Dr. Tour on the Origin of Life at Syracuse University Cru

I have to separate portions of this talk the first portion I'm going to talk about my relationship with Jesus Christ and what that means if that's not of interest to you just bear with me that's only going to be about 20% of the talk the rest of it is going to have nothing to do with with my faith per se it is going to be a purely scientific demonstration so if that's what you want there's going to be plenty of it alright what I'd like to do because this has been organized by by Campus Crusade bike route by crew is I'd like to open in a word of Prayer if this is not something that you're familiar with just roll with it for for a minute and then we'll be past that and we're gonna get right into it okay let's pray of a father I thank you Father for the opportunity to come and to speak in this place on this campus were you visited me 40 years ago and spoke into my heart and into my life and father I pray for your outpouring in this time that you would take and awake if there be anybody here who's not a believer in Jesus that you would show them yourself kindly speak to their hearts I pray and father for those here who know you that are struggling father draw them closer to you because of this time lord I lift this time up to you and I asked for your grace and your mercy and your power for the glory of Jesus amen I'm going to start by just speaking a little bit about an overview of the different projects that we have in my group and we work on many different topics ranging from laser induced graphene which we can make on food we can make on coconuts graphene nano ribbons which I'm going to show you a little bit more about and how we're using those in medicine now we've made computer excuse me computer memories this is now becoming useful in in a number of applications this has become a public company now and it's a two-terminal memory system we work in this area also of nano medicine and so a company has just started around this as well this is uh we're working on a series of super capacitor systems this has gone into electric vehicles this is a system which is actually now over 200 percent weight percent co2 capture where we capture it on asphalt this is asphalt the same thing that roads are made out of we've learned how to make it into a very high surface air in material 4,200 meters square per gram surface area and we're trapping co2 from natural gas wells this is the leg of a cockroach we put it on a piece of copper and we convert that into graphene graphene is a single atomic thick sheet of graphite and we do that by heating this up to a thousand degrees we wanted to see if we could do it from negative value material think of what has negative value so we figured a cockroach has negative value we also did it with dog feces converting it into graphene which sells for for $200 per centimeter squared and one cockroach leg could probably well I haven't done the calculation but a box of Girl Scout cookies we did the calculation on if you take all the carbon in a box of Girl Scout cookies and convert it into graphene that four dollar box could be sold for 15 billion dollars so that shows you the value of material when you change it from from one molecule type to another this is graphene quantum dots graphene quantum dots we make it from coal coal is $60 a ton when we started this process graphene quantum dots were costing 1 million dollars per kilogram so we make this from coal which is $60 per ton in one step and now this has been licensed to a company we work a lot on electrodes for batteries and super capacitors this is graphene that is seamlessly stitched into carbon nanotubes and this has been translated into a number of battery systems which are going to be commercialized and about a year from now we work in this area of nano cars where we're able to build little motors into cars and these cars are very small and these motors spin it actually at 3 million rotations per second and so they spin rather quickly these cars are small enough that we can park about 50,000 of them across the diameter of a human hair so they're very small and and and with these these fast rotating motors that activate by shining light we're using the same motors to target certain cells certain cell types and drill holes in those cells and we're going after a way to quickly destroy cancer cells that way where we just drill right through the membrane of a cell we have graphene oxide we developed a procedure for graphene oxide which is now used worldwide and it's very good for capturing radioactive materials from water for water cleanup it gives you a general overview of some of the areas that we work in this is a rat this rat has had its spinal cord completely cut in half at c5 at the base of the neck and then we put one drop of graphene nano ribbons in and the there's immediate communication between the brain and the bottom of the body and so now the brain is remapping the bottom of the body in the first week and by this by two weeks after surgery this rat is walking around with a completely cut in half spinal cord and that's with one drop of a 1% solution of pegylated graphene nanoribbons and at week two he scored an 18 out of 21 and on a mobility scale 21 being a fully restored mobility and now here here he is after three weeks just just ready to run ready to go and at this this point he scored 19 out of 21 on a mobility scale with a completely cleaved spinal cord that been remanded with graphene nanoribbons and so this is a new company has started on this called neural cords and that's again to try to rebuild spinal cords after after accidents where you get cut or a contusion into injury so it gives you this small overview of some of the things that we work on in our group so how did I become interested in chemistry several people have asked me that well I wanted to be a New York state trooper and so that's something that I that I wanted to do since I was very young and I grew up wanting to become a New York State Trooper but but I was color blind so I couldn't get into the Academy I don't know if if colorblindness still keeps one out of the Academy but at the time it did and so I decided to study forensic science at the time Syracuse University didn't have a forensic science program now I hear that they do but my dad said well instead of studying forensic science why don't you you you study chemistry and and because that way you can study chemistry just get a general degree in chemistry and then you can specialize in forensics after that and to my amazement at the age of 17 I listened to my father's advice and I started taking chemistry and then I started learning about organic chemistry when I was a sophomore and I absolutely loved it I mean to me organic chemistry was was just the greatest thing and and I understand that not everybody has that view there's a diversity of views on organic chemistry but they're usually they're usually digital either you love it or you don't and and I was one of the few people that really loved it so much so that you know these books they're they're like 1,200 pages and you go through it in two semesters I would do of course all these sign problems but on Friday nights I would sit often in the in the math building over there or what used to be the math building and I'd and I'd just get empty classroom because usually there were a lot of available classrooms on Friday nights I don't know if that's still the case and I'd sit there and I'd work all the problems that had not been assigned that's how much I loved organic chemistry and I and really organic synthesis is what interested me and I saw molecular structure and everything this is going to be important for the things that I'm going to communicate with you I see molecular structure and everything so in other words I know why you can walk across a carpet and the fibers bend down and spring right back up you can take a carpet fiber pull it out it has the diameter of about a human hair but it'll stand up that far before it'll fall over why is that what what do they do with a carpet fiber that allows them to get that what's happening at the molecular level I know why that happens I know why you can run your car into a tree and the tree is just fine and the car is destroyed I know what the molecular structure is of the carbohydrate strands and how you have these these proton these hydrogen bond interactions that allow these molecules to deform and then spring right back this makes sense when you start understanding molecular structure so when you start seeing things at the molecular level it can add a lot of enhancement to things and this gets me into trouble sometimes because I'm looking at people and as I'm looking at them I'm thinking about the molecular interactions that are occurring in their eyes where where you have a molecule when a photon hits it it keeps it keeps going from from a trans to assist double bond and then you have an enzyme that Springs it back and that then confers to an electrical response in the brain so that there's this immediate electrical response so if I hit the table here you hear something well you remember that I hit this how do you remember well there was an electrical response in your brain that happened very quickly and now as we speak about it it's going into protein synthesis so proteins are being made in your brain as I remind you that I hit the counter here and it made this sound and then as you think about this more tonight it's going to go into hardwired interconnect patterns in your brain so as I'm speaking to people and looking in their eye I'm thinking a about this and and I listened less about that what they're saying and I'm thinking more about the chemistry of what's happening in the brain as I'm talking to them this is how much I love chemistry I just think of these molecular interactions that are going on in everything that I see ok so now I'm going to tell you the story of the good news of how I came to faith in Jesus Christ that happened just a couple hundred yards from here in the Lorenson dormitory so I was 1977 August 1977 I was doing laundry in the it was in the basement of Lawrence and dormitory was the larger room is it still there in the basement yeah ok well I was doing it it was my first load of laundry and and I was talking to a guy in the laundry room and he played on the football team and I asked him if he wanted a play pro ball when he graduated he says oh no I'm not good enough for that I said what do you want to do he said well maybe lay ministry and I said what's lay ministry said oh like a missionary I said missionary we don't need missionaries today it's 1977 why do we need missionaries we got TV he just put it in there with TV why do we need missionaries he and he said can I give you an illustration of the gospel I said sure and so he drew this on a piece of paper he had people on one side God on the other and he had sin this chasm of sin that was separating us from God and then he opened up the Bible and he had me read this verse this is the first verse that I remember reading from the Bible I grew up in a Jewish home just outside of New York City and and I don't ever remember reading reading the Bible and certainly not understanding it says Romans 3:23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and I looked at him and I said I'm not a sinner and he said you know he was a bit taken back by that and in modern secular judaism the background that i came from we didn't think about sin very much we didn't dwell on it you can go to the synagogue once a year and and and uh a uh yom kippur and and you're good to go i never really thought much about this and i said look how can i be a sinner i never killed anyone and i never robbed a bank so then he had me read another verse from the Bible and it says in Matthew 5:28 but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart now that really hit me not only was that 18 years old at the time but I was addicted to pornography I had become addicted to pornography at the age of 14 and I was working on the Hutchinson River Parkway and these gas stations going into and out of the city on each side of the road and and my first job at the age of 14 was to clean the parking lots and I noticed that the men would throw away their magazines on Friday nights on their way home from from their work week I picked up these magazines and I became quickly addicted and when I read that verse it was the first time in my life I was ever convicted of my sin everybody has something that convicts them of their sin when I saw that I was convicted of my sin this was a new experience for me and it really hit me then he had me read another verse from Ephesians 2:8 and 9 for by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves it is a gift of God not as a result of works so that no one may boast and I remember he drew this arrow he said people tried many good works to try to get them over to God but it's never sufficient the Bible says that our good works are not sufficient won't get us to God but God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us I didn't even know that there was such a claim on the table and he drew this cross that bridge this gap and he had me read this this verse it says that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved how can any thinking man or woman believe in a physical resurrection from the dead I mean we don't have a whole lot of data points on that I've never seen that happen how can you believe that unless God has placed it within the heart of every man and woman and I'm amazed because I've shared this with many people over these last 40 years since I first heard this and I'm amazed at the number of people that will say to me I can believe Jesus Christ is risen from the dead God has placed this amazing thing in the hearts of many people since then I've studied the very resurrection and I have whole teachings on the physical resurrection but that's not a topic for today but he talked about how that could get me to God and then it was on the night of November 7 1977 I was in that building and you all know that building that's Lorenson dormitory and i was in room 18 12 that's my room and this was in November remember he had shared with me in August now it's November I had attended a little Bible study on the Gospel of John in in the common room on that floor for a few months and I was all alone in that room and I don't know what prompted me to do this but I got down on my knees I never saw Jews get down on their knees Jews usually stand when we pray Christians I saw they would sit when they pray and I got down on my knees and I said Lord forgive me because I'm a sinner and come into my heart and then all of a sudden this burden that I had been carrying that I had been convicted of my sin that I was a sinner and I knew I couldn't get past this thing it just started to lift from me and then it was amazing how this feeling came over me and then all of a sudden this forgiveness and all of a sudden somebody was standing in my room my roommate wasn't there but someone was standing in my room and I thought how can this be how can someone be standing in my room and I look where is this person and right in front of me someone was standing I couldn't see them with my eyes but all of a sudden this amazing sense of forgiveness came over me a piece like I never wanted to get up and I just started weeping like a baby which was very unusual for me at the time and I didn't know what to do I didn't know what to say and I just enjoyed this presence when I finally got up I didn't tell anybody what's this Jewish kid from New York City gonna say and uh two weeks later the guy who had shared with me he lived on my floor and he said he said to me Jim have you received Jesus in your heart I said I think so why do you ask he said you haven't stopped smiling for weeks something's happen to you I didn't realize it at that time but I realized it sometime after that the whole addiction that I had to pornography was gone just God that visitation on the day of salvation broke that in me and if you've ever had an addiction you know how compelling that can be in your life he doesn't he doesn't saw that and everybody's life he did for me use it to convict me of my sin he used me to show me his power I had many other things that I had to strive with for many years and continue to strive with but that one he absolutely broken me and then I was really blessed to be discipled by several great men one was dr. te kohe she from-from international assembly he was the evangelical chaplain here and he was the man who taught me to read the Bible he used to say you read the Bible from excuse me from beginning to end from Genesis to Revelation so that's what I started doing so for almost 40 years I've had this pattern of reading the scriptures from Genesis to Revelation over and over again so I start in Genesis chapter 1 and I just pick up where I leave off left off the day before and then when I hit Revelation chapter 22 I start again and I've had this pattern and he learned it from brother boxing who taught me the same thing and then there was when I was in graduate school professor Delmar burrows ma who was a professor of Entomology who was also the pastor of the local church that I was in and professor buck hatch from who was at Columbia Bible College at the time when we lived in South Carolina I spent my first eleven years teaching at the University of South Carolina before I moved to Rice so I've had great men speaking of my life that's my Christian story that's my family God has blessed me with a beautiful family this is my daughter I'm brain she lives in Israel for the past twelve years she's a mediator between Palestinians and Israelis fluent in Hebrew and Arabic this is her husband Phillip and these are their two kids my two grandchildren this is my daughter Sabrina she's a lawyer in Houston my son Josiah he's in medical school in New York City and Ben is an investment banker he graduated from rice last May as an investment banker with JPMorgan in the energy sector in Houston and so you know I just look at this and you know every good Jewish family needs a doctor a lawyer and a banker so I figure figure we're pretty well set here and I know what you're thinking I know what every guy in here is thinking how did I get such a beautiful wife I I think about this too all the time I can't believe that she married me I think she she thought I was really rich or that I was gonna become really rich she didn't know that I was only gonna make nano dollars I mean I just but anyway she's a wonderful lady and God really blessed me I prayed a lot I would break every day at noontime I would go up to Hendricks chapel and I'd go all the way up to the top of the stairwell and I would pray one of my prayers was that the Lord would bring me a great spouse and he really did in fact I didn't realize even at the time that we got married what a treasure she was we've been married 36 years now now now we do the change now I'm just gonna speak on the origin of life and evolution this is a technical lecture with intent no God gods or intelligent designer will be mentioned science will be used to critique scientific research that's it I'm going to transition now and just show you what can be done with science and we're going to discuss origin of life and evolution I've written on origin of life before I've written on it's called enema versions of a synthetic chemist that is supposed to be me you agree to write for this journal and and they take a picture of you that they get off the internet and they give it to some deranged artist and that's what they reproduce and so if you read that if you were to just google my name James tour and inference these articles would pop up it's an online journal it's it's it's it's an open source journal so so it's free you can you can read it right there online and I talked about the how hard it is to make the chemicals that are needed for life you've got to be able to make these four classes of chemicals you have to be able to make carbohydrates lipids nucleic acids and proteins you need those four chemicals and how hard it is to make those in and even in the racemic form how hard it is but certainly in their home okaro form so that's a long article if you're a chemist you'd probably love it if your synthetic chemist if you're not a synthetic chemist you can read the beginning and the end but the middle if you're ever suffering from insomnia it would be a great article to pick up I've written another shorter article that's a much easier read which was an open letter to my colleagues this published a few years ago a few months ago just about six months ago where I talked about how hard it is if you had all the chemicals of life to construct a cell how would you construct a cell how would you be able to construct a cell how would you be able to do this how do these things to come together because you have to build a cell in order to to have life and the simplest cell requires 256 protein coding genes how would you construct such a thing and so I just build those arguments there so a lot of what I'm saying today you can get from those two articles but also I'm going to be coming out with another article in a few months which summarizes a lot of the things that I will say today as well so what is the origin of life so this is a cell a cell is an absolute Factory a cell so much is taking place it is not just a blob of protoplasm so for example you go into a factory today and you look in a factory and you want to say how do they pick up some material and they move it from this part of the factory to that part of the factory has that done and you'll see many overhead conveyor belts with baskets of machine parts riding in them from one side to the other cell does the same thing it wants to transfer something from point A to point B it builds a tube you'll bills it and then materials get transferred along that tube you'll and then you know what it does it deconstructs the tube you'll and then reconstructed another part of the cell that needs to transfer materials you say why does it do that because if it left that tubular in place the cell would become too rigid and couldn't live so a deconstruction reconstructs it's an amazing machine you have these mitochondria which of these powerhouses that of the cell that just drive this cell along it has this lipid bilayer we're just gonna look at the simplest of the structures the lipid bilayer this outer coating that many people say well a cell is just a lipid bilayer with some things inside okay you want to say you can make the lipid bilayer we'll just look at the lipid bilayer that what is the origin of life so I think origin of life research is and when I say that just means slowed you think of it what you want but by I just mean slowed origin of life research is a field of science little as advanced in the field since the highly touted 1952 Miller year experiment after 2/3 of a century the world is no closer to generating life from small molecules or any molecules for that matter than it was in 1952 one could argue that origin of life research is even more befuddle now than it was in 1952 since more questions have evolved in answers since we understand much more about the cell it's made us realize that we're further from having a cell consider what's happened in the last sixty six years two-thirds of a century since the miller-urey experiment in other fields we have human space travel satellite interconnectivity DNA's DNA's code and the ability to precisely manipulate the DNA sequence we can even now pull out single bases and replace them as well as strings of bases all of silicon technology integrated circuits the internet that names just a few in the last two thirds of a century what's happened in origin of life research nothing no advances have occurred in origin of life research that have taken us any closer to understanding how life was made if anybody tells you that scientists understand how life was made they are lying or they are ignorant they just don't know and I'll show you that today by the way how many people in here are synthetic organic chemists organic chemists how many organic chemists in here okay so we have one professor here we have a graduate student and there was a there must be another graduate student another one he told me he was gonna come where's that other graduate student did he not show up tell me he was gonna well anyway we got two organic chemists here if I say anything that's not true just raise your hand or shout it out that I'm lying you guys gotta hold me accountable here to make sure that I don't tell something to these people that is not true regarding chemistry okay so chemistry itself is utterly indifferent to whether anything is alive or not organisms care about having nucleic acids carbohydrates proteins and lipids the four classes of chemicals needed for life along with redox potentials across membranes and metabolic pathways standing in exquis yet ill-defined non-equilibrium states that we call life while organisms exploit chemistry for their own ends it is erroneous to expect chemicals to assemble themselves into an organism origin of life research keeps attempting to make chemicals needed for life and then to have those assemble towards something for which they are inherently indifferent we explore here two main classes of origin of life science first the prebiotic like chemicals the synthesis of the molecules that constitute the four the four frameworks of life carbohydrates amino acids lipids and nucleic acids then the second thing we'll look at is is how we deal with assembly how does origin of life research deal with assembly of those into vesicles that they call protocells every chemical synthesis experiment chemical synthesis experiment in origin of life research can be summed up by this protocol something analogous to this you purchase some chemicals generally in high purity from a chemical company you mix those chemicals together in water in high concentrations in order in a specific order under some set of carefully devised conditions in a modern laboratory you obtain a mixture of compounds that have a resemblance to one or more of the basic four classes of chemicals needed for life carbohydrates nucleic acids amino acids or lipids then you published a paper making bold assertions about origin of life from those functionalist crude mixtures of stereo scrambled intermediates much like Miller did in 1952 then you engage with the ever gullible press to dial up the knob of unjustified extrapolation then you watch the mem mesmerised layperson exclaimed you see scientists understand how life formed then you encourage a generation of science textbook writers to make colourful deceptive cartoons of raw chemicals assembling into cells which then emerge as slithering creatures from a prehistoric pond everything can be summed up in that some permutation of that but scientists do not understand anything more about life's origin than they did before they perform their experiments because there is no solution to the fundamental questions needed for the path to life so how and the papers be published well because origin of life researchers serve as the unbiased reviewers of each other's papers and and excuse me and the the the editors have become numb to all of this they've seen this over and over again but they they become numb to it so you go two-thirds of a century with little change in origin of life and yet other fields make quantum steps leaps ahead for humankind here's a brief listing of some of the hurdles which need to be considered when dealing with chemical synthesis experiments common to all origin of life protocols that are being published organic chemists understand this professor you will understand this you will understand what I'm talking about molecules that compose living system almost lism systems almost always show homo chirality that means you have one hand one mirror image over the other nobody has ever offered a demonstrative solution and if this can be done sufficiently well than a mindless prebiotic cesspool why cannot the experts in origin of life research replicated in 66 years of trying while using their sophisticated modes of synthetic ingenuity when building molecular systems constant redesigns are needed which take the synthesis back to step in step one it's often impossible to remove a moiety once it's been added to a molecule so in other words say you're going along and you want to build a cell now remember this is nature which is mindless has no brain it's going along and uh-oh it added a methyl group here when it never should have oh well I'll just take that methyl group off you can't sometimes it's very hard to take that methyl group off you had the thing on you can't get it off synthetic chemists today don't know how to get off as mindless nature you say well an enzyme did it no remember this is pre enzyme this is prebiotic there are no enzymes we have to make all of this Abba Nishio from scratch that's what prebiotic means the synthetic reactions do not know how to stop their current course of progression or why to stop the prebiotic system will continue to make derivatives you say ah I've got the nick clegg acid I'll stop there I'll take it I'll put it in the freezer and wait for the next thing that I have to do with it no Nature doesn't have that advantage if it made something it doesn't does you're gonna continue to react time although claimed to be the great savior of abiogenesis can actually be the enemy for example carbohydrates are kinetic products there's carmelization meaning they polymerize or the kena sera reaction takes place where you get you get formaldehyde will oxidize to carbonic acid well while the aldehyde of the sugar you've just made gets reduced to the alcohol so in other words time is the enemy of organic chemists what do our gana chemists do they make something they right away want to work it up and they put it in the freezer and wait for it to be the next step why because it goes bad and remember these things are going to have to wait around for thousands or millions of years in order for the next step to take place and they're not in a freezer isolated from from from from all the elements when you're making a kinetic product time is not an advantage it's an enemy a prebiotic system does not have the ability to easily purify the structures sometimes selective crystallization can occur would designed input of a synthetic chemist but most often not even then it's hard to purify things when you don't purify things what happens is the impure compounds take up the precious starting materials and you get a mess after a few steps of propagating batches of impure material that's why chemists work very hard to purify in fact it usually takes longer to purify a reaction that it does to run the reaction reagent order is critical what if I said let's bake a cake today and so will we'll take the icing and we'll mix it in with the eggs no no no the icing has to go last well what's the difference it all gets in there at the same time now we understand that doesn't work Organic Chemistry is very specific if you don't add things in the right order it just doesn't work the parameters of temperature pressure solvent light or no light pH atmospheric gases are no gases all of that has to be addressed there has to be careful structure to all of this synthetic chemistry no explanation is offered an origin of life research that each step is essential for the chemist we will spend sometimes vast amounts of time trying to characterize them our material cause if you have the wrong structure as an intermediate then you're carrying on a wrong structure it's gonna mess up everything down the line well how does nature characterize anything it doesn't in natural biological systems everything is characterized everything is made and an enzyme comes down and checks if it's the right thing if it's not it has ways to degrade that but in a prebiotic system before there's an enzymatic world there's no way to get rid of these things there's no way to characterize what materials are you can spend months characterizing a complex molecule the mass transfer problem is it's just the mass transfer problem will be the killer of all roots how does one bring sufficient material through a complex multi-step synthesis there's no accountability of mass transfer from going from one paper to the next a prebiotic world would never have such a luxury nature never keeps a laboratory notebook you say well you know I'm going along I'm almost at the carbohydrate structure that I want but I've run out of starting material well what are you doing a lab you go back and you make some more and you bring up more stop call bringing up more material from the rear well what happens in nature wants to bring up more material it's like it just cost me 400 million years to get to this point and I'd like to go back and make some more but I forgot to keep a laboratory notebook I don't know how I did that it has no idea how to go back and make more you try to go through a 30 step synthesis of making something without going back to the beginning and starting again what kind of tonnage of material you need to go through multi steps in a mindless prebiotic environment all of those are problems professor aren't those problems it's hard to do isn't it all right origin of life synthesis is still miller-urey like where you just make a bunch of compounds and you claim you've done something except that the research day's put far more position into the protocols to make more elaborate arrays of stereo scrambled intermediates one could easily argue therefore that the researchers are moving further from the heart of abiogenesis since they're filling protocols with the best of the intellectual training to coax molecules into the form that the researcher desires and even with all that intellectual input origin of life researchers overcome few if any of the barriers noted on the last page at least Miller Urey took some simple compounds passed them across a large voltage gap and saw some scrambled amino acids at least that was simple stuff going on in there now the really elaborate experiments and still they get very little this explains the state of origin of life research when the obvious problems are unaddressed the researchers will continue down the wrong road while other fields progress toward the benefit of humanity in addition to the chemical synthesis that does not transfer hurdles there's a second part it's how do you assemble these how do you assemble structures so even if I gave you all the chemicals say you had them all all of these four classes of compounds how do you assemble that there's very few people in the world that actually do organic synthesis and they'll then take those compounds that they've assembled and build it into a higher work higher order working structure it's generally people with an organic synthesis background that work in an area of nanotechnology and the number of people is nano size it's very few but we realize how hard it is to build a working system how do you put these molecules together to do something functional they will call this a protocell a protocell by definition Wikipedia definition is a protocell is a selfless organized endogenously ordered spherical collection of lipids proposed as a stepping stone to the origin of life so some people say if you can get the lipid then you're part of the way there will remember a lot of these things just sort an automatically self-assemble but is that that that liposomal that's been made is that really like a cellular lipid bilayer we'll take a look most so-called protocell assembly experiments an origin of life research can be summed up by a protocol like this you purchase Homa chiral dye ACO lipids from a chemical company or you synthesize stairs scrambled lipids from smaller molecules add those lipids to water and observe simple and expected thermo dynamically driven assembly of those lipids into a synthetic bilayer vesicle upon agitation then often it has to actually go through shear in order to make the vesicles sometimes the researchers will have other molecules like nucleotides that get engulfed by the vesicle as it forms you publish a paper claiming that synthetic vesicle is a protocell and suggestive of early forms of cellular life engage with the media watch the layperson be misled I'm gonna read to you from a 2017 article from Harvard University where they from the origin of life Institute there and and and and and here here's what it says here's a recent example where they're where they're trying to construct a cell or just have something to do with the construction of a cell in 2017 researchers from origin of life initiative at Harvard University performed a known type of polymerization reaction in water called reversible addition fragmentation chain transfer raft which is not seen in nature it's a purely synthetic reaction the monomers were all synthetic and unnatural this is standard chemistry used to make polymers where there and there's a controlled radical polymerization reaction that can afford a polymer chain barring a hydrophobic block attached to a hydrophilic block when two different monomer types are used the researchers was observed these to form polymeric vesicles during the polymerization which is expected nothing new here while they kept the radical chain growing through ultraviolet light activation which is a typical activation source the vesicle grew consuming monomer within the vesicle to the point where the vesicle will burst again nothing surprising here a critical vesicle Silas sizes reached then the forces between the growing vesicle and the surrounding water dictate a critical growth volume before competing forces forces caused vesicle rupture the vesicle moves toward the ultraviolet light likely because of heat gradients induced by the light source of reaction thermodynamics chemists like myself finding it's interesting none of you find this interesting I find this interesting that's interesting it should have stopped there here's what they wrote in the article quote the observed net oscillatory vesicle population grows in a manner that reminds one of some elementary modes are sustainable while there is food population growth seen among living systems the data support an interpretation in terms of microscale self-assemble molecular systems capable of embodying and mimicking some aspects of simple extant life including self-assembly from a homogeneous but active chemical medium membrane formation metabolism a primitive form of self replication and hints of elementary system selection due to a spontaneous light trigger triggered by maragon e instability which is surface tension gradients that is a wild statement based on what they did how was this permitted where were the reviewers where was the editor just because a reminds one of B does not make a a simple form of B if those little vesicles remind me of flying saucers it doesn't make them simple or extant flying saucers the harvard gazette then writes an article on this quote a harvard researcher seeking a model for the earliest cells has created a system that self-assembles from a chemical soup into cell-like structures that grow move in response to light replicate and exhibit signs of rudimentary evolutionary selection huh how is it clean but nothing of the sort was accomplished in this experiment the public is deceived has the origin of life initiative at Harvard fulfilled its mission for the years requisite publication number here's a listing of a few challenge that's that need to be addressed when dealing with just the lipid bilayer assembly experiments common the most origin of life protocols that are being published researchers have identified thousands of lipid structures in modern celebrant membranes it's not homogeneous when making cell vesicles synthetic lipid bilayer membranes mixtures of mono ACO lipids can destabilize the system so how are these avoided in nature nobody knows lipid bilayers surrounds sub cellular organelles such as nuclei in mitochondria which are themselves micro system assemblies each of these has their own lipid composition different from the host vesicle lipid bilayers have a non-symmetric distribution between the inner and the outer surface we don't know how to do that in a laboratory we have no idea how to do that none of their protocells show that without that being done the cell it's not her cell protein lipid complexes are required passive transport sites and active pumps for the passage of ions and molecules through the bilayer membrane often with high specificity all lipid bilayers have vast numbers of poly carbohydrate appendages known as glycans these are essential for cell regulation for example just six repeat units of the carbohydrate deep here nose can form more than one trillion different hexamers through branching which is constitutional and glycosidic which is steric chemical diversity and these branching patterns store more information about the state of the cell than both DNA and RNA combined you can have more combinations just from the glycan of information stored in those structures than you can in all of DNA and RNA every cell membrane is coded by the complex array of polysaccharides and all cell to cell interactions take place through carbohydrate participation on the lipid bilayer membrane surface eliminating any class of carbohydrates from an organism results in its death so how do organ it or origin of life researchers address the prebiotic synthesis of complex lipid bilayers they don't yet they claim a protocell an origin of life research remains interact ohms there is there is a interaction that occurs between molecules within a cell this is not my estimation this is this work that comes out of a university of brussels and johns hopkins university good schools they estimate that just the protein protein interactions just how the whey proteins proteins interact the number of possible combinations between just the proteins in a single yeast cell has 10 to the 79 billion component combinations 10 to 79 billion combinations so that's a number one followed by 79 billion zeros that's a big number the number of Elemental particles in the universe in the entire universe is 10 to the 90 this is 10 to the 79 bill that's the number of possible combinations so what are the authors write the numbers preclude formation of a functional interactome by trial and error complex formation with that within any meaningful span of time thus a complicated cellular sorting trafficking and assembly system made up of membranous organelles receptors membrane translocation devices cytoskeleton tracks motor proteins and accessory chaperone guides the proper compartmentalization localization and assembly of proteins in the cell so what they're doing is they're saying there's all of this framework that helps them to assemble you can't just throw stuff in to a even if you had the membrane even if you had the lipid bilayer you're just going to throw all the chemicals in and say hey there's a cell now you need a whole framework to allow it to arrange he says in in the absence of energy even this well-developed infrastructure would be insufficient to account for the generation of the interactome which requires a continuous expenditure of energy to maintain steady state the ability to synthesize an actual artificial cell using design components that can self-assemble spontaneously still remains a distant challenge that's what they write people will say you've heard of the artificial cell let me tell you what that group did they which they never even called an artificial cell it was other people they took a functioning cell they took the genome out of that cell and they synthesized their own genome which was similar to the genome that goes in that and they put it into that cell so if I take the car out the engine out of a Ford and I put it into a Chevrolet can I go saying I made I discovered how to make a car no you just took the engine out of one car and put it in another that's exactly what they did and in fact it wasn't even the engine it was just the control box their little computer control box that's what they they put in that's what it that's what the artificial experiment was it was not making all the structure of a cell now we come to the greatest problem the origin of information critical for life is the origin of information DNA or RNA the information is primary and the matter is secondary to this point we've only discussed matter the material in which the cell is built but where did the information come from you can't have it from an from a a random array of nucleic acids you have to have an information code we can't even get to the matter let alone the information nobody has any idea where the information code came from nobody you can say it came from outer space that's fine but we're talking about origin of first life that just begs the question how did it get into outer space space where did that first come from the origin of information predates even all of what you're going to be able to do with the matter itself information is more primary than the matter on which it's written just like I can store something on a piece of paper by writing it down I translate that into my computer now it's stored in a separate place then I send it wirelessly through the Wi-Fi system and it's going through the air and in a in an RF wave and now it's stored in another place and then it goes through there through a wire in another way of information and then it goes to a server farm into flash memory in the deep trench capacitor in a server farm it's had many different ways that the information has been stored mediums upon which it has been stored but where did the information come from that's primary origin of life never addresses this this is foundational origin of life so say you assemble the dream team and I gave you I gave you all the chemicals you need for for a living cell all in Homer Cairo form and the informational code saving gave you DNA and RNA and all the arrangements you want could you build a cell the answer is no I've no waiter I don't know how to pack that stuff in there they interact I didn't know I would they can't make a cell the mystery of the origin of first life does not permit the opening of the door and by all biological evolution it's difficult to discuss biology without life I gave a talk on this at the University of Waterloo two years ago if you just google James to her origin of life it'll it'll come up and then you can see where I just took people through the gory detail of just making the molecules not even the information all right father time in turkeys when all else fails for explanation origin of life researchers call upon father time hundreds of millions of years to some solve their mysteries it is fallacious akin to buying 20 pounds of sliced turkey meat adding a gallon of turkey broth warming sticking a few feathers and suggesting that a live turkey will eventually come gobbling out if given enough time or that a proto two key or extant turkey had been synthesized and the research plods to that end and researchers delude themselves even professors in universities I've seen biology professors and universities not even understand the difference between evolution and origin of life origin of life predates anything of evolution and you have to have that before you can even discuss evolution the problem is fool's gold there were alchemists that we're trying to take inexpensive metals and make gold and what they learned is if you add sulfur to certain inexpensive metals the metals become yellow you add more sulfur as you can get it sometimes looking goldish you take iron and you add sulfur to it you get pyrite looks like gold but they knew they didn't have gold because it didn't have the same melting point didn't have the same conductivity didn't have the same ductility but would not the alchemists community have thought to themselves well at least were on the right track you're not going to ever get there by adding sulfur to other methyl metals you're never gonna make gold the only way you get one element to turn into gold that's not gold is you got to change the proton count and then you need some sort of nuclear process which is a lot more expensive than the gold itself so just because you think that hey come on leave us alone we must be on the right track no you may be totally off the track it's not going to get you there so origin of life community is traveling down a broad road that leads not to the city of life along this Highway one generation of researchers after another is destined to validate their own end of life long before they'll explain the origin of life we cannot command nature except by obeying her since Francis Bacon nature gives us clues and when we ignore those clues we suppress the truth truth suppression leads to darkening and the outcome is precisely what we have seen origin of life research retards even professors are misled so I'm calling for a moratorium on origin of life research until we can address fundamentals like what's the origin of life's code what's the route to complex interact owns how do we get these to form what's the mass throughput in synthesis how do you go from beginning to end by bringing up enough materials or else they have to give us some conjecture as to why these are not necessary for origin of life so somehow we've got to step back and I'm not calling for a cessation but a moratorium just stop for a minute and let's do a reassessment what about evolution and the frustration of evolutionists toward me well in 2001 I signed a statement so now we're moving from origin of life to evolution alright now we're on evolution we've got life biology I signed a statement in 2001 said we're skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged that's it who sent to me in an email in around 2001 I said the I can agree to that I had no idea that in 2005 that would become the touchstone of a court case and I hate court cases this statement has become known as a scientific descent from Darwinism statement so it has its own name now but all we're saying is that random mutation and natural selection it doesn't to us appear to be able to account for the complexity of life we never said you shouldn't work on it we just said careful examination should be encouraged what area would you say you don't know don't work on that anymore well they've got a lot of people upset so in 2016 I set out on a personal mission to engage with biologists philosophers of science mathematicians and geneticists in order to better understand evolution here are some of the things that I learned they tell me that Darwinian theory has already been debunked by biologists that many biologists suggest that random mutation and natural selection have long been recognized by many evolutionists themselves to be insufficient to account for the complexity of life you'll drift which is just the changes that occur between me and my children the natural changes in DNA between me and my children neutral drift is quantitatively more important than natural selection in understanding genetic differences between organisms furthermore the mechanisms of evolution and their relative importance are continuously subject to careful scientific examination and revision so careful examination of the evidence has not been avoided ok if that's the case so why don't you all sign the dissent statement with me you agree with me then why are you so upset that I signed it here's what they say I'm quoting them evolution is both about the mechanisms by which change occurs over time and the theory of universal common descent the mechanism by which change occurs and the theory of universal common descent that's what evolution is about today it's no longer that Darwinian evolution that I spoke about this is what they talk about today any biologists in here ok good I saw you so I can understand why those fluent in the field of genetics would be convinced by the theory if universal by the theory this should be of universal common descent there's an impressive oppressive impressive quantity and insightfulness to that work if you look at this theory of universal common descent it is an amazing theory there is a lot going for it it is a very well developed theory with a lot of evidence supporting its case but let me interject something on this cominis common descent versus uncommon asst humans have about 20,000 protein coding genes so on our DNA we have about 20,000 segments that will build there will be the code for the building of the the enzymes that build our body which is but that's only one point five percent of DNA in the entire genome and it's in within that 1.5 percent that common descent studies are primarily though not exclusively focused so in other words all of universal common descent is built around 1.5 percent of the DNA so when they say we are 99.9 percent the same a chimpanzee that is correct our genome is when you look at 1.5 percent of our DNA that's what that means so a large scale projected project institute in 2003 by the US National Human Genome Research Institute which by the way is not a religious organization at all called the Encyclopedia of DNA elements encode seeks to determine the role of the remaining 98.5 percent of the genome that was formerly called junk DNA but better called intergenic regions there is encode evidence that part or even much of the intergenic regions have regulatory elements that can affect gene transcription that's the building of RNA that constructs the enzymes that regulate or build a biological system so the uncommon as' is noted in the intergenic regions not the common 1.5% protein coding regions when you look at the 1.5% region the theory of universal common descent is an extraordinary theory we're looking now at the other 98.5% also work on orphan genes also called ORF anne's cast new light on the uniqueness of some genetic information orphan genes are considered unique to a narrow taxon generally a species therefore orphan genes are markers for uncommon as' when I first started researching this in 2016 just two years ago some of the geneticists yeah yeah and called orphan genes we're only talking about a few hundred regulatory elements now in two years it's swelled to several thousand regulatory elements in this intergenic region and it's growing all the time so it's becoming harder and harder to dismiss this now humans alone have capacity for art music advanced communication advanced mathematics and religious practice which constitute the broader organization of symbolism therefore if one is intent upon a common descent model then there was a massive and presently unexplainable infusion which was either intrinsic or extrinsic along the proposed very descent pathway between Australia pith essenes and modern humans so there was that was the the one the the group just above us in this common descent scenario something happened between them and us where all of this symbolism came into our lives if it were an intrinsic infusion then the requisite anatomical or chemical differences between modern human brain and other hominid brains are presently indiscernible and unfathomable and the chemical basis of evolutionary mechanisms for such changes is both unknown and presently immeasurable if the infusion were extrinsic then the materialist evolutionist and the supernaturalists share a common ground the mechanism problem a body plan this is just taken right off of Wikipedia a bot quote a body plan a ground plan is an assemblage of morphological features shared among many members of a phylum level group this term usually applied to animals and vigeous --is a blueprint incoming aspects such as symmetry segmentation and limb disk deposition body plans have historically been considered to have evolved in a flash in the Cambrian explosion but are more nuanced understanding of animal evolution suggests the gradual development of body plans throughout the early Paleozoic so nobody can fathom the mechanisms for body plan changes nobody knows how body plans have changed there's no mechanism remember evolution is about the mechanism of change nobody knows how these mechanisms have changed I don't like to use the term macro evolution because macro evolution can be different in what different people call it if you want to say you change one species into another there are examples of that occurring some plants sometimes will will spontaneously for some unknown reason double their DNA so you have a new species so if you want to say macro evolution has never shown doubling it's never shown a new species that's not a kintyre Li correct but what's never been shown is how a body plan changes which is the differences between us and dogs and tigers and and-and-and-and-and monkeys I mean the mechanism for the change is unknown a massive functional change of a body part would require multiple concerted lines of variation sure one can suggest multiple small changes add them to an item but the concerted requirement of multiple changes all in the same place and at the same time is impossible to chemically fathom one day the requisite chemical basis might become apparent so that the questions can be answered but present-day biology is far provide from providing even chemical proposals for this functional change let alone a data substantiated chemical mechanism what biologists will often give to me this they'll give me here is the immune system look at how the immune system of all's and I will concede you want to call this evolving it is evolving look at how the immune system does this it is all of a sudden it's it's confronted with something new and it will morph and change but my argument is it is always remained an immune system it didn't become a digestive system it didn't become an auditory system this system remains the same yes you have changes within the system but you never see jumping across nor can you propose how it even might do that not even asking you I said I'm not even asking you to show me how it's done how you would change an immune system into some other system just show me how what is the proposal for that nothing remember it's about the mechanism of change that's their own words collective cluelessness therefore I don't understand the mechanisms needed to change body plans or the mechanisms along the descent pathway between Australia pith Essene brain and modern human brain if we are indeed commonly descendant as predicted by the theory of universal common descent and nobody else understands the mechanisms either nobody but unlike most I'm saying it publicly collective cluelessness recall quoting the biologists evolution is both about the mechanisms by which change occurs over time and the theory of universal common descent the mechanisms are unknown and the theory of universal common descent though robust is being confronted by evidence that can be interpreted as uncommon as' through encode and orphan genes and it's massively chain every month there are hundreds being added to this list so what is what do I say further study is warranted that's it I can't disprove theory of evolution I can't disprove Universal common descent I don't want to disprove it all I can say is it is a theory that deserves further study but to go and to project it as if we are clear on this and it is fact is wrong it is a lie to do that it is a lie it is a lie to project to people that we understand the formation of life it is a lie because we don't we are absolutely clueless on the origin of life and on universal common descent it is a fantastic theory worthy of further research but it is not a fact and it should not be projected as such because what happens is when we as scientists lie to the general public they disbelieve us not just on that lie but on many other things that we tell them and that's why there is such in my view chasm between the general public one hundred million people in this country that aren't buying into evolutionary theory and a hundred other million people saying why are those first 100 million so stupid not to believe this we have so much fact around because you lie to them because you project it as something that it's not if you projected this this is our theory this is the best we've got going right now there are some real holes that we don't understand then that's ok but when you project it to them as fact and if they don't buy it they are stupid for not buying it then you're gonna have this chasm remain and they're gonna distrust you not just on this but on many things across the areas of science the end thank you [Applause] thank you so much dr. tor I appreciate that thank you for how thorough it was and you have an amazing ability to cover a lot of ground really rapidly thank you very much and I'm sure there's people here tonight and I hope there are that have a few questions for him so we reserve some time for Question and Answer does that sound good okay all right all right can I ask the first question professor did I did I deceive people on the difficulties of chemistry okay his answer was no and do you have any further comment on that it's a tough business synthetic chemistry is a tough business and when you're in a mindless prebiotic environment it's even tougher we have our modern laboratories and it's much harder to do this under a rock okay questions so the question was was on time frames I had said that the time just long times is not a solution because what happens when you're when you're making organic compounds so say say you've made the compound you you really need for life now it doesn't stay around it goes bad these are kinetic products meaning that they are not the thermodynamically most stable product along the chain here and that's particularly true with the carbohydrates carbohydrates a five membered ring carbohydrate is needed to string together all of RNA and DNA it makes a five membered ring and and and and and then you need other six membered ring carbohydrates for other systems and so these don't stay there so this is a problem even in a modern laboratory you will find people who work in origin of life research they will put this in their certain set of reaction conditions and then they will work up the reaction very quickly because they know if they leave this and they go home for the weekend the yield goes way down and so I have cited this in the article that I wrote on the enema versions of a synthetic chemist is that is that I showed from the data itself from their own data when they let the the reaction go for four months or six months how the yield depressed by 12% well remember four or six months is the twinkling of an eye in prebiotic timespans and so that means that after a few years there's nothing left so what happens is to just say time solace it doesn't solve it and that's why I gave that turkey example I think that you would agree that if you add turkey meat and turkey broth and some feathers and you let it sit for five minutes a turkey isn't gonna jump out right and then if you let it sit for five years probably a Turkey's not going to jump out even and and and how can we say that because we look at the progression of what is happening over the timescale in which we can measure so over five minutes we didn't see anything useful occurring over five years we actually saw deleterious reactions occurring we saw those proteins breaking down even further so then we extrapolate that out over a longer time period and we say the result is even worse this is the same sort of thing that we can do in chemistry that's where I say time is not the solution to all of this time can often be the enemy particularly when you're making a compound that is a kinetic product and not a thermodynamic product right so what are the positives and the negatives I think I discussed the negatives in that the universal common descent is primarily thinking about the 1.5% of the DNA and not the 98.5 percent of the intergenic DNA that's a real problem because Universal common descent has primarily been concentrated there what does universal common descent have going for it many pieces of information that show that when you find out a regulatory segment in a human being you can find the same regulatory segment in the chimpanzee but it's not just that it's not just finding that same regulatory segment it's finding that that same regular taury segment straddled by the same regulatory segments on the chimpanzee that were that human beings are straddled by you see what I mean so the levels of overlap are really quite significant and it's not just between us and the chimpanzee there's been estimates that between human beings and a dandelion were 70% the same as a dandelion yeah when you'd look at that 1.5 percent and it's not just looking at the regulatory segments that are there it's looking at all it's around there and what you what patterns you should expect to see so when you look at this mathematically so I spent an entire afternoon with a geneticist I said take me through it boom boom boom and you look at it after why you're just dizzy with how strong Universal common descent is so I concede universal common descent is very strong it's when you get outside that that when you get outside the nine other ninety eight and a half percent project encode is exposing and then the orphan genes that we're finding more and more uniqueness that are unique to a certain taxon yes okay so the question is why is natural selection not the answer to the mechanisms you'll have to ask your biology professor this is what they are saying that natural selection is insufficient so we see these changes and they themselves are saying that neutral drift is far more important so in other words you see changes from from a father to a son and then you look you can you can map through ten generations this we can do today and you see these changes and those changes look far more significant than anything that we can ever map in natural selection so I think that they're saying that neutral drift can can embody much more than we can ever see embodying through natural selection that it's just strictly neutral drift and again that's not my words that's their words okay so so the question is conflict can be good for science and how is that playing out between the things that I'm saying and the establishment that there's an origin of life community that's not real happy about what I'm saying and there's there's an evolution committee a group that's also not real happy about what I'm saying do they welcome this this conflict the answer is no they don't welcome the conflict not at all and then let me put this in several ways and and and and this is going to be an extended answer but I think it's worthwhile first of all scientists are people so if I have been working on something in developing a theory for the last 30 years and somebody comes along and says uh-uh it just doesn't work I am going to naturally be very defensive of my theory and and so people don't say yeah oh I am so glad you came and you wrote that paper too saying that my theory just doesn't work I you know I feel so much better today now that your paper came out no that doesn't happen because scientists are people too the other thing I can tell you what has happened in my own career what's happened in my own career is I sign that statement in 2001 and this is affected my career in many ways I have not been allowed into certain societies of science certain organizations of science and I will point out to them I say you know you have certain requirements for getting in I have more requirements than the people that are getting in you know that you can look sue so in other words I have I have you look at number of publications you look of impact of publications through something called the h-index you look at number of citations how many times your papers have been cited you and and you look and those so there are real metrics how you can measure this their reply to me was oh you have more than twice as much as the people who are getting in but you will never get in because when you sign that paper that statement that was a political statement I said oh it was political so first of all what made it political all I said is further research is warranted you're the one who's naming it political and in your society 99% of the people agree just like you do only 1% of them think what I do and that 1% is old and they're dying off they got into this society before which critical and soon they're gonna be a hundred percent because they like to say that our society is near-unanimous on this but it's meaningless I tell them because it's self selecting you only select those who agree with you and so that that's why it's there so it is not welcomed and it is not welcomed at all and it is affected my career in many ways is it's felt it affected me in promotions it's affected me in in being put in in charge of certain Institute's because people will say oh the guy doesn't believe in evolution he shouldn't even be there what does how come evolution is always cast in the terms of belief nobody ever says the guy doesn't believe in chemistry the guy doesn't believe in physics says the guy doesn't accept physics the guy doesn't that doesn't accept this thing of belief they always put in the terms of religion he doesn't believe in evolution as if it's a religion they themselves confess it's a religion and saying it's all about belief what does that have to do with anything what does that have to do with all my body of work as a scientist here is what I the problem that I have with your evolutionary scheme I don't see it here's what encode is uncovering all the time here is what orphan genes are uncovering and I can't see the mechanism he and I work in this area of synthetic organic chemistry we have mechanisms for things sometimes our mechanisms our proposals we can't we haven't proven them yet but if there's one piece of evidence that argues against them we can't use it but we come up with mechanisms we propose mechanisms and then we build up the mechanisms with facts there are you don't see that in biology I say show me the mechanism show me how this can change here to there there's no explanation they say all the mechanisms there show me show me the paper if it's so abundant it must be in your textbooks show me show me where you have evolution of a complex system where one system changes into another show me an example i sat with two people in my office one was a one was the Nobel Prize winner one was in the National Academy of Science and I asked them do they really I said do you guys really understand this do you understand how you can have these sorts of changes you know what they said to me thing when I get them alone they they say Jim I agree with you when I had two of them there together they wouldn't confess that they didn't believe so they said nothing but did you know that no response is a response in itself and I was I was at the Weizmann Institute talking with a biophysicist he was describing this the this part of the ear where there's there's a bar that vibrates but that bar has a different modulus a different stiffness the further as you go along the bar it's very hard on the material system to modify the stiffness along the transition and that's what allows us to hear all of these different tones and I asked him I said could you give me an idea how does something like this evolve I mean if this guy studied that one piece for his career he said only a Jewish professor in Israel could speak like this he says Oh Jim we all believed in evolution but we have no idea how it happens that's what they say in the back room it's we believe in evolution just like I believe Jesus is the Son of God it's a religion to them and they have no idea how it happens and I can give evidence of the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ historical evidence so even as a religion it's weak what my view on origin of life is okay all right so you mean beyond what we know from science right right okay so in in the in the classroom I I don't bring in my faith into the classroom and saying God created the heavens and the earth in six days I don't do that and there's a reason I don't do that because I hold myself to the same analytical standards that I hold my colleagues to I say you have got to show me using our instruments of chemistry you've got to show me how this can support whatever the topic would be how this shows me where the information code came from or show me using the tools of chemical science how an interact on that's that complete come complex and remember that was just a protein protein interact on in a single yeast to sell that wasn't just then you have protein nucleotide interaction you have nucleotide nucleotide you have all the other interact ohms but in any case so if I am switching to what I believe I believe the Bible I believe the Bible is true and I believe the Word of God is true but the Bible doesn't give me a lot of specifics on this topic it tells me that God created the world in six days he created everything in it in six days I don't understand within that what six days actually means is it six literal days is it six time periods and the reason I say that is because the Sun and the moon and the stars don't even come in until they four so what really is a day so I don't understand the days and I don't understand the mechanisms by which God did all of this I know that he spoke it forth so if he speaks it for something has to happen is it booth it's there maybe well where did those molecules assemble from I don't have an answer from my Bible you see what I mean so I am a believer I believe the text of the Bible but I believe the text of the Bible was never made to be complete to give us the full description and that's why you know it's only this this vigor the book of Genesis is only that big or the the the creation story which is which is a couple of chapters there's only a couple of chapters it's incomplete in the sense of giving me specifics so a lot of specifics I don't have but I believe that God created the heavens and the earth but I cannot prove that so for me that is a belief what is most important to me in life and one of my priorities that's I didn't pay him to ask me this what happened to me on November 7th 1977 Jesus Christ came into my room and I have never been the same I wept that day at the feet of the risen Savior and something happened me where I wanted to live for him I loved chemistry but it is nowhere close to way that I love my Lord and uh and I believe that I will spend an eternity to him with him and that's the most important thing to me and the second most is I would say is the same as as any parent in here is my family my wife and my children mean more to me than anything and my my son medically had a rough time last night and and 80% of my CPU even if this moment is on my son and not here and that's just the way the way I think human beings are wired so so my love for Jesus Christ and what he's done for me in the cross and how he's given himself for me and then from my family are the most important things to me yeah the Big Bang actually I so the question is do I believe there's anything any legitimate parts of the theory to the Big Bang you know the Big Bang is not a description of the origin of life right so the Big Bang doesn't doesn't give us a real description of that in in in in the details of what I'm talking about today but the Big Bang may well correspond to what the Bible is talking about that there was a discrete beginning up until the scientific understanding of the Big Bang people thought the Bible was nonsense to speak of a beginning they thought it was more like Hinduism had it right that it's forever it's an eternity but the Big Bang brought us right back to a definite beginning a definite beginning to the universe I am NOT of enough of a physicist to be able to be a judge on that but there are again a lot of pieces of evidence supporting that so in other words we have a lot of evidence supporting that our universe is still expanding so in other words if we were thrown out like a Big Bang boom we would be expanding outward and there's a lot of evidence you can talk about the redshifts as you look at how light changes with time so in other words today is going to be a longer day than was yesterday we know that by a very small amount we know that and talking about the seasonal changes I'm talking about the 24 hours a day is gonna be a little bit longer because of this expanding universe that explains the expanding universe that that that we are encompassed with there's there's an interesting theory put forth by a man named Gerald Schroeder and I'm not sure Gerald with the G and last name you can spell it any way you want if you just google Gerald Schroeder age of the universe it'll come up Google will capture it for you and he wrote a document now he's written a book on it he's not a Christian he's actually a Orthodox Jew he lives in Israel he's a physicist PhD physicist and he talks about how if you look at time relativity of time because time is relative to where we are in the universe where we are on this expansion so in other words if you're early on in the formation of the universe early on in this expansion and this is his theory that what looks to us like like very long time periods was very short in the beginning of the universe because each day is becoming longer and longer if he's right if he's right in this theory and he talks about it he correlates that with the events of the Bible this was created than this than this than this and he talks about that in the relativity of time in the expansion of the universe from this this this fourteen point eight billion years a universe that we have since the Big Bang which again assumes that the Big Bang is correct and general shorter builds this theory upon it then both the young age the young earth creationists and the old earth creationists are right they're both right you say how can they both be right because time is relative to where you are looking from the place in the universe are you looking at it from the instant of origin and Counting from there or are you looking at it from where we are now and looking back very interesting theory so and I'm sure there's other theories that are gonna come along on this and there's again I don't have a lot of details from the book of Genesis and it may well encompass the Big Bang Theory it may yes okay so I I'm gonna try to rephrase the question it kind of progressed so DNA self-replicate let me just say DNA doesn't self replicate it has many other things working upon it to replicate so if I just have DNA here it doesn't self replicate I have to have a lot of other enzymes helping me along to get it to make another copy of itself right so did DNA but even if you had DNA that doesn't make other DNA molecules aren't self replicating that way it has to have lots of other things working on it so self-replication comes when you have all these other things that comes from a living organisms that it's working upon it so from my understanding and and again talking with with with biologists and geneticists that that most of the changes that are occurring with DNA so the question was can't can't just changes in DNA account for these things yeah there are small changes that occur from from parent to child the big changes have never been beneficial there that you get far less number of beneficial ones than you get deleterious ones far more deleterious thing happens when you get big changes in DNA the other question that you had about the 98.5% of what was formerly called junk DNA and is now called intergenic DNA I'm not sure that I understood your question about that oh so your understanding is that junk DNA junk DNA is inactive that is what was believed you're running on decade old information yes and that's why it was called junk DNA it was inactive now it is no longer called junk DNA because it is not inactive and we are finding like I said thousands of regulatory genes within that 98.5% that are very important to us as humans and the monkeys have their own regulatory genes in their 98.5% of their intergenic DNA yeah it's very important now science evolves how should a person of faith live in a scientific and educational environment and I you know I things have changed over time when I started I started my career as an assistant professor thirty years ago and and I was 28 years old when I started my career and these things were much less of an issue in other words they would not have affected my career what I believe in in in my Bible life what I believe about things and whether I accept certain theories or not as a chemist it didn't affect me at all I I had my own little chemistry world it's becoming harder and harder to live I think as a believer on a secular college campus because professors will use information that is incomplete and they will attack people and say these things are fact and it makes it very hard on those who come from a different background so in other words it's very hard for students to stand and to take the message that I have said today and to go and to stand in their evolutionary biology class their professors will call them out and and really try to cut this thing down and sometimes they feel that they don't have the the the knowledge to really battle with this person I'll be glad to battle with this person and to call out what what I know is incomplete in their theories I think I gave a lot of credence to universal common descent of how good it really is when you're in stay within that 1.5 percent but it's becoming harder and harder and that's why I think that as Christians as young people in a secular University if you want to walk with Christ it is very important to have community around you because the attack is coming much harder than it ever did I never had a professor call me out on things that I believed I never did back in my day and I never had this sort of thing happened to me but it does happen today and people are made out to be idiots to be stupid if they don't buy into certain mantra and it's not just origin of life in ever Ellucian there are other political hot topics that if you don't agree with the masses that you can be really picked on so I believe that if you want to walk as a believer it's important to have community and to have other believers around you and then they can help you to secure the resources because there are people like me I'm not the only one we're a small number of us but there are there are a growing number of professors that are calling the community out on these issues and I know the chemistry very well origin of life nobody will know this better than me so I can understand the chemistry very well I'm not a biologist so I talk about what I know in biology but there are evolutionary biologists who believe very much like I do that the evidence just isn't there and they are doing two biology what I am doing two chemistry you know and and and and so so there and the community can refer you to these people and that can give you strength in the midst of this because really when these so-called experts are confronted and I've seen this in my own life I was brought up on a on a podium with somebody who was a so-called expert in in evolutionary sciences and I got done with a presentation which was not terribly unlike this and we each were given 40 minutes and he only spoke for 20 minutes and finally said give science a chance and and so when they are confronted by other experts who call them out they're very different they act very different than the way that they'll call out a student you see what I mean there there's a differential of power that that people in my position will execute toward other people that is unfair and is not right and should not be there and then where they're confronted with an equal in power then their response is very different just like I said to you that all of my colleagues that I have confronted them on this in privacy of my own office have agreed with me that's what I'm talking about and so so I think we need community and with that I'll end it and I think you so much for for inviting me [Applause]

Channel: syracusecru

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Id: -Gsa58Rm8Sk

Length: 90min 29sec (5429 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018