James Tour: The Mystery of the Origin of Life

[Music] so I'm gonna haven't gonna stand off to the side here because I've got to look back at them and like in the old days where you have to look back at the slides and use a laser pointer rather than so go ahead to the next slide this is just an overview of some of the work that we do in our group because because many times there will be criticisms of those who speak at conferences like this that they're not not practicing scientists that they they read papers and they write books but I write very few books in fact I've only written one book and I'll never do that again and I've written chapters for books it but only at great urging usually I just published papers we published papers and journals that's what we do in my world and so we work in a number of different areas and the reason I'm telling you all this is because I want you to see that I really am a practicing scientist and this is I rarely attend conferences like this I'm usually in conferences with with scientists and engineers but we work in an area called laser induced graphene that's where we can take this is a polyamide sheet and hit it with a laser and write patterns of graphene graphene is single sheets of graphite one atom thick and it's the strongest material known at that level and generally it's made made at high temperatures and this is all done in the air with a laser this is on bread that's not dropping down ink that is converting the carbohydrate atoms in the molecules and the bread there's carbon atoms in that bread - graphene so we convert that that's a coconut we turn into a super capacitor so we can do it on food you say why would you want to write patterns on food well why wouldn't you so if you have for example a potato and you can just market very quickly just as on every one of your plastic bottles it's a water bottle it has a little later laser scribe date if we can laser scribe electronics very quickly you would know exactly what field that potato was picked from what what date it was picked on and if you build in electronics you can put an e coli sensor or a cell Manila sensor you could build an electronics into food very rapidly we split carbon nanotubes and we use these in medicine and we use these also in electronics and batteries this is 2 terminal 2 terminal memory this is all gone commercial now this is commercial memory now two terminal memory we work in the area of traumatic brain injury and stroke there'll be a company launch this year for that and also dementia we work on super capacitors this is where we've taken asphalt and we we can't wrap over 200 or 8% co2 in it and we use it for removing co2 from natural gas that's all licensed by Apache this is the leg of a cockroach that we can turn into graphene we can take I wanted to take something of negative carbon value what has negative value what do you pay people to take away from you that's carbon I figured roaches we've done it with dog feces we can actually turn this into graphene now just evening an idea of why you would want to do this we did this with Girl Scout cookies if you calculate all the carbon and a box of Girl Scout cookies which is 4 dollars and you convert that into graphene that graphene that you could convert just from one box of Girl Scout cookies would be worth fifteen billion dollars which shows you that the value of a material it's not in the atoms itself it's in how those atoms are arranged just like if you take a person with the value of a human being just take take away the spirit this is just the fiscal entity just of like a robot what would be the value of a human robot now if you take that that that entity and you cremate it you get less than a penny of co2 and water out same atoms arranged differently being bring the change in value a piece of coal $60 a ton same atoms in in diamond which has very high value they're just rearranged differently this is where we take graphene grow carbon nanotubes this is a company the company that started built it's it's being built up right now just outside of Houston it's it's real in batteries we work a lot in these areas of cleaning up cleaning up water we work in these areas nanomachines if you click it once that this car will start to go so you click the slide advance once oh yeah that's not gonna run I forgot because it's been transferred so alright that that that's that's okay just just will trust me that that moves across the surface so so this what happens is is is this top part spins and pushes the car along and it spins it 3 million rotations per second and propels the car these cars are so small we can park 50 thousand of these across to the diameter the diameter of a human hair 50,000 of them and and they have little motors that are all light operated and now what we're doing is we're taking these same motors that spin at 3 million rotations per second we put on a peptide and that'll direct it to the surface of a cell a cell of choice depending on the peptide add and we put there and then we activate the motor and it spins at 3 million rotations per second it drills right through and the cell is dead in one minute he's drilling into cells so we're looking at this so if you'd advance to the next slide so these are just transitions to companies in the past five years graphing quantum dots that's commercial now it's working in anti-counterfeiting platforms and also for frack water tracking to terminal ultra-dense computer memory lithium metal batteries corrosion and inhibitors are already on the market the we're working on spinal cord repair peripheral nerve repair optic nerve repair we want to do the works of jesus christ we want to we want to want to make the lame walk and the blind see we've already made the deaf here so we're trying to build technologies that can do this and and and this is real we do this type of thing we can cut a spinal cord completely in half in a rat and infuse this back up so the rat within three weeks has a 19 out of 20 121 is the highest mobility that the the that can be achieved can't so can get to near perfect mobility within three weeks so that that's a company now that's going in in Tel Aviv Israel treatment of pancreatic cancer that's that'll be in clinical trials within one year at MD Anderson Cancer Center DNA sequencing this is doing the entire human genome map entire human genome not just 23andme the entire genome in for a hundred dollars in one hour this opens it up now to everyone in the world we work in this area of water purification based on laser induced graphene we have inserts for texting with long fingernails so if you have long fingernails and it's hard to text we've got a little thing you can you just put it on your fingernails and you can text just fine there's there's actually a big demand for that and this is this is real stuff this is the traumatic brain injury stroke and dementia drug that's this will accompany will launch this year graphene synthesis at a hundred dollars per ton and energy cost going to concrete plastic and metal so at launch this year and then the molecular nano machines to kill cells and scoring the cancer and the killing of superbugs these things that are not are not are resistant to antibiotic antibiotic resistance we can drill right through them and a friend of mine here Richard is here and he works on this as well so the these are air is so we're real scientists we do real things okay next slide and the next slide this movie's not gonna run so just go to the next slide there there's Richard there and let's go to the next slide that was the research group so we're gonna get into the the talk at hand I'm not going to make any reference to God any reference to intelligent designer any or anything I'm just going to allow science to critique the science what do we have to say about origin of life what does science tell us what what can we infer here and so by choice I am NOT going to mention God because if I mention God and Jesus Christ people will say oh tor introduce the baby Jesus to talk about this it's not a real talk this pure scientific talk this would work in in any in any medical school in it in in any chemistry department next slide so this is a cell what is the origin of life how do you get a cell like this what is the origin of something like this this is an amazing machine of cell is an amazing machine it's not just a blob of protoplasm every day it gets harder to have the origin of life to come up with a scenario because the origin of life becomes more and more complex every day a cell is a factory it has the lipid bilayer which is extremely selective to let certain things in and not other things it has all of this sub structure in here these little areas where energy is made in here it has these microtubules which can form so you can move matter from point A to point B if you go to a factory what you see is you see these overhead hanging machines that are moving materials from point A to point B in in in in in these systems and the way they do this is they build these racks but you same things happens in a cell you get these microtubules to move material from point A to point B and then as soon as the material is done moving the microtubule breaks down and then assemble some other place you say well why doesn't leave it there because then the cell would become too rigid so just rebuilds it it's just amazing Factory what's happening in a Cell this is what we have to make if we want to have origin of life you got to start here you don't start here you start with a single cell just build a single cell that's what we have to do in origin of life nobody has ever done this if you've been taught that simple forms of life have been made that is a lie that you are believing somebody told you a lie that has never been done nextslide organisms care about life molecules don't care chemistry on the contrary is utterly indifferent to life without a biologically derived entity acting upon them molecules have never been shown to evolve toward life never molecules don't care about life they don't know anything about moving toward life they have no brain organisms want to move toward life and keep life going molecules don't care about life nobody has ever seeing molecules assembled toward life never doesn't happen without a biological entity working on them I asked all my colleagues can you show me an example of this of molecules moving toward order moving toward an ordered system where you have a non regular assembly regular assemblies like a AAA or a bab that you can get pure thermodynamic assembly but non order assembly is a non regular pattern that's what you have in DNA we know from computer science you have to have non regular patterns in order to have complexity for living systems and I asked my colleagues do you have any example of molecules without a biological entity acting upon them moving in in in to give an ordered assembly that is a non regular pattern and they sent me papers where chemists have taken molecules and assembled them in that way is it non biological entity you can't have a human doing this but molecules don't move toward life well even if you want to have molecules move toward life and you have human beings working upon them can the human beings do it and the answer's no next slide so almost every chemical synthesis experiment an origin of life research can be summed up by a protocol analogous to this you they purchase chemicals generally in high purity from a chemical company all right so that's what they do they first purchase the chemicals they mix those chemicals together in water and high concentrations in a specific order under some set of carefully devised conditions in the modern lab then they can obtain a mixture of compounds that have a resemblance to one or more more of the basic four classes of chemicals needed for life so what you need for life is you need carbohydrates nucleic acids amino acids and lipids that's what we know all life we know composes those four building blocks so they try to make those four building blocks then they publish a paper making bold assertions about origin of life from these functionalist crude mixtures of stereochemically scrambled intermediates much like Miller did in 1952 nothing has changed in 66 years nothing nothing's changed exactly where we were in 1952 is exactly where we have remained think about what's been done in science in the past sixty years think about how we have now satellite connectivity remember 1952 there had never been a satellite now we have satellite connectivity we have cell phones we have structure of DNA we can manipulate DNA structure nothing has changed an origin of life studies in 66 years that's important to realize then you engage with the ever ever gullible press to dial up the knob of unjustified extrapolations watch the mesmerized layperson exclaimed you see scientists understand how life formed then you encourage a generation of science textbook writers to make colorful deceptive cartoons of raw chemicals assembling from cells which then emerge as slithering creatures from a prehistoric pond that is exactly what it's done every one of their experiments it's all done like this every one of their experiments can be fit into this and so what's gonna happen is I'm gonna go back and a bunch you're gonna send me articles look at this these people have made life haven't they it fits into this trust me it fits into this every one of them next slide so here's the synthesis problem if you just want to make the molecules remember we have to make those four classes of molecules if you just want to make the molecules here's what you got to do molecules that compose living systems almost always show homo chirality meaning that they they have they have one handedness and not the other the vast majority of biological molecules except for very small ones like water and an acetic acid anything larger than that they're mirror images just like your left hand in your right hand or mirror images they're non superimposable you can't put a left-handed glove on your right hand it doesn't fit all molecules are like that in biology that is hard to make it is very hard to make just one mirror image of a compound it can be done but it's very hard so that's part of the problem when you're building molecular systems constant redesigns are needed to take the synthesis back to step one so that take the synthesis back to step one so in other words when you're going and you're making something you're like oh boy those conditions didn't work my stuff decomposed so you go back to step one and you bring through more start material and so you take small amounts you try this you try this anything that would be happening in a prebiotic earth it's marching along trying to make something if it makes a mistake you can't pull that entity off very hard to pull the end of the off once it's on there it's on there so you've been going along say for 400 million years if you want to take these sorts of numbers and all of a sudden it's put a wrong moiety on there oh what am I gonna do well you got to go back to step one I got to go back 400 million years yeah you got to go back there well I don't know how to go back well why not because I never kept a laboratory notebook when you don't keep a record of it you don't even know how to go back you don't even know what you're going toward because it doesn't know that it's moving toward life remember molecules have no brain they don't know where they're going that's the synthesis problem and they don't know how to stop the course of progression or why to stop there's no target they don't know I think we'll form life today I think we'll make a certain cell you don't know that molecules don't know that so they're going along and things are chemical reactions are happening it doesn't have a target when you're in the lab you're going toward a particular target you know where you're headed here it doesn't know where it when to stop or how to stop maybe it's made a carbohydrate it doesn't say why made a carbohydrate I think I'll stop synthesis I know it'll go on and make something else from that doesn't know how to stop time although claim to be the great savior of abiogenesis that's the that before there's biology abiogenesis can actually be the enemy for example carbohydrates are kinetic products they undergo caramelization or the kena's are reaction they decompose so in other words when you make a carbohydrate that is not the final product that would form in that reaction make sure you have to stop the reaction so a chemist watches the reaction and they stop it at a certain time to stop that progression of the molecule going on if this is just undirected unguided it keeps going to other garbage carbohydrates are kinetic products meaning is that they caramelize they polymerize into a bunch of trash just like when you take sugar and you heat the thing up on the oven and things turns into caramel that's what happens to carbohydrates they don't stay nice simple carbohydrates they end up actually dehydrating a prebiotic system doesn't have the ability to easily easily purify the structures you have to be able to purify because if you cannot purify then the byproducts build up in the system and they start using up your starting material and they start inhibiting the reactions that you want you have to be able to do purification without purification you can't work every chemist has to run a reaction then you stop you purify you get a pure and you go on the next step once in a while if it's a really pure reaction you can go on one or two steps but you have to purify reagent order is essential reagent addition order you can't just say all the reagents mix it together and you get what you got you're making a cake you got your flour you got your milk you got your eggs you say well I think I'll just add the frosting now no there's an order to this this is real this is what you do in chemistry things have to be added at certain times you can't just add it whenever you want to reagent addition order at proper timing is critical the parameters for temperature pressure solvent light know like pH atmospheric gases have to be carefully controlled in order to build complex molecular structure there's no way around it this is what's needed you have to have characterization at each step this is hard to do chemists have to characterize things at each step because you have to make sure what you've got before you can go on to the next step how does nature characterize well right now biological systems characterize things by every time it makes something there's an enzyme that checks that structure if it's not the right structure there are other enzymes that come and chop that up into smaller pieces and try rebuilding it again you get a mistake in in the DNA you have enzymes that run up and down the DNA find this mistake excise it and then stick in the right base there but in a prebiotic biological world there are no enzymes how does it check it and every time whatever it's using to check it whatever system is needed to check it is more complex than the system that it's checking so where'd you get that from nobody knows everybody's clueless on this but nobody wants to admit it there's a the mass transfer problem this seems like nothing not a problem to you but let me tell you something this is the killer of it all anybody are there any synthetic organic chemist in here any synthetic chemists here any synthetic chemists get your hand up high one there okay so if and one there okay if if I say something that's not true I want you to stand up and just say liar all right if I say something that's not true just stand up all right because I want these people enough for all they know I'm lying you have to you have to verify on this all right the mass transfer problem anybody who's done complex organic synthesis what you do is you start with with like a half a kilo of material and you go along and and your yields are never 100% you're purifying you're going and you end up with two milligrams and you're not at your target yet so what do you do then you go back to the beginning and you make more and you follow the defined route that you had defined before and so now you can keep your yields higher but you keep having to go back and pull up starting material from the rear you're bringing up more material how do you do that so stay in nature they started safe somehow it started and then got a kilo of of formaldehyde an acetone and it's going to start combining these so these are going to go along and start reacting at some point it's going to run out of material how do you go back to the beginning and get more again you never kept the laboratory notebook so you never know how you got there so even if you could repeat it and go down the same junkie path and you run out again you never get to where you want to go nature keeps no laboratory notebook next slide so this is this is just the motor part on the nanomachines we were building nano cars we actually won in 2017 the International nano car race it was the first race we're 150 nanometers in an hour and a half and and that sounds like a long time to go 150 nanometers but we actually we actually the the the the second place people behind us we're the Swiss team took them five hours beyond us so it took them six and a half hours total and none of the other international teams were able to complete the race in 30 hours so not easy to 150 nanometers when you're driving these little car but anyway so this is the motor on just the car and so you see these different steps you wreck you reacted at all these different temperatures here's you have to have it at five degrees then cool it to minus 10 and minus 15 and then minus 50 degrees here and then then you run these reactions this one's done at 130 degrees this 116 what's the temperature what's your problem what weren't your cold hot cold hot why do you do this oh because we just like to we just like the cool things uh cool things down and he think no you have to each step needs its own parameters how does nature know that well it was you know it's it's some deep-sea vent okay so warmed up there and then what then it left the vent then it you know ended up it's some other really cold place and then went back and then went back back nobody nobody knows any and how any of this ever happened in nature nobody knows next slide so this is the experimental procedure so what you do you take an oven dry three bottom or the three neck round bottom flask and you charge it with 33 you add magnesium sulfate and dichloromethane and you cool it down cool it down here cool it down this is one step just one step on that thing and then then you get the this is just one step there's all these things you got to do you have to know what you're doing even if I just gave this to you you wouldn't know what to do so you have to be an experienced chemist to take this and be able to repeat this so what is a mindless a biological system I didn't know how to do nobody knows next slide then you have to characterize once you make what you want you have to characterize this we have this tool called NMR and you get these Peaks and from these Peaks you assign the structure so you can get the exact structure this is how all the pharmaceuticals that you take this is how the structures are assigned you run these spectra and you say well nature doesn't have to do this it doesn't nature uses a more complex system it has a different glove for every hand in nature a different enzyme that that detects structure problems it's more complex than this this is a general tool but the next slide shows us next slide this is the this is what we have to write to convince our colleagues that we got what we thought we got a combination of standard what deuterium proton c-13 depth 135 c-13 experiments with standard 2d h1 h1 cosy h1 h1 noe boom bleached so you go all through this not done next slide so that's part 2 all of that needed to just characterize the one molecule characterization is harder than synthesis it really is any chemist will tell you you can make something but it takes you a lot longer to characterize and you have to know the structure because you have to know what to do for the next step nature is confronted with the same thing all the time making molecules is hard next slide this paper had 281 pages of supplemental characterization data I showed you a paragraph of characterization 281 pages of that to convince the world that we made what we were making when we made those light driven motorised nano cars has a dumb a biological world ever do this nobody knows they're all clueless but scientists aren't saying how hard it is next slide this was the first generation motor that we put in the car it worked but it only rotated 1.8 revolutions per hour when we when we rebuild it without that sulfur atom there then the five-member ring then it goes three million rotations per second alright so small changes can make a big difference well what do you do well what do you do is you just come here and you erase that sulfur and you do that now that you can do on a blackboard but this took us back to step 1 this is what I'm talking about when something you're going along and you want to build and you say oh I'm just near life if you have one thing wrong it doesn't work so well you just modify this and it'll work alright go back to the beginning go back a billion years to the beginning it's too hard nobody knows how this thing is solved you can't build the molecules next slide and then so remember these just to make the molecules the simple molecules you got to have the carbohydrates you you have to have the lipids you have to have the the nucleic acids you have to have the proteins even if you make an amino acid how do you hook the amino acids together amino acids don't hook together by themselves we're not even talking about order how do you just get him to hook I mean somebody sent me a paper just last night I mean here's a paper just came out on self folding molecules well dot it doesn't prove anything you build a molecule it folds up big deal how do you get these things to hook together in the first place nobody knows that's that's with amino acids how about with nucleotides you want to get these things to hook up people will make a nucleotide we've got DNA no you don't have DNA you got to get these nucleotides to hook up look at a DNA synthesizer how many steps are blocking protection D protection you need to do the complex chemistry just to get one linkage you made nobody knows how you can throw all these together in a flash people say well the concentration of new tides was very high I've read this in high school books it was very high and these things came together but you calculate the concentration the world would have to be raining nucleotides and even if it were raining nucleotides at those concentrations they wouldn't hook up they don't hook up you need enzymes to hook them up but this is prebiotic there's no enzymes here or you need very complex DNA synthesizers those weren't there either on early Earth now you have to assemble it so say we had the mileage how can you get them to assemble so here's the assembly experiments a protocell is a self-organized and dodges the ordered spherical collection of lipid lipids proposed as a stepping stone to origin of life so that that's what a protocell is is it but most so-called protocell assembly experiments an origin of life research can be summed up by protocol analogous to this you purchase homo chiral die ACO lipids from a chemical company or you synthesize stairs scrambled one lipids for smaller molecules add those lipids to water and observe a small amount of it to form simple and expected thermo dynamically driven assembly of those lipids into synthetic bilayer vesicles upon agitation sometimes the researchers will add other molecules they get engulfed by those vesicles then you publish a paper claiming that the synthetic vesicle the synthetic vesicle is a protocell and suggestive of early forms of life engage with the media hype it up watch layperson be misled every assembly experiment I'm telling you can be summarized in this whatever you send me don't send me any more I've dealt with it all alright I get enough of them and people say well what about this one what about this one and it fits all into this it's all garbage all garbage next slide next slide ok so the complex cellular membrane so this is actually what the the membrane of a cell looks like when it's made really really simple in cartoon form so researchers have identified thousands actually 40,000 different lipids now have them identified in cell membranes not just one every protocell experiment they use one type of lipid actually cell is made up of thousands of different types and mixtures of mono ACO lipids destabilize the system so when they have their mono ACO lipids those would destabilize the systems you can't use those lipid bilayers surrounds sub cellular organelles such as nuclei and mitochondria which are themselves micro system assemblies each of these has their own lipid composition so this is a lipid bilayer you have some pointing out toward water some pointing in toward the water on the interior of the cell and the outside ones are different than the inside ones nobody knows how that was done nobody knows clueless nobody knows how that was done every protocell experiment just uses homogeneity throughout the whole thing and so so so it doesn't doesn't it's not really a protocell it's really reminiscent of a cell now within each one of those you have other organelles like nuclei mitochondria that have their own bilayer assemblies with their own constitution different than what's on the outside of the cell nobody knows how that was done plus these have these proteins so there's this this non symmetric distribution then there's proteins that go through here these are ionophores that allow certain things into the cell and certain things out without that you can't let anything into the cell it's gonna kill the cell there's a it has very discreet sensors that allow certain molecules to get in certain other molecules to get out and has ionophores allow certain ions in certain ions out to keep the ionic concentration at a certain level for maintenance of that cell as soon as that ionic concentration gets off you know what happens boom the cell explodes because the ionic constrict concentration has gotten off it blebs and explodes nobody knows how that is done none of the protocell experiments none of them have these proteins going through them as these control gateways then then there's also lipid bilayers have a vast number of carbohydrate appendages so all off of these this is a carbohydrate appendage it's called the glycan the artist is just showing us a few of these a cell is covered with these this is how cells recognize each other how does one cell recognize another cell by these carbohydrate assemblies that they recognize each other they have this recognition patterns and so you can tell one cell from another and so if you just take nucleotides if you just take DNA DNA Oh DNA so complex and it has so much information if you have six a basis AAA AAA how can you arrange those what are the different ways you can arrange it just that one a that's it one way you can arrange six bases look at carbohydrates if you just take the carbohydrate deep here notes just a standard carbohydrate just deep your nose you have six of those has over one trillion ways it can assemble one trillion ways it can assemble just with six of them these have much more than six and if it's not assembled right guess what the cell dies you change any one of the carbohydrates it results in cell death there is much more information stored in carbohydrate assembly than in DNA yeah much more information can be stored in carbohydrates you want to build a massive computer build it based on carbohydrate assembly much better than DNA assembling this is a carbohydrate assemblies really hard to control nobody knows how to control this nobody but somehow on a prebiotic earth with nobody around under a rock it figured this out how do origin of life researchers address this problem they don't they don't nextslide interact ohms this is the non covalent interactions that function within a cell nobody knows how a viable cell emerges from massive combinatorial complexity of its molecular components and of course nobody's ever synthetically mimicked it and interact on is the whole set of molecular interactions in the particular cell if one merely considers protein-protein interaction combinations in just a single yeast cell the result is an estimated 10 to the 79 billion combinations that's estimated by the these folks at Johns Hopkins and Brussels all right that's not my estimation these are the these are biophysicists alright so just to give us an idea of how big that number is that's 10 to the 90th is the number of elemental particles in the universe that's 10 to the ninetieth this is 10 to the 79 billion that's a big big number people do not understand numbers they just don't you say a million dollars a billion dollars what's the difference a million dollars or a billion dollars well let me put it in a way that you understand a million seconds is 11 days so you ask somebody will you marry me I'll tell you in a million seconds okay if they say a billion seconds that's 32 years uh-huh you feel that now a million to a billion and then if they say a trillion seconds that's 32 thousand years huh you see the difference when you go up three orders of magnitude you go a million ten to the sixth to ten to the ninth to ten to the twelfth that's 10 to the 79 billion that number is crazy big that's just in a single you sell the interactions between the non-bonded interactions so how does it interfere information flow information flows through non-bonded interactions through electrostatic potentials which physicists called a virtual photon information goes down these at the speed of light that depends on ordering between molecules non-covalent interactions these have to be all kind of assembled right and that's why this information you don't dehydrate cells and rehydrate them and get them to work properly when a cell divides it collapses down puts the information on both halves and brings it into both sides so that that information keeps going to the next and the next generation because when you lose these intermolecular interactions that are non covalent non attached you've lost your information flow big problem nobody has explains nobody nobody an origin of life ever mentions the word interact Ohm's never will you hear it in their literature next slide proto turkeys origin of life protocell assembly is 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 turkey or extant turkey has been synthesized this is exactly what is done origin of life experiments is exactly what is done if given enough time a Turkey's gonna come out and people buy this stuff there's a whole area of research called origin of life research and they've been doing this same thing since 1952 next slide critical for life is the origin of information DNA or RNA the information is primary and the matter is secondary we can't even get the matter carbohydrates nucleic acids lipids proteins let alone the information what is the code even if you had the nucleic acids and even if you could hook them up which the code where do you get that code so we heard a little bit about this earlier in in this in this conference the information is primary that's the information it can be stored on all sorts of mediums so so I have an idea and then then I transcribed this onto a piece of paper and now it's on the paper and then I type this into my my computer and it goes into into DRAM and then when I hit save it goes into flash memory and then when I upload it to the web that same information I was going through an RF wave into a box on the wall and then from that box on the wall is going through wire to some server farm someplace where it goes right back down into transistor base flash memory that same information which was here in my hand to the paper in my computer in several different forms in in an RF wave same information different medium the information is primary the medium can change all the time so for example the molecules in our bodies are always changing it used to be said that the molecules in our bodies turnover are changed every seven years and that's a bunch of nonsense they've changed continually it's much less than seven years and some guys wrote well the molecules in your teeth aren't changed and then they send just I did one second Google search I mean your teeth are constantly you get dissolution read that position constantly changing every molecule in your body is undergoing a proton exchange but proton comes with a spin up a proton comes through the spin down every one of these now is a different molecule in the sense it has different atoms that come that make it up maybe the same pattern of atoms but a different atom you had a different proton exchange every molecule is continuing to change we are dynamic structures constantly changing what is the real me I don't know what the real me is if you want to say it's the matter is the real me then you got a big problem because it's constantly changing this is what we were talking about earlier the difference between brain and mind what is the real me next slide you try to build a cell even hypothetically get the dream can get the smartest people together can they build a living cell I'll give you all all the chemicals you want in houma chiral form and I'll give you even the informational code I'll give you the whole code in other words you tell me how you want the DNA set up I'll give it all to you now just assemble a cell go ahead you got all your die ACO lipids all in chiral form make your protocell make it put in your peptides any way you want set it up get your carbohydrates out there I'll even hook the carbohydrates together you just tell me the pattern you want then you got to stick them on yourself can you do it no nobody can nobody nobody's ever done it nobody can do it that's not to say it won't ever be done I'm just telling you as of today it hasn't been done and it's far far away from being able to do it people will quote to me this synthetic cells well in 2010 Craig Venters group copied an existing bacterial genome and transport rants planted it into an another cell so what happens i buy i buy say a corvette and so what do i do i take i take the computer control box out of that corvette and I go to my clean room at the University and I copy the chips I copy and I put my chips that I copied into that control box and then go back and they stick that in my Corvette and I say I built that Corvette I made that Corvette I I did that he just copied the same chip and he put it back in that's all he did he took another one in 2016 and he did something similar but he took the control box and he knocked out all but 473 of the working devices and he stuck it back in the cell and like whoa you made it tell no he didn't you just made a cell worse you just chopped out a bunch of stuff and left just a few pieces to keep it operating enough it didn't make the selfish all this complexity all these Interactive's nobody ever made that nobody knows how to do it next slide so here's what's written in in in books that people read people like you what is like I never read these books you never see people like me read these books this is the the masses but this is what they tell you so here's the science writer Regis he says life began with little bags of garbage random assortments of molecules doing some crude kind of metabolism that is stage one the garbage bags grow and occasionally split into two and the ones that grow and split fastest win it's in his book on what is life by Oxford University Press well few origin of life researchers which stayed it so shamelessly none nonetheless little bags of garbage too precisely what they've been making and those little bags of garbage have little more resemblance to living cells than a big bag of garbage to a horse next slide so you say well that's a book from 2009 well let me show you the primary literature 2018 in the journal Nature this is our top journal you want to see what nature will publish in this area none of us could get away with this except origin of life researchers do this guy is Nobel laureate Jack szostak here's what he writes on Anana how did life begin let's go through it I'm interested I mean guys Nobel Prize winner he must not the early atmosphere had no oxygen it consisted mainly of nitrogen carbon side with smaller amounts of hydrogen water and methane lightning asteroid impacts UV light from the Sun acted on the atmosphere to generate hydrogen cyanide a compound of hydrogen carbon and nitrogen raining into volcanic or crater lakes the cyanide reacted with iron brought up water circulating through rocks the resulting iron cyanide compounds accumulated over time building up into a concentration stew of reactive chemicals okay cool where our life as we know it requires RNA some scientists believe that RNA emerged directly from these reactive chemicals nudged along by Namek forces in the environment huh nudged has no you can't put nudged in any of our articles no scientist knows what nudged means they don't know nucleotides the building blocks of RNA eventually formed then joined together to make strands of RNA some stages of the process are still not well understood you think how do these things hook together show me the chemistry it's not there once RNA was made some strands if it become enclosed within tiny vesicles formed by spontaneous assembly of fatty acid lipids in the membranes creating the first protocells as the membranes incorporated more fatty acids they grew and divided at the same time internal chemical reactions drove replication of encapsulated RNA that is nonsense next slide here is next slide the figure that he showed this is the figure from nature this is his figure cyanide derivatives and simple sugars those are not sugars he says this is oxygen carbon nitrogen phosphorus that's fictitious I don't know any sugars that have that chemical composition you don't know that he's lying to you that's not real is this HCN I mean there's you should be a carbon a nitrogen and a hydrogen if that's HCN and I you know I'm color blind today I can see that's not really HCN I don't know what that is maybe that's phosphate I can see that that'd be phosphorous oxygen maybe that's phosphate okay and then all of a sudden you got an art name nucleotide but the problem is that's not a nucleotide it's a wrong structure by far that's wrong sure he didn't even put the right structure at least he could have put the right structure he didn't put the right structure well what what's acting upon this to make it do this well heat from here UV light from there nobody knows that's in nature that's not in an eighth grade textbook from 2018 people think I selectively choose these things from crazy places no this is nature 2018 this is what confuses even professors see this and they think Oh see if people know nobody knows this is a bunch of garbage this is garbage next slide all right exquisite exactness is needed in synthetic protocols this is one of the kingpins an origin of life research from from Oxford John Sutherland I've never spoken to John I'm not sure he likes me but but so here this is from chemistry in nature chemistry 2015 next slide so you go back to his protocols you read you go to the Supplemental procedures you read his protocols it is amazing how hard it is to make the things that he says he wants to make and then he he makes a little bit of it and it's a bunch of junk and so then he says well we'll just use synthetic organic techniques real techniques to make more just to simplify handling procedures come on because you can only make like a fraction of it and you wanted to carry it on but you it was just a bunch of junk it was just a peak and that it's not real and even with all your synthetic prowess and these are just four these are just for intermediate it's not even the real compounds next slide so to give you an idea so so he takes copper one and and he says he makes it copper chloride was mixed with potassium chloride to generate the Newland catalyst at 70 degrees so this is supposed to mimic a prebiotic earth but he's using all clean glassware he's not under Iraq Rocky's in an advanced organic lab separately generated source of acetylene was prepared from calcium carbide and water this gas was bubbled through the Newland catalyst prepare acrylonitrile this is a highly unstable molecule you look at the Crillon I try a little polymerize when you buy it you buy it with stabilizers to keep it from polymerizing so so he has to properly inhibit his polymerization in store then he treated with a potassium cyanide for one hour with five equivalents of ammonia as a 13 molar ammonia ammonium solution adjusted the pH 9.2 with sodium hydroxide to generate the immediately desired amino appropriate nitrile I mean this is hard chemistry to do even if I gave this to synthetic chemist this would be hard to pull off hard hard chemistry there's all this even the most skilled synthetic chemist repairing a very simple precursors to very few of the molecules within the building block class and all the precursors and then we're all racemic at that next slide then he even goes so far as to say all the cellular subsystems could have arisen simultaneously through common chemistry that is crazy I'll tell you if you work in the area of nanotechnology you try to build systems you take molecules to build a new system that functioned he says they all could have arisen simultaneously through common chemistry that's a lie and it's accepted in the best of journals this is crazy all he made was a couple of precursors and he's going into the Assembly of all substances show me two could have happened show me he'll never show you next slide so then then here's an article from 12 December 2018 so this is like a month ago this comes out now in Nature communications prebiotic chemistry and human intervention so now they're saying yeah you know if you're really going to copy prebiotic chemistry you can't have too much intervention so they're beginning to catch on I'm surprised the Journal took this he says such a pure chemical scenarios unrealistic prebiotic Li but necessary he's saying if you want to do something free robotically you gotta have clean chemicals he says nobody's really explain this furthermore the ideal experiment does not involve any human intervention so this is this guy clemens richard the beginning to catch on next slide how close have researchers come to making an artificial cell well we know now we know how far they have closed they've come how do we know because in November 2018 it's just a couple months ago science magazine top Journal since biologists create the most artificial like the most lifelike artificial cells whoa I want to see what they've made lets he'll see how far along it really is next slide so they're commenting on this article which appeared in Nature communications in November 2018 communication and quorum sensing in nonliving mimics of eukaryotic cells Wow it made these cells and their to communicating with on one another quorum sensing meaning that they can tell distance between each other let me read about this next slide so semi-porous microcapsules were made of plastic plastic from acrylate polymerization containing clay were prepared using modern microfluidic techniques done within a fabrication devices so you go into a cleanroom you build microfluidic devices and you take you polymerize you make polymers around clay that's all well known how to do that that's what they did these are plastic shells clays have a high affinity for binding DNA because clays are positively charged DNA is negatively charged so you add DNA to the solution it goes through the porous plastic and binds to the clay then they add in they by ribosomes and and RNA enzymes and reagents would purchase are extracted and they add that to the medium those diffuse into and the normal protein synthesis starts taking place which which is normal synthesis and then some of that diffuses out of those and then the nearby ones they add some of it if into the nearby ones the ones that are near get more diffused into them than the ones further away well duh that's normal diffusion gradient the ones that are closer get hit more often the chemistry's gonna work nextslide the chemistry of the exogenous Lee added reagents will work regardless of the container whether it's a plastic semi-porous micro capsule as was used in a test tube or in a large industrial production van the chemistry is the same it's done all the time you take these biological derived systems you add them together proteins will start being made this is how proteins are made you know you buy these drugs how do they made they're made in that well this guy did it in a little micro capsule that's the most lifelike system that's ever been made according to science magazine that's it so it is far from the press hype claims of gene expression and communication rivaling that of living cells that's what the press is saying there is no rivalry here no one further one might arguably agree that these are indeed the most lifelike artificial cells yet but that only serves to underscore the point nobody has ever come close to generating the workings of life nobody's even close you do this chemistry in the lab all the time so they did it in a microporous capsule and they said whoa this is life my test tube is life then next line fool's gold so so uh if you take sulfur and you add it to different Mediterranean sulfide well when alchemists made iron sulfide don't you think they would think that wow if you add enough sulfur different elements it's gonna start being gold they knew it wasn't gold it didn't have the same ductility didn't have the same melting point but wouldn't they have thought hey we're at least were going in the right direction they would have thought that but no you're totally wrong you can add sulfur to any element you want all day it's never going to turn into gold we know now the only way to make gold from another as you change the number of protons then you need a nuclear process which is a lot more expensive than gold so you can get thrown off just because it looks like gold it's not really gold and you're way off base next slide so what I'm saying is I'd like to have a moratorium on the origin of life research so a change is warranted and and we've got to change the way we do things and and we need to address fundamental problems here in origin of life research next slide again one more slide here's the ramifications of colin conjectures facts claims that mislead the patient taxpayer are unhelpful and the public will even distrust scientific claims into other fields uncorrected or unfounded assertions jeopardize science beyond a singular field especially since there's mounting distrust of higher education in general condescending comments toward the public or a student if they will not embrace our conjectures as facts will lead to continued division between our scientists and non-scientists which can kneel public reluctance to fund our research we must tell the truth wood with specificity if it is a fact saying if it's not a fact say it blackballing scientists if they bear legitimate nonconformist views by excluding them from professional societies and academies withholding their or their funding or denying them tenure is anti scientific and it will the advancement of science next slide I'm just gonna finish up quickly now I'm done with the technical talk I'm gonna come back to the Bible a scientific fact water has two hydrogen's one oxygen that's a fact that's not going to change anywhere in the universe there's never been discordant between the scientific facts and statements in the Bible so there's no need to reconcile them so-called scientific facts which are really theories are constantly changing even on the order of decades and certainly on the order of a century so trying to twist the Bible of fit the scientific theories of frustrating endeavor don't let professors with their bold claims of facts upset you theories or conjectures are not facts but unfortunately and shamefully many professors themselves do not make the necessary distinctions this leads to the confusion of generations of students and even professors themselves I am Telling You professors are confused on these issues professors think that simple forms of life have been made they're confused on these issues and I'll close with this Bible verse next slide you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer the Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul it is the Lord your God you must follow and him you must reveal keep his Commandments obey him serve him and hold him fast when your students go off into the universities and they hear these things these are false prophets speaking to them some of them are sincere but they're sincerely false prophets some of them are sincerely misleading people as believers you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer the Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you really love him or not he's testing you keep his commandments obey Him serve Him and hold him fast thank you [Music]

Channel: Discovery Science

Views: 658,560

Rating: 4.7955184 out of 5

Keywords: science, philosophy, biology, evolution, Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, human origins, science and faith, intelligent design, Discovery Institute, Charles Darwin, biologic institute, icons of evolution, darwin's doubt, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Douglas, Axe, Evolution News & Views, Michael Behe, William Dembski, John West, Jay W. Richards, Darwin Day in America, Darwin's Black Box, Privileged Planet, James Tour

Id: zU7Lww-sBPg

Length: 58min 1sec (3481 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/stcordova]

Thank you!

[u/[deleted]]

I love James Tour, he does present an excellent argument for design. As a hardened Darwinist, I needed to hear this kind of evidence to reconsider alternative hypotheses for origins and biodiversity.

[u/marsavela]

Thank you for sharing it. Really good.

[u/SomniumCorvus]

This is very interesting, thanks