Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
Greetings. My name is Robert J. Marks. I'm the guest host today on ID the Future.
Our guest today is Walter Bradley and I'm the director of the Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. And. And of course, Walter Bradley is the namesake of the Discovery Institute center. And it's delightful to have you here, Walter.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Thank you, Bob. It is good to be with you.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Thank you very much. We look back in the history in modern intelligent design and see what actually sparked people into believing that there was something happening in biology that pointed towards God. 1991, Philip Johnson wrote Darwin on Trail 85, Michael Denton wrote Evolution A Theory in Crisis. 1984, Walter Bradley, along with Charles Thaxton and Roger Olson, wrote the Mystery of Life's Origin. So this was a precursor to all of them. It was much different than evolution though, wasn't it?
[00:01:09] Speaker B: It was when I was asked by John Buell if I would be interested in writing a book dealing with the whole question of evolution as a Christian, I told him that I was not the right person to do that. The last biology course I had was when I was in 10th grade in high school.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: And so Buell, you told me, was one of the founders of Probe Ministries, is that right?
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Yeah. John Buell was one of the founders with Jimmy Williams that co founded Probe Ministries, which was an organization to try to bridge some of the areas of apparent dispute between faith and science and in other areas of Christian apologetics. I had known John Buell because he was the campus director of Campus Crusade for Christ at the University of Texas during the years I was in graduate school.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: And that's where you went and got your PhD?
[00:01:55] Speaker B: That is where I got my PhD.
[00:01:56] Speaker A: Okay. And you met him there then?
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: So he approached you and said, let's write a book on evolution. And you said, Walter, don't play that game.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: You didn't have the background.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Well, we don't need or more books by Christians written by people who don't have qualifications.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: I see.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: And sometimes we have hurt ourselves by having well intentioned people who really didn't know what they were talking about writing a book that that was intended to advocate for the sort of rational basis for Christian faith that they were not prepared to do. And so really they did more harm than good. Now what I told John with the counter proposal was my area that I work in is polymer science and engineering in the bigger field of material science and engineering. And obviously all of the stuff having to do with the origin of life is all about polymers.
Living systems are simply a aggregate of all kinds of polymers that have different functions in living systems. And I felt like I had a terrific background for that. I had a strong background in P Chem and statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics. These are all important subjects that are foundational for trying to understand how life began. And so I thought an Origin of Life book might be a possibility.
But I had never read any of the literature, Bob, so I had no idea of where it was at.
And I told him, give me some time and let me go and try to find out where is the state of the art.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: And there's been a lot written on the origin of life even back in 1984 and prior to that.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: Correct, correct. Starting in 1952 there was a paper that was published called the Miller Urey paper. It's quite famous. Urey was a PhD chemist, Nobel Prize winning chemistry. Yuri was his, or I'm sorry, Miller was his PhD student. And I think Yuri was interested in the origin of life kind of as a sideline, not his primary research area. So he had one of his PhD students take up that topic and they ran an experiment to try to show that if you began with the right atmosphere, the right gases, they would comprise the atmosphere. And if you provided energy, could be, for example, like lightning, then you might actually take the simple building blocks in the gases and actually begin to build the polymers of life.
And so that first experiment was done.
As I read through the literature, I really was quite amazed at the many, many different obvious chemical problems with trying to get from simple gases, molecules and gases to the complicated things that are necessary even for the simplest form of life we can imagine. And so I told John I felt like this was a much more fertile area. And in fact the people who worked in the field acknowledged that there wasn't any pretense that we can now explain how life began.
In fact, people were quite modest in saying the Miller Urey experiments provided at least a simple first step. But the people who worked in the field were not.
Is inclined to overstatement is I sometimes feel like some of the people in evolution are. They were quite honest in saying this is an interesting first step, but there's so much that we don't really understand a lot of it, which looks to be very challenging. And so I felt like this is, this is an area where if I carefully reviewed all the literature which I had not yet done that I was pretty sure that I would find a very, very interesting picture of how did life begin? What do we understand about it. What do we not understand about it? I felt like it was a much more fruitful area. If we were looking for places where God might have had to do something in an extraordinary way versus doing it in his ordinary way, what we call the laws of nature, then the origin of life was a really interesting possibility.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: But you didn't feel that you had the breadth of knowledge to actually tackle the problem. And is that where Thaxton and Olson came in?
[00:06:02] Speaker B: That is exactly where Thaxton and Olson came in. My background was very strong in some areas having to do with chemistry and basic fundamental laws like quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics and even P Chem thermodynamics. But I didn't have a background in biochemistry for example. And biochemistry is a very critical part of the story, how life began.
I also came to realize as we. As I was doing my own reading before I even agreed to get involved in writing a book, I thought I ought to find out is there really material there that's worthy of doing a book. It became very clear that one of the critical questions was what was the early Earth's atmosphere?
When Miller and Urie did their experiment, they presumed that it was with gases. The earlier atmosphere was filled with gases that are very energy rich things like hydrogen, like ammonia. When you think of ammonia, you are aware occasionally when we have explosions in ammonia factories, ammonia is like.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: You get a lot of ammonia.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: Well, you get a lot of energy release. Like when they had it in West Texas, in west. The city in Texas like got a bunch of people killed.
So the idea was that they had these energy rich chemicals and that makes it possible, if one talks in physical chemistry terms, it makes it possible to imagine that the simple building blocks could become longer and more complex molecules.
[00:07:29] Speaker A: One of the challenges with the Mille uri experiment though was they had some false assumptions about the composition of the atmosphere.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: Well, and in fact that's exactly what I was alluding to. They assumed that the earlier atmosphere was filled with energy rich gases.
When they were struck by lightning, they would chemically react to form larger, longer polymeric molecules, some of which might have the functionality of a simple living system. But in reality, when I got Roger Olson involved in this project, he graduated from maybe one of the very best geochemistry programs in the country, maybe in the world. At Colorado School of Mines. He was just finishing his PhD and we met and got to be good friends and ask him if he thinks that would be a subject area that would fit in with his background. And he said, oh my gosh, that's what I've been doing.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Oh really?
[00:08:23] Speaker B: With a lot of my, my training, either in classes or in research.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: And so he felt very comfortable to be able to read the literature and say, based on what we know today from what the literature claims, does this make sense in light of fundamental physical laws of nature?
Because we always want to say here's the evidence and here's the claim based, made based on the evidence. And as Roger took the time to do that, he was quite shocked to see that the claims that were being made were, I think, very extraordinary in light of the reality of what we know from geochemistry.
And so the claim, for example, that we had lots of energy rich gases in the atmosphere that would make the Miller Urey experiment.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: It's been explained to me the, in the following way. The Miller Urey experiment basically had the chemical reaction to make a brick. And whereas life itself is a big castle composed of a lot of brick.
[00:09:24] Speaker B: Well, that's fair. And I would say that Miller and Uri themselves did not make a bigger claim than that.
They basically said we've made the building blocks. And if you want to use the analogy of bricks in a house, then we've made the building blocks for a living system.
I think what other people did though was to, I think, exaggerate the significance of that. Well, it is. If you can't get the first step, then you're in big trouble. Yeah, but getting the first step is not the same thing as oh, we're almost there, or oh, it's obvious that the second, third and fourth steps can happen in some simple naturalistic way.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: We see that today, especially in hype headlines. People have delayed scrutiny. They say in 20 years, 30 years, all of this incredible stuff is happening. When they are just making those predictions based on just little incremental results initially.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: So how would they know that, as I have heard, that the atmosphere wasn't as Miller and Urey assumed?
[00:10:23] Speaker B: You can look at, you look, you look at the minerals, the rock formations and so forth, the kinds of rocks that are formed during different periods of time. Going back in history will tell you a lot about the atmosphere. Because where did the rocks come from? Well, in many cases they came from the condensation of gases from the atmosphere. And what you'll have, if you have one atmosphere would be a rock that has a certain chemical makeup, a certain kind of compounds. So you can infer then based on what was condensing out as the atmosphere cooled and condensed into liquids and then the solids, we can tell something about what was the atmosphere that would have allowed these kinds of rocks to be formed. And so you can go back and look at the geology. That's why the geochemistry is very important here. We're going to look at the geology, we're going to look at what were the chemical compositions of these rocks as a function of time. As we go back in geological history and we can say during this period we, we had a predominance of these kinds of rocks. And then at a later period in time we simply had a bunch of different, maybe kinds of rocks formed. And as we look at different geological strata at different time from time periods in the past, we can infer from that quite a bit about what the atmosphere had to be like. And so it ends up being a very, I think, straightforward way to do that.
NASA began to do this in a very detailed way.
I'm not sure when they started, but they began to publish in about 1980 and they published a whole series of papers which was actually timely for us since we were in the process of doing the book. And Roger Olson had a strong background and was familiar with this and he was able to review those papers. Actually I was, he was a better reviewer than I was. But even with my background I could read that and say, well, it's pretty obvious that the early Earth's atmosphere was never a highly reducing atmosphere as was used in the middle year experiments.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: I see.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: So they ran an interesting experiment, but it was not interesting in the sense of the origin of life, because the atmosphere that they presumed simply never existed. And so it calls into question the significance of those early experiments. I had the opportunity to co author with a couple of friends a paper for the American Biological Association, I think.
But we were able to write a paper that was critiquing the new textbooks. They do a 10 year, every 10 year review.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: I guess the important part. This was a mainline archival journal.
[00:12:57] Speaker B: Oh, it was a mainline archival journal, yeah. And maybe it's a journal about it for biology teachers, I can't remember. But it was one that was completely secular and basically pro evolution.
But in our article we were able to point out that the claims being made having to do with the origin of life are, are really overstated, given that what we know and what NASA has more recently found is that the Earth's atmosphere did not look anything like the Miller urey experiment.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: Absolutely. NASA's probably interested because they want to see about life on other planets and they want to look and see how life on other planets might be created.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: They Get a certain amount of their funding basically to look for life in other parts of the universe.
And as we go and explore, right now we've gone and explored the moon, for example, and we hope to go and explore Mars. So I think the idea is to try to have enough understanding of how life begins and how it develops that when we go to some of these interesting neighborhoods from where we live, that we'll be able to get some better idea of is there life on this planet? Is life from this moon? If so, when did it develop or how did it develop and what was it like? How might it be different from ours? Because they had a different atmosphere and so forth. So they have a stake in the origin of life study and they're the main government funder of origin of life.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: Research, Is that right? You know, I have a colleague, Dr. Keith Schubert, that was on a project funded by NASA and he would go to these extreme life caves that were full of sulfur and look at extreme life formations there to see where did these come from, how did these develop? Yeah, you know, in the movie Expelled, I think Expelled came out when 2009 or something, there was a person on there and he was a well known respected scientist that certainly believed that the origin of life had to be materialistic. That said that life, some people think, formed accidentally on the backs of crystals. He actually used those three words on the backs of crystals.
Do you have any opinion on that claim?
[00:15:09] Speaker B: Well, I think the claim is not completely. Well, it's not. I don't think it's plausible at all. But why would they talk about the back of crystals? One of the problems that you have in a assumption of a life that began in a liquid environment, which is probably true because chemical reactions occur more quickly in a liquid environment. But the problem is that crystals do nothing more than to help to concentrate chemicals.
So if I have a low concentration of some of the different compounds, some of the different molecules that I'm hoping will react, then my hope would be some of those might preferentially be absorbed onto the surface of some kind of a crystal where there was a chemical affinity with maybe some geometric compatibility as well, to try to get these things to chemically react. If I have a 1% concentration, it's not easy to imagine how those could react with other compounds that are 1% concentration. If some of these crystals want to attract, chemically attract these compounds, and then sitting on the surface, they could maybe chemically react with each other. I think that helps a little bit with the concentration problem. It does not help at all with the energy barrier problem.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: Energy barrier?
[00:16:23] Speaker B: Yeah. If the chemicals are going to chemically react, they need a driver. Energies in nature go naturally. What, downhill from higher energy to lower energy.
[00:16:33] Speaker A: It's basic thermodynamics.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: Basic thermodynamics. If I take oxygen and I get it to chemically react with water, it releases a huge amount of energy and the net result then is that the resulting compound, H2O water, is a lower.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Oxygen reacting with hydrogen.
[00:16:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm sorry, Yeah, I made mistake. That. Yeah. Two oxygen or an oxygen atom. Two hydrogen atoms. If those chemically react, why would they chemically react rather than staying separate? Because they release a large amount of energy and it represents a lower energy state. And just like water tends to run downhill, but it never runs uphill, chemical reactions, unless somebody's tinkering with it, will always go from energy rich to chemically reactive into some lower energy state, much the way water always wants to run downhill and water doesn't want to run uphill. The idea of putting things on the face of a crystal has been around for a long time and it's trying to solve one of many problems having to do with how do we even get these gases to chemically react to form the building blocks, which are the amino acids. And that was one of the suggestions. They've been talking about that for 40 years. And as best I can tell, we still don't have any very compelling evidence that crystals and concentrating chemicals on the surface of crystals was a major factor in the origin of.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: Well, these were some of the items that you talked about in the 1984 book, the Mystery of Life's Origin. Thank you, Walter, for talking to us. We got good news now. The Bradley Institute is re releasing the Mystery of Life's Origin in the year 2020.
And it contains the original text by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olson. But also, how have things stood the test of time? We're going to be talking about that in a subsequent podcast with Dr. Bradley, but we also have to bring us up to date some chapters by the incredible James Tor, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Guillermo Gonzalez has a chapter, as does Brian Miller. There's a great introduction to the the History of the Book and How It Stood the History of Time by David Klinghoffer and a preface by John west and me. And John west gets a lot of credit for putting this together. But this will be available from Amazon.com either in print or in the Kindle version.
So until we talk to Dr. Bradley again, this is your guest host Robert J. Mark saying be of good cheer.
This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. ID the future is copyright Discovery Institute.
For more information, visit IntelligentDesign.org and IDTheFuture.com.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: SAM.
