Focus on the Origin of Life

dr. Thaxton how did you first get interested in the origin of life when I was a graduate student in chemistry at Iowa State University my subject matter was not origin life studies it was x-ray crystallography and we were doing small molecules not huge proteins or something like that and there was a postdoc who was a postdoctoral student in our lab who was from Harvard and was in contact with some of the Harvard people doing origin life studies well it had been a fascinating idea I heard a couple of seminars on the subject but never really particularly focused on it and he mentioned a book that was a new book by a man named Dean Kenyon that was about called biochemical predestination and it happened to be in our bookstore so I picked the book up began to read it it's very fascinated by it because I felt like that on the first reading it all sounded so solid so you know May it made perfect sense but it's began to reflect on it later I realized that there were a lot of things that I had already learned as a chemist that it just didn't it didn't fit and I had sort of puzzled questions but no real approach to it well I went to Europe for a year and during that year I had a chance to reflect and think a lot more about about the book that was just after I'd finished my PhD in chemistry and I had a chance to get some thoughts together more specifically on that subject at the end of which time I wrote a little essay giving my response to basically Kenyon's thesis in the book and sent it to him because it was just a just a subject interest fascinating growing subject and his response was that well I like your criticisms very much and encouraged me to continue to continue on with it and that's basically where our book came came from was out of that original a response to thinges kenya's book the biochemical predestination so it wasn't any lifelong search for the how life began it basically came during the end of my PhD studies and when the subject first entered my consciousness at s2o this is a subject that's in the traditional evolutionary mode that fits my background in training I think I will look at it and see what I come up with and that's basically how it happened how did you come to write the mystery of life's origin with Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen well I came to after my time in both the Harvard and Brandeis I had written more on it just privately and developing my own thoughts and when I came to to Texas after after her Harvard experience met Walter Bradley who began to who was also interested in the subject as we discussed found out we had very similar interests but we seem to be missing each other if he was an engineer thermodynamics specialist and my background was something I knew about thermodynamics but had learned it as a chemist and not an engineer and it just seemed like that we in our communication we were missing each other and we discussed them we discussed and eventually figured out that there was a slight adjustment and we could get our vocabularies when we communicate but that point I had already met Roger Olsen we also collaborated with and Roger was a student of Bradley's at Colorado School of Mines and so the three of us began to discuss and find out that our materials meshed and so the three of us joined up to write that book as a critique of chemical evolution was there an advantage to having the three of you collaborate on the project oh absolutely because the field lends itself to an interdisciplinary study yeah as you might imagine if you're going to discuss the question of where life came from that requires knowledge a bit about chemistry geology physics all the different facets of what's going on in with other planets the the atmosphere wouldn't hurt to know some biochemistry either and just a variety of different disciplines so astronomy or astrophysics all these different disciplines are coming in together well roger was geochemists so he covered the geology geochemistry the conditions of the early Earth in our in our analysis I did Kent the analysis of the experiments the chemical experiments and simulation processes and the chemical part of it and then Bradley did the discussion about thermodynamics and then three of us discussed about the about the rest and the more the philosophical discussion part of it what is the primary argument of the book the argument of the book that we put together was to look at the theory itself from the assumptions that are made by those who presented we wanted to give a legitimate critique of this field not stand aside and throw stones at it as you know you can do if you're any kind of a critic you can always throw stones at something this was not our objective at any point along the way you look from the beginning or anywhere along the way since the idea was to get inside the minds of those who do the research and to interact with their minds as well as interact with with them as individual people to find out what they've done how they did it read the fine print in the research papers and try to see what were their assumptions how did they do it and then from within arrive at a legitimate critique that's what we tried to do why do you consider the origin of life to be a mystery I believe there are it's still a mystery because the approach has been too crude for the complexity of what we're trying to solve the interesting interesting observation to make here I think the field began you might say of chemical evolution in 1953 with the publication of Stanley Miller and Harold URIs paper well really at this point Stanley Miller is paper on the origin of life showing how you can simulate in a laboratory glassware conditions that might have existed on the early earth some three to four billions of years ago from in that same year that Stanley Miller showed how life might emerge from simple chemistry Francis Crick and James Watson startled the world with the publication of their structure of the DNA molecule so the whole genetic revolution you might say has begun the same and how complex we now understand increasingly life has even at the simple quote simple level it's far more complex far more complex than anyone ever dreamed at the time that the first model of chemical evolution as a way to explain how life began was presented so you have you had the the idea that first chemical evolution is going to show how the first cells began and is increasingly since that time we found out level after level after level of inquiry that the simple cell is far far from simple and then it's just just the pure complexity of the subject has shown that these crude blasting of chemicals technique with that with the ultraviolet light or heat or any other type of energy source is just conceptually it seems increasingly the wrong approach do you see a particular irony in the timing of Stanley Millers experiments and the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick well irony and yes in the sense that one is trying to show how simple life is the other one shows how utterly complex life is and they the two methods or approaches just don't seem to fit how does the emergence of modern genetics tie in with the Darwinian scenario of life going from simple to complex well first of all you have to read a file what you mean by simple at the time of Darwin the cell theory for example was just just a few years old and so his whole thesis from start to finish did not take into account what we would now call the complex cell it did not consider that at all so you have to rely have to redefine what you mean by simple and further analysis just shown that there isn't anything simple there's no one there in a world I can that can look at a bacterium for example and can say that this is simple we really don't know that it's more simple than even a multicellular creature and depending on how you define it the inter inner workings of the cell are just as complex just as many enzymes in a bacterium as there isn't a multicellular organism and that's an unusual discovery but that seems to be the way things are what are the major problems with origin of life simulation experiments well let's look at the prebiotic stimulation experiments just for a minute because you have to understand what is being done in these experiments the goal is to simulate in a laboratory setting the conditions as the theory says might of conditions that might have existed on an earth three to four billion years ago now in principle there's nothing wrong with this approach however in order to get experiments that work you have to constrain the conditions so that you can get results even the design of the original Miller experiment illustrates this he really arranged the flask in one one one way and no results and you rearrange the glassware and you get results so it was why did why were the results why do we consider the arrangement that gave results that cassette of conditions which match the early Earth instead of the other one well it's because the one set of condemned laborat of conditions the glassware gives results that matches the theory now that's fine then you have to go on and consider well what else are you doing in this simulation experiment that corresponds with what you say existed on an early Earth isn't it rather impressive that amino acids were produced in the Miller experiments well that's what was so impressive to many off the bat you take a simple environment of methane ammonia water vapor and hydrogen gas no oxygen in these systems by the way because according to the chemical evolution hypothesis oxygen would only appear on the scene after the first life began to produce oxygen the first planet life but it produced oxygen and then you can do these experiments without oxygen there because you're dealing with the prior to the beginnings of life at least that's the idea it turns out there's a practical benefit of doing this you don't get experiments to work if you have oxygen present because oxygen is a poison preventing these type of chemical reactions another thing that is that if you use methane and ammonia in other words the so called reducing environment with some hydrogen gas present you can get plenty of organic materials produced and yes it was very encouraging to the proponents of the theory when amino acids a few amino acids were discovered in the flask in fact over the years more than a dozen such amino acids have been found in the Miller type experiment how close is the devel of amino acids to the threshold of life well you have to have many things besides amino acids and if you only produce the sweet of kin of of amino acids that are necessary for living things and there is a subset of 20 amino acids that we know in in living things you need you need those but you need many other compounds and chemicals but let's just deal with with with the proteins or the amino acids as there is their components first because in these exemple experiments simulation experiments you produce not only that set of amino acids but many other amino acids they're far more amino acids that are produced and even in greater abundance than are produced of the 20 amino acids and so you mix all those together together with all of the other chemicals that are being produced and you find out that the interfering cross reactions of these just prevents any type of meaningful buildup of chemicals that are sufficient to go on to the next step in making life so it's a very difficult almost intractable problem I would say chemically what are the steps involved in producing proteins from amino acids well the way typically these experiments are done you do an experiment you produce a glycine and alanine and a few other amino acids that we know exist in in in living systems and true proteins for example and then you isolate those amino acids from the system and you purify these amino acids and then you use these amino acids separated isolated from the myriad of other chemicals that would have been present in a quote prebiotic soup of chemicals and then you you react these amino acids together under the under other conditions to produce polymers in other words you're trying to build up if you can simulate the production of protein why are amino acids isolated during this process we want to separate the chemicals from each other in different stages of simulation experiments so that we can get a realistic handle on how the developmental process of chemical evolution occurs if you don't do this you have all the different chemicals mixed together and they will mutually interact and react with each other now why this is bad or what happens is it amino acids will combine with with with amines or other groups that have that have say a carbonyl group and you can just and you will get dead end prop process you won't get meaningful subjects what substances do you go just a goo just other other substances that don't have any biological significance to them and this is the really difficult part in trying to conceive how to do a simulation experiment it's well known nearly every one of these experimenters know that you can't do a realistic experiment according to what the theory says and get meaningful results but if you just did that everybody would get the same glopping it's not a meaningful result and so you have to have meaningful results to publish and that's the reason why you separate things so you can get have a symbol of an idea of how you're going step by step to produce your to go along the process of making life how can the investigator affect the outcome of a simulation experiment well you must have in any kind of a simulation experiment the role of the investigator I mean it's impossible to do experiments without the investigator so when we wrote our chapter on the role of the investigator in the simulation experiments we were trying to point out and make a distinction between those legitimate interferences in the experiment such as stopping the experiment at a certain time and withdrawing sample for analysis that's legitimate you can do this yeah the experimenter can set up the laboratory conditions and and set set the parameters of the experiment and that's fine these are the kinds of investigator role that you would expect what is illegitimate and we felt like needed to be brought to the attention of students and other professors who were investigating this and brought it out into the open because believe me it's never brought out into the open you can go to these international meetings and there's two things that are almost never brought into discussion one is the problem as we've already mentioned the role of these interfering cross reactions if you discuss the role of the interfering cross reactions there would be no other place for the conference to go you would just focus right there it would stop there wouldn't be anywhere else to go because you can't have any meaningful results so nobody talks about it has frankly the way it is the other thing is that besides the interfering cross reactions you in order to you must have you must not talk about in these conferences the role of the investigator to interfere in an illegitimate way with results because if you did it would become obvious that most of these experiments are unacceptable according to their own criteria for what we're doing is prebiotic simulation that means by the way let me explain what I mean by that according to the theory you want to we want to reproduce in a laboratory setting conditions that would have been on an early Earth 3 to 4 billion years ago and that means no interference from God or any other outside forces and either then or since so we make a naturalistic assumption from the beginning to the present well that means then that we cannot have if we're going to simulate those conditions we cannot have an investigator constraining the conditions that are outside the boundaries of what we've already said were acceptable for that pre-buy out earth how did you evaluate the different chemical evolution experiments basically we put the scale in such tentatively drawn I mean if we can show that it's it fits the parameters of a legitimate prebiotics pyramix parent then yes by all means include it and we'd be glad to move our line one way or the other according to how the data goes but so far the experiments are such that the investigators role prejudice is the outcome of the experiment in an illegitimate way I just find it intolerable that men of science can allow this to go on and not make it vocal and not make it open and purr certainly not you know be more specific in their research papers as I mentioned earlier though the reason why we don't do it why it's not done is that if you did you wouldn't get meaningful results and you can't publish a lack of results you can't just do a research paper and say well I'll publish a paper of what I've done the last two months that hasn't worked you know you've got to have some results and internet turns out and in forty years of all these experiments by and large now there are a few exceptions but by large most research papers have fit the category that we would call illegitimate because the experimental parameters are constrained in such a way the conditions are constrained in such a way that it would not fit a prebiotic earth and that's the primary problem that I see with these simulation experiments are the initial conditions in the simulation experiments plausible ok let's look at the original and initial conditions of the early Earth it started out first that the hypothesis was an atmosphere of methane ammonia water vapor and hydrogen you would have had hydrogen sulfide also but you need for certain proteins and other substances that contain sulfur but originally the famous Miller experiment only contained methane ammonia water vapor and hydrogen let's look at why methane and ammonia are in this experiment it turns out thermodynamically that is the energetics of the system that you're dealing with inside the flask carbon that is in the reduced state nitrogen that is in the reduced state and that means the maximum amount of hydrogen connected to the atom carbon or nitrogen in those states reduced state is like having a molecule at the top of the hill and what happens if you blast it with a spark or of you know electricity or ultraviolet light or even heat it up to such an agitation point well it's going to tip it over the edge of the hill and it'll go downhill and bring about a chemical reaction it's what it's what is known as a chemically spontaneous process so in this kind of an atmosphere with methane and ammonia in it you can blast it with these chemical with these energy sources make the reaction go downhill and bring about a production of amino acids that's all straightforward chemistry fits the physics perfectly understandable the really difficult part is trying to do this with carbon monoxide or even more realistically according to recent more recent investigations of what an early Earth would have looked like carbon dioxide and nitrogen gas very very poor results if the early Earth was like the modern geochemistry picture of an early Earth containing carbon dioxide and nitrogen and so water vapor it would be I you know extremely difficult that this process ever worked but what happens is in order to even get things to work even with carbon dioxide and nitrogen put a little hydrogen in there we need to have hydrogen why because when you blast it you can you can still make the process work and get some products but you must have the hydrogen present this is us this is a doubtful procedure too but it it's it does get around the problem of not having I mean oh trying to trying to deal with the problem of no methane or no ammonia on that early Earth of which there is no geochemical evidence that would have been there what did the Earth's early atmosphere contain well for example the the picture that geochemists give today is that look at the effluent gases of volcanoes would give you a pretty good handle on what the what what kind of gases would have been coming out of the early Earth and it turns out to be carbon dioxide and and you and a nitrogen being produced will the simulation experiments work with this atmosphere that's what I'm saying that it that you get a very very very small amount of any of any organic compounds in this kind of environment you must have a hydrogen there and it really does help and in fact Stanley Miller has said on a number of occasions well I don't care what the GL chemists say you can't do the experiments without methane so since we know that life is here life must have had I mean these early Earth must have had methane on it now this is a kind of reasoning that really dominates in certain quarters of origin of life studies it's not it's not it's not the typical scientific approach that you would expect and you would like to see it is dominated by metaphysical condition I would say we know naturalist naturalistically that that we that life is result of these processes of chemistry well how do we know this well we're here and so how can we get here well we've got to have certain chemical reactions that will lead us to where we are and what kind of conditions well the only way we can make it work is if there was some methane and ammonia there therefore they must have been present so this must have been argument you used very often in this field and it's very frustrating for those of us who are trying to to move the field over to more realistic scientific approach to this problem there seems to be an underlying assumption that the origin of life resulted without any intelligent input whatsoever yet the simulation experiments appear to rely upon intelligent guidance could you comment on this irony well there's an interesting contradiction that comes in when you look at the stated assumptions about what the conditions on the early Earth were and what is required to make an experiment work you have an early Earth says the theory void of any intelligent activity I'm asked by definition to do a naturalistic experiment but in order to make the experiments work the illegitimate role of the investigator who is always intelligent prejudices the direction or changes of direction over which it would normally go if that investigator did not do certain things now let me give you a specific example here because I think it's important for for it to be understood how it works the theory says that for example ultraviolet light would have been a major energy source on the early earth there's no reason to doubt that it wasn't in radiating the earlier early earth so we want to simulate in our laboratory setting experiments using ultraviolet light now in order to do the experiment even with methane and ammonia present you must use the shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet light less than 2000 angstrom units or wavelengths in order to make the chemical reactions take place to give us a product but if you what happens if you use the longer wavelength say greater than three thousand angstrom units what happens if you if you use those you know if you use those so greater than two thousand dollars from units well what happens is that the destructive processes of the products begins in very big time and so you're destroying the products of this reaction thousands of times faster than you're producing them producing the products so in a laboratory setting if you use the full spectrum for example of course experimentally you cannot do this we don't have a way to get the full spectrum but let's but but we can produce longer wavelengths and shorter wavelengths but these experiments are never done this way we filter out the longer wavelengths and I say that's illegitimate are there any natural processes that would have filtered out destructive ultraviolet light if in fact there was a realistic filtering mechanism then of course it would be an acceptable experiment but no one has suggested any way any possibility or any mechanism for eliminating the longer wavelengths and just allowing the short wavelengths to react with the with the materials and I think that frankly it's done because it gives the results that we have already specified as a step wise procedure toward the development of living things and interesting thing was this another another factor that must be considered I think by the time a body of criticism in the literature of origin of life was built up okay to show that these destructive processes would have far in a way it dominated the situation by the time this literature was built up the assumption was already set and permeated the whole field we can do it the monomer level in other words the first level of making amino acids is presupposed nearly by everybody and so the fact these criticisms are unheeded and so we've gone on now to explain well how do we make how do we make proteins the first ten years of the field say from 1953 until say 1965 66 almost all the vast majority of papers during that time was how do we make amino acids how do we make adenine one of the one of the bases in DNA and RNA how do we make the sugars the monomer monomers for the front because you can't have a DNA or RNA if you don't have sugars well despite all of the body of criticism that says well it's not very realistically you ever had a prebiotic soup it had adenine in it or ribose in it or that had that had very meaningful concentrations of these various amino acids from which you can make proteins despite that criticism the field today has presupposed that we have granite to stand on and they don't even have sand to stand up and they're trying to build polymers proteins and nucleic acids as if we have solid evidential basis that the precursor our components on which to build these polymers has already been established and it has not been established so the field now is dominated majority of papers are dealing with the polymer level so we're in a different decade and we're doing different things but it's it is it hasn't worked out what additional steps would be required to develop life in order to have life you have to have not only the amino acids from which you make proteins but now in the new clinic as in the various components to make nucleic acids but you have to have the you know to have to have the assembly for the cell structure cell membrane and the cell membrane is not simply a bunch of fatty acids that react and and and make a micellar or a bilayer of chemicals you know it's so that you can have an enclosed boundary what has been discovered in the last decade about the cell wall a cell membrane to show that it is utterly complex extremely complex it's it's perhaps one of the major discriminating factors in allowing certain materials in and out of the cell now this structure must be there in order to have a viable living system and no one has any clue how to do this there are many things of which we don't know how to put together how to assemble it but conceptually the problem has been for the last 25 years to make the monomers and then see how to make the polymers and then how to and different different research workers and groups are trying to work on different batches of the problem but let's not kid ourselves we're discovering more and more how utterly complex the living system is and the that's why the field is shifting and changing yeah we're either at the end of a paradigm where chemical evolutionary processes are being recognized as is is the wrong approach I mean however much merit there has been concern in the past we're at we're rapidly approaching the age where more and more research workers are saying well we're going to have to try something else we're going to have to do something else why because no results that are meaningful there's not anybody in a world that can explain in a realistic way how to make a protein there's not anybody in the world can offer a realistic explanation for how to go step by step to make even an even a nucleic acid and in a realistic environment now with plausible conditions and how to put that qualifier in there with plausible conditions because people get Nobel Prizes for using constrained conditions for you where you manipulate the conditions so that if the chemical chemistry only goes in one direction but if you do this that's no longer prebiotic you see that's the problem we have to do it in such a way we can mimic a dumb stupid nature blind chemical physical processes now if we are going to require something of the level of a Nobel prize-winning scientist to manipulate the conditions then this is you can do this with great difficulty to make some things but still no one's ever made it bacteria no one has ever made a sell of any kind no one's ever made of virus even no one's ever made the kind of protein from just basic chemistry now it can be simple chemical steps now Fred Sanger and others have gotten Nobel Prizes for making like for example insulin but certainly this was not done with the kind of crude processes that the origin of life field is trying to use to mimic the process what is so difficult about making proteins or nucleic acids well the problem in trying to make a protein for example from even if you have just a pool of amino acids is that the energetics is such that now it's an uphill process now I mentioned before having I mean having protein amino methane and ammonia and blasting them with the energy and having it as a downhill process well let's assume now all we have is a pool of amino acids that are the right set of amino acids to make a true protein well how are we going to assemble the units individual pro init amino acids in a linear sequence to make a protein in the first place in a real protein they're all left-handed amino acids yeah I guess you would call it except for glycine which doesn't have any handedness but all of the other 19 amino acids are left-handed amino acids well when you do the simulation experiments you get a 50/50 mixture there's no way around that then he was found if someone can do a laboratory experiment and say that fit the conditions of something realistic on early Earth that where you just made left-hand amino acids but this would be a tremendous encouragement to the field in fact that person would probably get a Nobel Prize for example if somebody can get a Nobel Prize for showing that that an enzyme can have catalytic activity then which is a requirement what did I say yeah if you RNA is now recognized to have catalytic activity it's not just a part of the nucleic acid or part of the of the informational system but it is it is recognized to do the role of on a somewhat more limited level of an enzyme so if if this could happen and and is worthy of giving a Nobel Prize for this discovery then certainly anyone who figured out a way to produce left-handed amino acids would probably be worthy of the same kind of thing especially considering the amount of work that's already going into it now that's one thing the other problem is linking them together in real system you can't do it without having an enzyme present in fact the assembly process in and it can't happen without enzymes and the reason being you must have the energy put at the right place to make the reaction go uphill that's the problem it's a tremendous uphill it'd be the equivalent of I guess being down in a valley and trying to try and trying to go to the top of the mountain and this doesn't happen without without not only energy you know if you put energy in a you know if you have gasoline you have energy but you have to having the right kind of engine I mean you don't just pour gasoline over a over your over your you know your some kind of algae I mean some kind of a wagon you got to have an internal combustion engine to use the gasoline to drive you up the hill that's what the enzyme does it uses the energy that you have available and couples it to the individual amino acids to about the production of the protein in addition to the energy problem in protein synthesis isn't there a sequencing problem absolutely it already have viable protein you must have the right sequence and the reason for that according to the standard way of looking at it is if you don't have the right sequence the protein doesn't fold up properly to give it its overall three-dimensional structure best way I can describe it is that the overall three-dimensional structure is said to be held within the sequence of the individual amino acids in the protein if you had the right sequence the molecule would fold up okay they call this self-assembly but you must get the right sequence and you can't get the right sequence by just chemical processes that aren't directed and they are directed in living system by the enzyme but in a in a flask they can be directed by the role of the investigator so you can't get around the fact that either you have to have an enzyme or you have to have the role of the investigator if you had the role of the investigator that's an illegitimate entity for what you said is the prebiotic experiment and that's the impasse this field has been in for some time our DNA sequences analogous to a written language probably one of the one of the real emotional experiences you might say that I've had in in doing this kind of work over the last 20 years is I used to have abused almost every biology book I've picked up and trying to explain how the DNA molecule works in helping to code for proteins for example how to make how to make proteins by using amino acids the explanation has been given in terms of the analogy to a written message and it is of course in terms of function this is precisely what happens and after I guess a number of years of reading the literature on these Arjun of life experiments and thinking about how they were how they were worked out and then focusing in on the role of the investigator in thinking about what the criterion is and or the criteria are for making successful experiments and realizing what how the enzyme works actually in the Sindhi assembly process and just figuring all of this together and then being hit with well it's only a crude superficial resemblance to a language you mean in reality but it looks like one but it must have been the result of of just purely natural processes here I began to to see that as is increasingly unrealistic that it would be comparable to going to old mount on the mountain in New Hampshire and recognizing the the face on the side of the hill and and then I'm going to Mount Rushmore and seeing the faces of presidents on the granite and saying well these also were the same kind of superficial resemblance well it's it's obvious when you see it you know went erosional processes are not responsible for putting the faces on Mount Rushmore to me it's the same problem we've got when we look at the informational sequences in DNA most of my colleagues think I think this is purely rubbish and they say this is the same kind of superficial resemblance as old men the mountain and I don't I don't think so it seems to me that what we've got is that the is the requirements are too close and the similarities are too great for it to be just just coincidence so I'm very much impressed by this and still open to consider a purely natural process can explain it but I haven't seen anything that makes sense so far has Hubert yaki made similar claims yes of course yaquis paper did not actually make this connection it was something he did say though that caused me to think more realistically about the idea that the information content is not just a superficial resemblance to a language here's what he said if I could remember it exactly he said that there is a mathematical identity in the structure of these base sequences in DNA and the alphabetical letter sequences of the message so we're only talking about a mathematical identity of the structures of these two systems now by experience we know that it takes intelligence to arrange the alphabetical letter sequences and a written message so if they're mathematically identical structures it seems to me quite reasonable that it also takes intelligence to arrange the base sequences to spell out their genetic message and that's the basis for for this and until I actually saw that written there like that the mathematical identical structure I don't think it ever clicked with me to get beyond the well this is just like old man of the mountain I now realize that what we have in DNA is more like Mount Rushmore in the mystery of life's origin you refer to order randomness and specified complexity could you give us an overview of these concepts yes it's very it's very important to make the distinction between order and complexity and then between complexity and specify complexity so I'll do that a random situation is something that you can use but for example with a sequence just pull letters out of a hat at random and then the sequence would be a random sequence this is what you would get if you do the simulation experiments and you made a polymer they there might be some some crude ordering some people are very impressed with the with the slight ordering tendencies that that natural laws would give and in sequencing these things but of course it's not like order that you have in a crystal so on an order would be like aibee aibee aibee aibee this would be a sequence of order and a random sequence would be like a.j b Q T you know something like that where each letter it you might have a run of three or four that are that are consecutive aaaa but in the long run they're each each one has equal or near equal probability of appearance out of the sequence then a specified sequence is one that has the like out written message t-h-e d OG you know the dog and then spell out in the sequence the dog Rand this is a state as a sentence that spelled out fits the vocabulary fits the grammar and the proper cindex it is this kind of distinction that you can recognize as I wait for order and then randomness and then specify complexity now the thing is that in in in the examples are that the results of of stochastic chemistry what happens in a lab and a flask is is an example of a sequence that would be ordered I mean would be random complex is a random state order would be like a crystal everything is specified to write in in in in a in a particular sequence of defined arrangement but specified complexity it's complex some have said this it's like a random situation but it's it's it's it's it has certain rules that are like language rules so it's not a totally ordered arrangement like a bee a bee a bee but it fits the characteristics of a language and we see that in language system but the same thing happens with the DNA and protein it also happens with making for example making a computer or anything artifacts RF other examples of specified complexity Mount Rushmore would be an example in specified complexity in fact in fact you don't find examples of specified complexity except the structures of artifacts that people make and dna-protein as examples what do you think the presence of specified complexity in a living system indicates about its origin in terms of the origin of specified complexity in living systems I would say that if we had any examples available that unrestrained or unconstrained natural processes produced specified complexity then I would be prepared to go along with the community of scientists that are saying that natural processes produce living systems but we don't have anything like that every single example of specified complexity we have is either an artifact produced by human being or else it is the result of the living system and so like the structures of DNA and protein fit the pattern of what human beings produce one way you can look at it it's not with that it's easy to understand why for so long people have used the analogy that a human being or our living system is like a machine machine analogy to a human to living systems has had a long record now and it's been very productive in a lot of things that have been accomplished and scientists and scientific approaches but the Machine never arrived at by spontaneous equilibration of chemistry and physics these forces must be must be have certain boundary conditions in which they operate and this is what human beings do to make artifacts we can make machines ourselves but we don't find machines arising by natural processes the same the same situation so I would say that really we haven't we haven't progressed much in terms of our understanding about this question so I still conclude that the data supports the position that specify complexity is somehow whether we like it or not the result of intelligence in inferring the necessity of intelligence to produce life haven't you ventured from the realm of science to religion oh I know that everybody says this is the adventure of religion but well you simply look at the structure of what you're dealing with it fits the pattern at experience has taught us only results by intelligence all it takes to show that this is not the right answer is to find a single example of a natural process to produce the specified complexity and then we would have to really rethink things for example it's like the example of William Paley is is is in the watch is classic everyone has heard about this you find a watch and you know that someone with intelligence has been there and made the watch well this is recognized of course now there's a there's an argument that is often given to explain this in the chemical evolution crowd in literature and it goes like this well we know that it takes intelligence in the by way of someone to make the watch if we found a watch we know that but this is inorganic materials we're dealing with with the living system which and and then the fact that we have to have human beings that manipulate the conditions to to make these experiments work and publish them as prebiotic chemistry experiments isn't this a violation of the rule of naturalistic processes well no why not well because natural selection produced the investigators it's a circular argument again that that trying to to address earlier about we know that the early Earth must have had methane on it why well we can't get the experiments to work without methane this is no help this is not a scientific approach this is pure philosophy and so yes I would say that my view is not only empirical and fits the data but it fits our experience that intelligence is the direction we ought to be looking for accounting for the information in the living system could you summarize the reasons why you believe intelligence was involved in the origin of life the overall complexity it's such an inordinate level of complexity plus it fits the pattern of my experience we don't find anything like this the result of natural means and processes it's only the circular argument of saying that we are here by the result of natural selection which produces those natural selection produces us we produce artifacts therefore we don't have to worry about the fact that the watch is produced by an individual and so we don't have to worry about the successful experiments because we find in that human intelligence was produced by natural selection will you go around and around the circle the fact is we have such high level complexity where do we find it in living systems now we have to have some way to break out of the circle it seems to me now you either have you either have to rule this answer by religion or some other philosophy some philosophy and I say that the by-and-large what is being happened right now by the failure to follow experience we are demanding that our students and our professors only look at natural process and it doesn't fit our experience and I think every researcher in the world knows it it knows that it fits the pattern of Mount Rushmore and a watch this is not the issue the issue is it's unthinkable it could be anything else but natural process why well it must be natural process this is philosophy how is the mystery of life's origin received by the scientific community well I think when the book came out of course we were a bit apprehensive in 1984 in the mystery of last origin I hit the hit the world we might say there were very few people who were acknowledging the kinds of things we were saying well in 9 years or than a decade since then there's been a tremendous shift the kinds of things that we've talked about and that's in this book are is generally regarded more and more favorably among the researchers they know that the chemistry is not favorable to the production of living systems it doesn't go that way but it's standard textbook orthodoxy nonetheless but in terms of going to the origin of life meetings going to the and interacting with the researchers who do the work they're very candid they're very very upfront and they know what's going on what are the major objections to your current point of view they say you can't do research if you hold design and so it's really a strange kind of logic that works we're going to hold a theory and that natural processes produce this and and continue to to look at for natural ways to explain it and by the way I want to put a parenthesis in here I'm not at all suggesting that we should stop research on natural process approaches to the origin of life I'm not at all suggesting this in fact I think it would be a huge mistake if we did stop that but I am saying I'm saying that a long while we pursue natural process approach to the Argent life it ought to be that the fields should be wide enough to entertain other possibilities other approaches if these don't work let's look at some others and maybe continue to work this may be some one of these will work but it's sort of like the idea that if you say that only natural processes are at work it's sort of like taking your geology students to Mount Rushmore and saying look at this mountain come up with some wind and erosional process or other set of natural factors that would account for these phases I'm saying that we have to be guided by the structure of the effects we see and let that determine the course of our inquiry not the other way around what was dean Kenyon's response to your critiques of his book biochemical predestination well the first contact that I had with professor Kenyon was a letter after having read his book and a few years later having done my own original response to it and I contacted him with an essay that I had I had written it wasn't the manuscript for the book it was an original essay that I had written prior to that and he wrote back was very positive to the to the criticisms that I had given and suggested that he too had changed his mind about a lot of this and encouraged me to continue I think that his shift had already happened before I contacted him but certainly he was a big encouragement to me in terms of continuing along you can imagine what it was like I felt like myself I was virtually alone out there there may have been other critics who were saying these things and obviously Kenyon was but I hadn't read any of it and I didn't I couldn't find anything in print that supported the views that I was coming to so I was very tentatively putting forth this sort of like a child going to the ocean never been to the ocean before you you're afraid of this you don't know whether you want to get out there and venture forth or not and that's frankly the way I felt about the opinions I was coming to about the origins of life feel and evaluation of the experiments so when we presented the the the essay to Kenyon and he was favorable to that began to correspond with with with other people with with one of the drafts of this book and we heard from a variety of different people who were he were doing research in the field and they gave very valuable feedback and in what I really expected to find was an avalanche of resistance and criticism and do you know that we did not find it we found that the by and large the chemists agreed with the chemistry statements the geologists agreed with the geology statements and the engineers of the physicist agreed with the physics statements but here's what I call the Swiss cheese mentality or the Swiss cheese view of knowledge or science coming into play here someone who was an expert in chemistry chemistry would see what we had done there and would say well yes that's that's fine but your problems were over here in geology or physics or something and there are biochemistry and then someone else who would was was expert in geology or physics would read those parts and would say well those parts are fine but your chemistry needs to be worked on over here and what we've discovered was that people's knowledge in their own area was was up-to-date but their knowledge outside their discipline was was behind a few years and they hadn't realized that enough criticism over the whole field had been such as to basically question the credibility of this whole enterprise as the dominating dominating paradigm for how life occurred on this planet what was his response to the mystery of life's origin ah that was an interesting experience let me tell about the time that I first met professor Kenyon and the response that he gave to the book I had wanted him to write the foreword to the book because his own book had stimulated my own thinking so much in the beginning of it and I went to California in San Francisco State and met him after he had already had the manuscript for some time and went in to see him and he was very you know no clues given with body language or gestures or smiles or anything like this that that he accepted the point of view of the book and I was really somewhat apprehensive that how he might have found all manner of objections that would just undermine the whole thing because I at that point as I mentioned I we still felt fairly alone out there and stranded and isolated and after a few minutes of just quiet in his office and discussion about general things I said well if Esther Kenyon what's your response to the book and I he was just became very animated after a few seconds he says I really liked it and my I don't know what caused me to say this is my first response well then why don't you write the foreword to the book and as I can remember he said well I was hoping you would ask me that and so that's how he became together to write the foreword but he was very favourably impressed with the overall treatment he had some critical comments to make here and there and and we address those but I think that he felt like it was a it was the kind of response that he wanted to give but because of administrative duties of things didn't have time to go back and make those changes I hope he will revise and update his own book because it was certainly a masterfully done work were you a bit apprehensive about meeting Kenyon after writing a book which was critical of his views and biochemical predestination yes I was apprehensive about meeting Kenyon that first time because I wasn't sure how he would receive it I mean if in fact he had been where he was with biochemical predestination I would have imagined it would be come across overall as a very devastating jolt to his prior position and it certainly was but he as he said that over the years in fact he said one thing that very that was very interesting to me he said even at the time they were writing the book he was aware of these problems and I think all of the researchers are aware of these problems it's not that they don't know I think the problem is that the that the dominant perception or philosophy of the culture is such that it's not attractive to question and you must go on and and do research along the old paradigm even if it doesn't give us the results that we know meets our experience and fortunately there's a growing body of people who are beginning to question these things and to come out but the whole paradigm itself is effectively dead in my opinion our self organizational theory is plausible well there are a lot of people who are still doing the self organizational work as you mentioned I think frankly though they there aren't any realistic self organization studies that have been done when I say that I mean that they presuppose that you have gotten past some way you've solved all the problems at the monomer level that I've already discussed and that's why I mean that they're not any realistic ones and that you just don't have examples that fit what we say must have been like without in an investigator interference would you comment on the work done by Prigogine and eigen pretty genes work has often been looked at as a solution to the problems we talked about but British genes work doesn't solve these problems and here's why Priya Jane is talking about specificity he can produce this in his system he can produce but he cannot produce specified complexity and this is the real issue we're not trying to produce a system that can just get nucleotides to form you've got to produce them in the right way and not even prejean has solved that problem even of producing the nucleotides you know the poly nucleotides he solved he's done a very good work I first learned about bridging as a graduate student learning about his irreversible thermodynamic processes years ago and of course after he had developed a lot of this area of work and it was a legitimate bona fide Nobel Prize he received but people I think are unduly capitalizing on that as he has written about the origin of life he has not solved this problem and I think even he would acknowledge this and certainly Manfred eigen knows that his hypercycle is way too complex even at the outset he is another example of someone who's a Nobel Prize winning physicist who came into the area of biology to try to explain the origin of life and has done has offered one of the best theoretical explanations if you had this high level of complexity certain minimum level of complexity of what he calls the hyper cycle but again that is way too complex and he himself has acknowledged that it would not come although he writes as if well the prebiotic soup would give us this you look at his research papers he says the prebiotic soup and then kind of it's almost like hand waving and then we get to the hyper cycle and then we get these other things no one realistically addresses the key problems of this the key problems are how to produce how the key problem is the of how to make the legitimate polymers and how to make this the specificity problem how to solve this what is your assessment of RNA scenarios some years ago the suggestion was made that we have an RNA world now the reason why this became a subject of approach was the the recognition that RNA itself has some enzyme I mean it has some catalytic activity and prior to this that we were trying to look for some way to break out of the chicken and egg in an egg problem you have the the fact that DNA and proteins are both required for the living system the DNA is produced the proteins in a living system but really which came first and in this field of the origins of life there's a huge faction that says well proteins came first these would be the enzymes and then our other crowd said well DNA came first when it was discovered that RNA is one of the nucleic acids itself could serve as the conserve the capacity of a catalytic activity which the enzymes normally provide then it said oh we've solved this problem RNAs are the RNA world can account for the living system it was for a while there I think it was looked at it as perhaps realistic and there's still some people who still write as if this is solve the problem but conceptually I'm not conceptually but realistically on a primitive earth is where you have to deal with a problem because you cannot have RNA without ribose sugar and you cannot have RNA without the nucleic acid bases and adenine and and the other bases you cannot have RNA without phosphates well how do you get that from the prebiotic soup and this is the problem in fact in our one of our chapters and in the book the myth of the prebiotic soup deals with precisely this problem you just have to come to the conclusion if you know enough chemistry that our you take the chemistry realistically you might know enough chemistry but you have to overlook it to conclude that you can get RNA from a viable prebiotic soup I don't believe anybody in the world who realistically looks at this kind of chemistry could conclude that this is the way RNA came about what other problems do you see with an RNA world well other problems with the RNA world is that you must have a whole whole not just RNA but you must have the the other Associated substances they go along with it what you would really like if you were an advocate of this perspective is to have natural selection operate at these at this molecular level but of course the problem is and they're forced to this I believe these researchers are hedging on the definition of new of natural selection historically natural selection requires the living system well how do you apply then natural selection before the living system well it would help greatly if you could but no one has really satisfactorily explained how to do this so what happens it just gets posited well we had something like natural selection that have would have worked prior to the development of living system to what they mean is applied at the level of RNA for example and then maybe it would it would start working what what does nature selected that at that purely chemical level what sort of things are selected complexity order well that's still as far as I'm concerned no one's ever demonstrated that nature selects anything at this level it's just overall destructive processes in a realistic environment

Channel: Access Research Network

Views: 7,675

Rating: 4.5643563 out of 5

Keywords: Origin of Life, Creation–evolution Controversy (Literature Subject), Charles Thaxton, Intelligent Design, Abiogenesis, Darwin

Id: 5AXkrc2OSs4

Length: 73min 4sec (4384 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 24 2015