants.
Organic molecules, aside from the very simplest of organic molecules, have two handedness.
You either have a right handed model or a left handed model. Your right and your left hand are mirror images of one another. If you put your right hand up to a mirror, it will appear as your left hand. The two are non superimposable. That's why your right hand can't fit in a left handed glove.
Molecules are like that, organic molecules are like that as well.
He made both of the images. You have to have one and not the other. So there were other experiments that talked about resolving these, separating these. But that's the easy part. That's actually quite easy.
But what was presumed from that experiment, which was actually a very nice experiment and not belittling that experiment at all, is that we would very soon figure out the way to life. That's what was assumed. And so that was 75 years ago. So think about that. Think what has been done in the last 75 years where you have this whole silicon era which started in 1960. You have computers, you have space flight, you have landing on the moon, which was in the 1960s, a long time ago. You have all of this Internet connectivity, the medical advances.
We still don't know how these things come together. You have to take the amino acids and polymerize them, hook them together. That's a big problem. Nobody has solved that.
[00:11:03] Speaker C: Jim, could I. May I read a little bit from a paper of yours, one of your thousand peer reviewed papers? I don't understand a word of this, but I'm going to quote a little bit and ask you to help help me understand it. Quote. This is the title of the paper. Are present proposals on chemical evolutionary mechanisms accurately pointing toward first life. All right. You describe work that you have done in assembling what you call nano cars, tiny little vehicles. Here's a quote.
I'm quoting you in this paper. So here's something to consider as we think about the problem of the origin of life, designing nanocars, to which you've already devoted about a dozen intricate pages of how you design these tiny little vehicles. Designing nanocars is child's play in comparison to the complex molecular machinery and information processing systems at work in the synthesis of proteins, enzymes, DNA, RNA and polysaccharides.
Let alone their assembly into complex, functional macroscopic systems. Close quote.
Is this layman correct in saying, as we have learned more about chemistry, as we have achieved the ability to manipulate chemistry more and more accurately, we have learned that the question of how life first began is far bigger and far more complicated and far more elusive than Darwin and Miller and Urey ever conceived?
[00:12:43] Speaker A: Yes, this happens all the time. We see this all, every time we try to make something, the goal post goes further away. It's not that the cell is evolving, it's that we understand more of the cell. So we're here, we move a little bit closer to, may be solving this, but the cell, the target, has moved miles and miles further away because we're like, oh no, I have to make that too. Oh, I have to solve this problem too. So when you just think a cell is a bunch of protoplasm, the target's not very hard. But then when you learn about the cell and the complexity of it, and you see that biochemistry is extraordinary and there's so many layers to this that I never even thought about because I didn't have the tools to see it 50 years ago, but now I see it. And then you think about how those might be solved, how you might solve those, and then you see layers of other things you have to solve. So though people may say we're getting closer, the target has moved much further away.
So I would never say that it will never be solved. As a scientist, I can't say that, but I just say that the solution is very far from today.
[00:13:58] Speaker D: Okay, can I interject and please this in some historical context. I did my PhD on Origin of life biology and one of my Cambridge supervisors who also worked on the history of that field, had a well known quotation. She said that behind the question of the origin of life is a deeper question and that is the question of what are we trying to explain the origin of.
And in 1859, in the 1860s, 1870s, the scientists, early evolutionary biologists, assumed that that question was going to be pretty simple and easy to understand.
[00:14:37] Speaker C: Thomas Henry Huxley and they assumed that lie.
[00:14:39] Speaker D: They assumed it because they thought life was very simple. Thomas Henry Huxley, who was Darwin's famous bulldog, said that the, the cell was a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm. And they thought that life was essentially a kind of chemical. It was made of an essential substance called protoplasm, which was a kind of Jello or goo that could be produced by a few simple chemical reactions.
And our knowledge of what the simple cell is actually composed of, as Jim has just said, has advanced massively since then. Huxley had no idea, Darwin had no idea what we would discover. And now we know that inside living cells we have at the very least an information storage, transmission and processing system, which is part of a whole automated system for building proteins and protein machines. These nano machines that Jim makes, as you correctly point out, are, as he puts it, child's play. He has these massive chemical recipes that are involved, multiple steps, interventions and manipulations to build the much simpler miniature machines that he can build. They're much simpler than the ones that are found inside cells.
And so the problem has, as he puts it, it's receded off into the distance because our knowledge of the complexity of life has meant that it's much, much harder to envision how that might have arisen by a series of undirected chemical processes.
[00:16:02] Speaker C: Reading your work, Steve, if I understand it correctly, there's a big moment and the big, funnily enough, the big moment happens at about the same time as the Urey Miller experiments. And that big moment is Watson and crick in 1953.
And you get the double healed. They understand the structure of DNA and suddenly they can see how complicated DNA is.
And every living cell. First of all, I want to make sure I get this right. Every living cell contains DNA. Is this correct?
[00:16:31] Speaker D: DNA, rna, proteins.
[00:16:33] Speaker C: So a few quotations that you present in your book Signature in the Cell. Bill Gates DNA is like a computer program. Biotechnologist Leroy Hood DNA represents, quote, digital code. Richard Dawkins himself.
The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer like, close quote.
So doesn't this pose just a gigantic new problem?
Again, let Stephen Jay Gould and Doc whatever they want to argue about evolution.
We are concerned with this first box and it's still empty. And the first box is the first life.
And not only is it empty, but Tour comes along and says, oh, you have no idea. The simplest forms of life require such complex chemistry. It is. And then Meyer comes along and says, well wait a minute, fellows, what about Watson and Crick? Every cell contains DNA and you're not going to create a 3 billion item long strand of DNA hitting ammonia with lightning no matter how many times you do the experiment. Is that not correct? This empty box is now a couple of things, a source of awe, really?
[00:17:48] Speaker D: Exactly. If we go back to the Miller Urey experiment, there's two big classes of problems. One is that they synthesize the amino acids Using alleged prebiotic gases. They synthesize it based on gases in those flasks that don't simulate the actual atmosphere on the early Earth. But secondly, the amino acids that they produced were a mixture. And there was a mixture of all kinds of other things that had to be eliminated for those amino acids to hook up in a way that would be life friendly.
But they also didn't explain how they would hook up and how they would hook up in the precise sequence to actually form protein.
So it's like getting, it's the difference between letters and words that mean something. You have a bag of Scrabble letters and you dump them on the table.
That does not give you a triple word score in the game. Okay, but the Watson and Crick discovery is seminal. But it's the beginning of a whole series of discoveries in what historians of biology now call the molecular biological revolution. In 1953, Watson and Crick elucidate the double helical structure of the DNA molecule. But then five years later, Francis Crick, who was a code breaker in World War II, realizes that the subunits along the spine of the DNA molecule are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or like the digital characters in a section of software. In fact, George Gamow, one of the great physicists of the time, realized very quickly that the string of A, Cs, GS and Ts along the spine of the DNA could be represented as readily represented as a digital bit string. And so what you have and what Crick realizes, he calls this the sequence hypothesis, is that DNA contains information for the construction of the proteins and protein machines that are needed to keep cells alive. So it's very much like our modern CAD CAM technology that's used in, say, a Boeing plant where an engineer will sit at a console, write some code. The code is then translated into another machine code that can direct the function of a manufacturing apparatus. So maybe in Boeing the code from the engineer would put the rivets on the airplane wing in just the right place. Or younger people are aware of these 3D printers where we have digital information directing the construction of three dimensional mechanical or other structures. That's what's actually going on inside cells. It's not just that there's code, it's code that's directing the production of three dimensional proteins and protein machines that are absolutely essential for everything the cell does.
[00:20:31] Speaker C: So even the simplest cell contains DNA and DNA. Turns out, and even I presume I'm putting it correctly, correct me if I'm wrong, Even the simplest DNA turns out to be a fence. Fantastically complicated and sophisticated instruction manual. Is that correct?
[00:20:44] Speaker D: Right. For building very specific things that are needed to keep living cells alive.
[00:20:50] Speaker C: So if you believe, as Darwin believed, that the first life was a blob of Jell O, maybe you have pictures in your mind that suggest that you can get that out of primordial soup.
[00:21:01] Speaker D: They just weren't that worried about the problem in the 1870s because they had a false idea of how simple life was. They thought a couple of reactions they figured out, but now you've got to figure out, now they have DNA.
[00:21:11] Speaker C: How do you get that out of the primordial soup? Why hasn't the. Okay, so.
[00:21:15] Speaker A: No, no, go ahead.
[00:21:16] Speaker C: Why hasn't the whole scientific establishment said, stop presses. We're in trouble. We have a problem.
[00:21:23] Speaker A: That's what I've said. I said time out. I had a whole article called Time Out. I mean, you're sensing the frustration. Welcome to my world. I mean, this is the problem. This is. This is the problem. None of this works.
It's a bunch of science fiction. It's really nonsense, what these guys are putting forward. And they're building their careers around this thing. And money continues to this day.
40 million euros was just designated to, in 10 years, figure out where life came from. And there's about 40 researchers in Europe that are going to try to do this. It's really nonsense. We don't even know where to begin. We don't know how to take the simple building blocks, what they're going to end up doing. And I'll make a prediction right here. What they're going to end up doing is something that's analogous to what Craig Venter has already done. They're going to take a living cell and they're going to knock some parts out of it and then put the parts back in that they knocked out and said, hey, look, we made life. You didn't make life.
You started with a living cell. I mean, this is what's going on.
[00:22:22] Speaker D: You started with a car. You took the carburetor out of one car and put a carburetor from another car in and said, hey, look, we.
[00:22:28] Speaker A: We made us because they're not going to know where to begin. There's so many problems. It's not just five problems.
I talk about five problems because these are five you're going to have to solve, but that's five of 5,000 that are facing you. That just to begin, none of these do we know how to make the polymers none of these do we know how to assemble them. We're just lost on every phase. It is a big scam.
[00:22:52] Speaker C: One more question, Jim, I'm going to quote you again.
Look, I'm quoting your article.
Imagine that the world's best synthetic chemists, biochemists and evolutionary biologists have combined forces to form a team. A dream team.
Money is no object. They have at their disposal the most advanced analytical facilities, the complete scientific literature, synthetic and natural coupling agents, and all the reagents their hearts might desire. They have a lot of things I don't even understand. But they have it all.
[00:23:24] Speaker D: Have it all?
[00:23:26] Speaker C: Carbohydrates, lipids, amino acids and nucleic acids are stored in their laboratories in a state of 100% purity.
Would the dream team. I'm continuing to quote Dr. Tour. Would the dream team please assemble a living system?
Take your time, folks.
Take a few billion years.
Nothing.
Well, well, well.
Okay, Jim, this expresses your frustration, I get that. There's one piece of this that still puzzles me.
You say take a few billion years. Isn't that still the argument that if you give it enough time, somehow or other it's an immensely complex procedure. But if you give it enough time, enough shocks of lightning, maybe we can't do it in a labor, but the real lab had billions of years added. What about the element of time?
[00:24:19] Speaker A: Time is your enemy. Enemy? Time is your enemy. Yes, because those organic compounds in the.
[00:24:24] Speaker D: 50S, George Wald, a famous scientist who worked on the origin of life problem, said that time was the hero of the plot. Give it enough time that what's improbable will become inevitable. But Jim has.
[00:24:35] Speaker C: I'm perfect for you because I was using old textbooks in high school that were probably printed in.
[00:24:39] Speaker D: Well, we all still get this.
Yeah, same stuff.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: So the compounds decompose, all those beautiful chemicals that they have stored in their labs in 100% purity.
After a few years, they're not 100% purity. In fact, the RNA after a few weeks has undergone significant degradation. So the whole idea is that, oh well, somehow one RNA formed and then it took off. If you have one RNA molecule, if you figure the half life of rna, maybe a month in water, you have to change that to a probability that one molecule has a few hours to survive.
It doesn't survive. Just like your pharmaceuticals. It says, don't take this after one year.
Now you want to wait billions of years and see what it's going to become.
Everything goes bad with time. These are not even stored in very, very strict conditions. But even if they are. There's always a degradation rate. So time is your enemy. So if you happen to have all of those chemicals, they're all going to go bad.
Time is your enemy.
It's the enemy of being able to do these things. In fact, every organic chemist knows this. If they go home for the weekend without treating their compounds properly and bringing them on to a stable state, they come back after the weekend and it's fallen apart. I mean, you pay the price for this sort of thing, so you don't have the time.
[00:26:06] Speaker D: In these Miller Urey type experiments there's a problem called interfering cross reactions where you get yes, two or three, maybe four or five protein forming amino acids, but there's all kinds of other chemical compounds that are also synthesized in those same experiments and they will quickly react with the things you want and form. In the case of the Miller Urey experiment, the sludge was called melanoidin and it's moving in a life unfriendly direction. So what the chemist has to do is effectively intervene to remove the byproducts that are unwanted. To allow only the things that are wanted to continue on. In the simulation, the chemist has to.
[00:26:46] Speaker C: Play God, which is chi.
[00:26:47] Speaker D: Exactly. It's an intelligent intervention and therefore not a simulation of an undirected chemical evolutionary process.
[00:26:55] Speaker C: Let me sum up if I may wear it where I think I now understand things stand. And I'm going to quote Jim one more time.
This is a different article called Clueless on the origin of Life, quote quoting you.
Two thirds of a century since the Miller Urey experiment, origin of life research has not made any progress whatsoever. Not made any progress whatsoever. We've been to the moon, satellites in space, Internet, but on the origins of life, zippo. We can even say that suggestions on how life might have formed really show how life probably did not form. Nothing even resembling a synthetic cellular structure has arisen from its independent components, let alone a living cell. Not even close.
Are you both willing to stand with that as a good tight summary statement?
[00:27:45] Speaker D: I am, but I have quite a small difference with Jim on this perhaps and that I think that is progress. I think that we've defined how difficult the problem is.
[00:27:57] Speaker C: He's playing semantic games.
[00:27:58] Speaker D: It is a semantic game in a way, but it's an important point because as I was just saying that for the chemists to move the molecules in even a modestly life friendly direction, they invariably in their simulations have to remove things they don't want, use purified reagents, they are inputting information into their system and therefore the logic of these simulation experiments run like this. We're going to do an experiment under conditions that we think model what was on the prebiotic earth and then we're going to see what happens. Well, in order for the molecules to move in a life friendly direction, invariably there has to be an intelligent input into the system to manipulate the chemical conditions to move them in that direction. So what's actually being simulated? Aren't they actually then simulating the need for intelligence to move from simple chemistry to more complex life relevant chemistry?
[00:28:55] Speaker A: But even their intelligence is nonsense. Their intelligence shows that this doesn't work. They're so clueless on this thing. They say, okay, we'll do this and it solves this problem. No, you just introduced 10 more problems. This is a bunch of nonsense. The whole area is a scam.
[00:29:14] Speaker B: That was Dr. Stephen Meyer and Dr. James Tour unraveling the challenges to origin of life research and showing that Darwin's theory of biological evolution has no answer for it. Look for the second half of this conversation. In a separate episode, Meier and Tour will delve into the crucial concept of information, what it is and why it's supremely important to the origin of life question. Dr. Meyer offers up intelligent design as the best explanation for life's ultimate origin. You'll hear him make the case for that in part two, so look out for that. As a separate episode. Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson is a production of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and we're grateful to the producers for permission to share the conversation here. For ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
