On the Origin of Life - An Interview with Dr. Dean Kenyon

dr. Kenyon what first interested you in origin of life research well I've had a long-standing interest in the life sciences and and it goes back to high school days when I got to college as a as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago I was studying physics at the time but the Darwin centennial celebration took place there in 1959 and I had an opportunity to hear some some great people speak on a subject of origins and really piqued my interest and kind of had a impact on me for deciding what to do in in graduate school going on to Stanford and working with some people who were working on the origin of life problems what was your viewpoint on the origin of life when you wrote biochemical predestination well at that time I was working as a postdoctoral fellow in Melbourne Calvin's laboratory at UC Berkeley in an atmosphere where there was a great deal of work and discussion on the origin of life problem from the perspective of chemical evolution theory and I had that view that that life did in fact arise on the planet by by a chemical evolutionary process and I was pretty convinced that that that in fact was the case how have your views on the origin of life changed since you wrote biochemical predestination well in the years following publication of biochemical predestination I had the opportunity to teach in the area of origin of life and in the area of Darwinian evolution here at San Francisco State and after about 10 years of this teaching activity I began to have some doubts about whether or not life could have arisen by natural means by chemical evolution and I had some doubts growing doubts about whether or not there was a Darwinian process to generate the major forms of life and so it took it took a while to reorient my thinking but I did eventually changed my views in both those areas yeah do many of your colleagues support your new position if not why not actually very few have been supportive of my views new views on an origin of life and the development of the other species I think a rather larger number of my faculty colleagues however are are willing to allow me to express these new views in in class but the majority though are unhappy on both counts I would say and as to why they hold this view I don't think there's a simple answer to this some of the some of the possibilities are that that the Darwinian way of thinking is such a deeply ingrained habit of thought it's been prevalent for such a long time and it has so many implications for for the whole of the biological sciences another aspect tied to that of course is how graduate students are socialized as they go through their program and here only the Darwinian story of origins and and I think my colleagues in general those who are opposed to this very reluctant to to to take time to examine this issue and maybe they realize the the large orient reorientation of thought that would be required if they were to change their views what are the general presuppositions that scientists make who study the origin of life well I think there are two general the most general kinds of presuppositions that people can make one is that life in fact did arrives naturalistically on the primitive earth by some kind of chemical evolutionary process the second presupposition would be that life may or may not have arisen by a naturalistic chemical evolutionary process now if you have the first presupposition then the goal of your research is to work out plausible pathways of chemical development to go to the bio polymers into the proto cells and what what would be likely pathways that you could demonstrate in the laboratory by simulation experiments if you have the second presupposition you're still going to be doing experiments but you're going to be more open I think to the possibility that the data as they come in from those studies may actually be suggesting a different explanation of origins altogether what is the open Haldane hypothesis and what role does it play in current research and teaching on the origin of life well the open halt dein hypothesis is the most general theoretical framework within which experiments and research on the origin of life are conducted still today Oberon proposed his Chemical evolutionary views for the first time back in the 1920s and all Dane right at the end of the decade of the 20s and essentially the hypothesis says that on the primitive earth before any life was present you had carbon compounds in very simple form in the atmosphere in the form of methane for example and other simple gaseous substances and that these would gradually increase in complexity under the influence of energy provided in the natural environment solar ultraviolet flux for example cosmic radiation heat energy and then you would get the transfer of these molecules more somewhat more complicated molecules down into the oceans amino acids and sugars for example and then these would link up later on into polymers polysaccharides proteins and then you could have nucleic acids form and then you get protocells from aggregation of these materials they would compete by a kind of proto natural selection process a proto Darwinian process and the one that would win that competition for for dwindling nutrition and the oceans would be the first to arrive at the state of a full living cell so it was the process of very gradual complexification of carbon compounds taking maybe hundreds of millions of years what are the major underlying assumptions of the apparent hypothesis of chemical evolution well there are a number of them first that I could think of was that apparent aught that the the ancient atmosphere was very different from our present air it was a reduced atmosphere and it did not have molecular oxygen in it at all typical gases were methane ammonia water vapor and molecular hydrogen another assumption would be that the molecules that were formed in the atmosphere under the influence of these energy sources were somehow protected from destruction by those same energy sources so that you could really have an accumulation of life building substances amino acids and sugars and purines and pyrimidines could actually survive the rigors of the ancient environment once they got into the ocean if they ever dead another assumption of the hypothesis would be that just the right what we call bio monomers amino acids for example or sugars would react with the same kind of bio monomer to give you the kind of polymer that is so characteristic of of life namely a polypeptide all amino acids in other words no other substance would get in there and interfere with that clean production of polypeptides are there any other important assumptions in origin of life theories yes there are other basic assumptions of the apparent hypothesis one of them additional one is that that just the right optical isomers of for example amino acids reacted with each other like all L amino acids forming the first polypeptides since we find exclusive occurrence of the L or left-handed form of amino acids in protein today a parent had to assume that there was some sort of process by which the L form would be separated out from the D form which is equally likely to have been formed we also have to assume if we believe this is a the the kind of process that generated the first life on the planet that the polymers that we're forming in the oceans could have acquired genetic information and this is a key point specified complexity genetic information in these polymers they have to the subunits have to line up in specific order in order for biological function to be possible and yet we know of no chemical means for the alignment of these subunits in the absence of preexisting genes of course it when we're going toward the origin of life we certainly don't have any genes in the picture so the question is how can these substances align themselves and so it's a major assumption of the hypothesis another one is that as you get close to forming an actual cell that all of the many many different components you need for a cell to live all the different enzymes and the nucleic acids and the other substances and the metabolic reaction sequences could all have originated simultaneously and in the same microscopic region of space a bacterial volume and the probabilities against that happening spontaneously would appear to me do appear to me to be overwhelmingly negative how well are these assumptions supported by currently available scientific data well let's start with the assumption of the do store reducing atmosphere of the primitive earth I think that if we look at current geological data referring to them in the oxygen content of ancient surface minerals we cannot decide the issue of whether the ancient atmosphere was reduced or not but the evidence is consistent with the possibility that there may have been some oxygen present in the old atmosphere another reason for believing in a strong possibility of molecular oxygen having been present from the earliest times in the atmosphere is the fact that even today in the high atmosphere water vapor is being a photo dissociated by the solar ultraviolet radiation and the result is molecular oxygen and molecular hydrogen hydrogen very light could have escaped into interplanetary space leaving that oxygen there I think from the very earliest times so if oxygen had been present even to the extent of only 1% its level or a tenth of a percent of its level in the current atmosphere I don't think you could have had any chemical evolutionary development at all because oxygen destroys organic compounds very effectively so you could say that chemical evolution according to the Oparin hypothesis would have been extinguished right at its source right at the earliest stages of its movement what is your evaluation of the Miller type of simulation experiment well I think Stanley miller's pioneering simulation studies at the time they were done did provide some very valuable insights into the possibility that a chemical evolutionary development might have might have occurred on the primitive earth he did discover in his apparatus the formation the synthesis of several protein forming amino acids and a few other substances of the type that occur in cells I think in in subsequent years though as time has gone on we've looked at these experiments in the light of new scientific data that they appear to be less and less relevant to the to the question of origin of first life there is the issue of the the composition of the atmosphere and the crucial question of molecular oxygen which is routinely excluded from from all of the Miller experiments his original ones and all of the the follow-up studies that have been done since that time by others and if oxygen is present in the apparatus you're not going to see any synthesis of amino acids you better also not include molecular hydrogen as Miller did in the first study because then you'd have a a great explosion in the laboratory so I think that we do have reason now for for doubting that these studies tell us much about the possible origin of life I think most of the chemical reactions that go on in this apparatus are away from life the substance that appears in the apparatus is a kind of that coats the whole inside of the opera's kind of this amber intractable macro molecular material that it's non-biological not doesn't occur in any organism but represents 85% or so of the converted carbon that you start with is methane so the trend in these experiments is really not toward biochemistry but in my view is away from biochemistry is it possible that interfering cross reactions might prevent life from arising naturalistically I think that's very likely and the most prominent interfering cross reaction I can think of at the moment is the so-called Maillard reaction now this is a reaction that what that happens between sugars on the one hand or aldehyde and then on the other hand amino acids or amines and these are two classes of substance that would be very important in any chemical level evolutionary development toward life and their tendency is powerfully to react with one another rather than for the amino acids to be able to react with themselves on the way to protein or sugars to react with themselves on the way to polysaccharide the cross reaction to form an insoluble polymeric material called melanoidins is far and away the more probable reaction and this is very well documented in the literature this reaction the Maillard reaction has been known for for many years and in fact is the reaction that is involved in the Browning of foods when you cook and do baking and so on and also the brown color in in various beverages is a result of the cross reaction of amino acids and sugars I believe that kind of thing happens in the Miller simulation studies but what it does is it takes you away from the development toward the first toward living matter and it kind of locks up the organic matter in this inert form Stanley miller's pioneering work in the origin of life assumed a reducing atmosphere of methane ammonia water vapor and carbon dioxide is there sufficient empirical support for this assumption I think there's not sufficient empirical support for this assumption I think if anything the balance of evidence suggests that it it is wrong that that it seems more likely to me from the geological evidence that we have about very ancient sedimentary rocks and their oxygen content and about the photodissociation of water vapor in the upper atmosphere that the early atmosphere would be far more oxidized than the early Miller experiments assumed but and but even more oxidized than the current Miller experiments he's using a carbon dioxide instead of methane now and he's using carbon monoxide and molecular nitrogen instead of ammonia now but I think that the crucial question is still the absence of molecular oxygen they're still routinely keeping that material out and I and the reason seems to be not an empirical reason but a methodological necessity if we put it that way in other words if melaka the argument as I understand it goes something like this if molecular oxygen had been present then chemical evolution could not have happened therefore molecular oxygen must have been absent because we know that chemical evolution happened but I think it's important to note that we do not have independent or convincing independent corroboration of that absence of oxygen do Sydnee foxes Protea noid Microsystems represent a plausible laboratory model of the proto cell stage of chemical evolution well Sydney Fox's protein or micro systems are an indeed very interesting experimental model I'm impressed by the fact that you can go in one continuous sequence from amino acids all the way to microscopic units of bacterial dimension when you look at these micro systems under the microscope they indeed resemble the light microscope level spherical bacteria in size but I think the resemblance stops there I believe that if you I know that if you look at this into the chemical composition of these micro systems you find very little that remind you of the chemical complexity of cells there is generally no protein present protein noid is present but that is not the same as genuine protein it does have amino acids in it but there are many chemical differences between the protein noids and protein there are no nucleic acids in these systems no polysaccharides no lipids there is no metabolism going on they're chemically inert there's no genetic information whatsoever in my view in these micro systems they are not self-replicating units they have no energy capture or processing capability so when you run down that list of of negative features you come away pretty much but the view that these protein ID Microsystems probably didn't have anything to do with it with the origin of life how large a gap is there between the most complex protocell model and the simplest living cell well I think this gap is an enormous gap you have the the great difference between the most complicated protocell and the simplest living cell which would be something like a mycoplasma type of organism you just don't have any of the ultra structural detail in the proto cell models you don't have any ribosomes you don't have any nucleoprotein particles of any kind you don't have any nucleic acid in there you you just have a simple little microscopic inclusion in these protocells with virtually no lifelike properties so I see the gap between the best protocells have been produced in a laboratory in the simplest authentic living cells we have today to be an immense gap what is the biologically relevant information content of the simplest living organism known to exist the information content of the simplest cell that we have today I would estimate to be about 1 million bits and this would be typical of some of the michael plasma type of organisms you I'm assuming that about for every base pair in the DNA of the genome of this simple cell you have approximately 2 bits of information now as to the estimate of what the minimal cell historically would have had to have possessed in order to be considered to be an actual living entity I would put the figure down to no less than 10 to the fifth or a hundred thousand bits I'd be willing to believe that you could put together a minimal cell with about 1/10 as much genetic information in it as in the simplest cell today I assume about 500 enzymes required for the minimal cell about a hundred amino acids for each of those enzymes and then you're just a simple calculation gives you about 10 to the fifth bits of information assuming no redundant DNA in the simplest organisms and that's what we see today anyway the simplest organisms to use all of their DNA for genetic information how probable is it that such complexity could arise by undirected chemical processes well I think random chemical processes would have virtually no chance of generating the kind of specific order that you need in the in the earliest cell in the biopolymers and the proteins and in the nucleic acids you just have to have a specific sequence of of subunits and I think you can show by some pretty convincing probability calculations such as have been carried out by Hubert yaki that in the whole history of the planet Earth in four-and-a-half billion years you would really not expect to find in the primitive oceans more than one or two or half a dozen at most functioning enzymes and and this is not even taking into account the issue of having the minimum set of enzymes for metabolism to 500 let's say all at the same place at the same time this is just a calculation at trying to see what the likelihood is of of finding just one molecule of one functioning protein or a half-dozen at most and so I think that in my view there's virtually no chance of chemical processes and generating the kind of specified complexity that we need in the for the first living organism what is the most plausible scenario for a purely naturalistic origin of life I don't think there is one I reviewed the many suggestions and I can't say that I could really support or give credence to nth to any of those that have been have been proposed I think Miller's experiments do show us the possibility of getting some of the bio monomers we need and and and and that's to the good I mean that's a strong point of that methodology Miller simulation type of studies but I don't have a candidate for the most plausible general scheme for going all the way to the to the first cells what are the major unsolved problems in origin of life research well I think one of the unsolved problems has to do with the optical isomer preference how can we get al amino acids and when going into the first biopolymers when the experiments routinely show an absolutely equal production of the L form and the D form the same situation exists with respect to the sugars in the DNA and so I think that that is a most difficult and intractable problem it has not yielded at all in the in the four decades that it's been studied we know no more today about it and we did 40 years ago on that other unsolved problems involve how you could have the formation of the first nucleic acid molecules we don't have a chemical pathway that that's convincing to get either RNA or DNA formed on the on the primitive earth and then on top of that we have not the slightest in experimental indication of how the the these polymers if they could have formed could have acquired genetic information this crucial problem of how you link the subunits together and just the order that there must be in order to code for proteins that can participate in metabolism not just any specific order in the we'll be biologically relevant order it's got to be those sequences that have biologic meaning so I would say that those are the two most difficult outstanding problems origin of genetic information and origin of optical isomer preferences what is the relevance of the second law of thermodynamics to the origin of life well I think that the second law of thermodynamics does have some relevancy to the origin of life problem but I do think that you have to be very careful in describing just that the way in which it it is relevant to the to the origin of life the second law says that an isolated physical system one that's not exchanging matter or energy with its outside surroundings will in every change that it undergoes tend to go to a state of greater disorder or greater entropy and at the same time the free energy or usable energy is declining the chemical evolution hypothesis about origin of life on the surface of the primitive earth when you first look at it seems to be sharply against the second law of thermodynamics going from a relatively chaotic state of the primitive gases in the primitive atmosphere to these highly organized and complex molecular systems that are living cells but you can point out though that the surface of the earth is an open system and it is receiving high grade energy from the from the Sun so you could maintain that just so long as the decrease in entropy on the surface of the earth is compensated for by by an equal or greater increase in entropy in the in the total system earth plus Sun that it is conceivable that chemical evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics the problem I have with that is that we have no empirical indication whatsoever to how an energy capture system a primitive photosynthesis mechanism could have originated by purely natural means and then of course we have no indication in the experimental data as to how a genetic system a gene which would direct chemistry against the the tendency that the second law imposes on matter toward greater disorder in the absence of those two lines of evidence I'm going to suspend judgment about whether or not the the origin of life violates the second law but I think that just on the face of it there is this huge problem you know the second law it describes matter going to decreasing states of complexity and the presumed origin of life by natural means is the reverse process is it plausible that an RNA world was the precursor of the first living cells well the RNA world concept does have a number of attractive features with the discovery that RNA has both catalytic activity and genetic information bearing ability you have a single molecule type that combines the the property key properties of the two great classes of macro molecule in life the nucleic acids on the one hand the proteins on the other hand so many researchers have believed that the first living systems might have developed out of a situation where you just had the RNA polymers in the primitive oceans undergoing some kind of proto nature election toward the first cells I think there are a number of problems with the RNA world hypothesis one is how do you get the RNA polymers in the first place I don't see how it's it's given what we know about the chemical properties of the building blocks of the RNA how they could survive in the energy rigors of the primitive surface they would have been destroyed by ultraviolet radiation but more importantly how do you get these building blocks of RNA to link up in the natural manner to form the biological polymer in the face of potentially interfering cross reactions which would have been much more likely in the primitive oceans so I have problems with how you get the raw materials the starting point for the RNA world the second problem I have with the RNA world is that the catalytic activities that have been discovered for RNA are really highly specialized few in number and they have to do with complex events in the in the eukaryotic cell processing that RNA in a highly evolved system and I'm not sure that that kind of catalytic activity would have been irrelevant in a prebiotic setting where you need a vast range of of different catalytic activity sort of a generalized catalysis over the whole metabolic spectrum so I do not think the RNA world helps us concept helps us much in the origin of life problem why must proteins in living organisms contain only left-handed amino acids well I don't have a completely satisfactory answer as to why present organisms need to have or must have just one optical isomer of the amino acids and the sugars in the DNA I have some ideas about it one would be that in order for enzymes to work and recognize their substrate you have to have what's called a three-point landing on the surface of an enzyme molecule and and so if you had the D form of an amino acid interacting or colliding with the surface of the active site of an enzyme the enzyme would not recognize the amino acid if we had both D and L forms of amino acid in our polymers in our proteins and same thing for sugars in our nuclei acids we would need it seems to me many many more enzymes than we can get by with today in living systems because you'd need an enzyme for the D form and then another enzyme for the L form of amino acid if both were used in in biological processes so it would seem to be very inefficient energetically the cell would have to invest so much energy building all of these extra enzymes so there is something to be said for the efficiency that you get when you just go down to one optical isomer as to how this could have originated we haven't the slightest idea and we don't we don't find any asymmetric forces in nature which could have given us the isomer preferences before life started why must nucleic acids contain D rather than L sugars how is the problem of chemical chirality accounted for in naturalistic origin of life theories well I think that we have the need in current biochemistry for one of the two stereoisomers the L versus the D for the efficiency of enzyme action and also the to avoid having the need to have so many extra enzymes to to to react with the with the other isomer both are present so there's an energy savings there but we from a point of view of the naturalistic theories of origin of life we we haven't an explanation at all for how this current preference of optical isomers are developed many experiments have been tried searching for clues as to how you might have gotten a preference of one over the other and William Bonner at Stanford University chemistry professor there who has researched this problem for about three decades wrote a review in 1991 of this subject concluded it by saying we don't know any now than we did when the search first began they're just it's just a very great enigma a tremendous problem if life did not originate by chemical evolution on the primitive earth what other possible scientific explanations exist a number of suggestions have been made about other possible origin scenarios they tend to go toward extraterrestrial origin though I think more and more scientists are recognizing the many many problems with the chemical evolution theory for origin of life on Earth and some of those are proposing that the origin didn't take place on the earth at all but took place somewhere else in the cosmos and then the first living cells microscopic microorganisms were transported somehow to to earth we have the directed panspermia idea I'm not totally convinced this was proposed totally seriously but it's it's it's in the literature and it's the idea that life originated on some other place in the cosmos and then an intelligent life-form shipped the first microbes to our planet deliberately directed panspermia so there's one possibility professor Bonner has suggested that the optical isomer sorting and it could must have taken place an extraterrestrial setting he does not see how it would have been possible on the earth but it's we have the result of the sorting today chemical evolution must have happened somewhere so it must have happened by an unknown means in deep space and then the the isomers transported down to the earth what do you mean by your statement that perhaps scientism is more widespread than we like to think well I think that in view of this of the great many difficulties that we're now aware of in the theorizing about origin of life and along the lines of chemical evolution it is a rather surprising fact that so many scientists still insist that a chemical evolutionary origin will be found with with future research in my mind it must go back to the general presuppositions that people make in regarding this area and the first presupposition is that chemical evolution must have happened and we're going to keep searching until we find some kind of plausible actual chemical sequence but that looks less and less likely now and yet we still have a general agreement that it must have happened and it's still uniformly taught that way in you know University science classes and so maybe it has something to do with scientism this the which I take to mean the belief that that the scientific method as presently defined and conceived can answer every question including the great question of of origins the origin of the universe origin of life and so that's what I mean by scientists and being perhaps very deeply ingrained in our in our scientific culture and our in our academic culture is it possible that natural processes are insufficient to account for the origin of all biological information not only possible I think highly likely that natural means are insufficient to account for anything but the really the almost trivial in increase in in biologic information can science rule out the possibility that most biological information had an intelligent cause no I don't think so I think quite the contrary that it is it makes sense to actually reach the conclusion that from from the data of origin of life studies from the date of molecular biology and for many fields in the light of science that an intelligent origin is a very likely possibility for the origin of the of the first life what alternatives are there to pursuing purely naturalistic explanations for the origin of life well I think it is conceivable and it makes a lot of sense to think that the empirical data that we have in hand taken in toto all the different lines of evidence bearing on this problem of origin to actually be in powerful support of the idea that the first life was actually created by an intelligent agent of of some kind I wouldn't be prepared to say at all from the scientific study who or what that intelligent agent is but I think the data are in strong support of the possibility or the likelihood that the the specific order of the bases in DNA for example the specified complexity was actually impressed on on matter by some intelligent agent what do you mean by intelligent design as it relates to the origin of life well intelligent design I think we reason here by by analogy and I like to think of it along these lines that if one attempts to classify physical systems complex and ordered physical systems as to how they come into existence in the first instance and in subsequent instances of them I think that you can find that the physical system sort out into three categories the first type of system which I regard is the low information type of a system would be a an object in nature that could arise by purely natural means you know rock formations snow flakes Krystal's of all kinds storm patterns many different examples exist but these systems I call type 1 systems and they kind of originate spontaneously by purely natural processes type 2 systems have to do with systems that humans are familiar with as manufactured artifacts everything from from a paperclip to a supercomputer there the matter is arranged in such a way that we cannot see how it could have gotten that way spontaneously because we can't deduce the order from the physics and chemistry of the of the components writing and language is also in this category the pattern of letters and intelligible text does not come from the physics and chemistry of ink and paper but it has to be impressed on the matter from the outside so these are called type 2 systems the first origin of of an instance there is by manufacturer and the subsequent instances are also all by manufacturer because these are not self propagating systems there's a moderately high information content to these the range goes up into pretty high numbers of information content now the question is what is a living cell what does it fit into type 1 or type 2 order I think it's a third category the first instance I think has two of the first cells that has to be by creation by an intelligence but then once it appears it is self-propagating so it can all subsequent instances come from the first one by purely natural processes i think that in this third class there there may be one other instance that's the Fon Neyman machine the the artificial device not yet manufactured but a theoretical device which could be self-replicating a manufactured device that could do its own mining operations its own smelting operations its own preparation of material and then fabrication of itself and then it could be a truly self-propagating artificial system so I think that third class has two members living cells and the fun moment machine possibly okay this gives us a framework in which to to answer the question about what we mean about intelligent design and the origin of life it seems to me that the order we find in cells especially in the DNA and the genetic information is more like type to order than type 1 order and therefore I would say the indications are very powerful that the first living cell must have been from one of a better term in quotes manufactured why is an intelligent design or creationist interpretation of the scientific data not acceptable to many scientists well I think the reasons here there'd be many reasons we would go back to the climate of opinion at the time that Darwin's work was was done and remember the the battle there was between special creationists and and those who wanted to have completely what they conceived of as a completely naturalistic explanation for this large area of science namely the the origin and development of life and so Darwin's ideas were were very appealing I think to many scientists who also wanted to further this program themselves but couldn't see a way of doing it and he came up with a naturalistic uniformitarian explanation that and given the information available in his day seem very convincing and his method of argument was was outstanding is a rhetorical genius no no question about it okay so then you had a long period of time in which the faculties of the of the universities were were Darwinist and so deeply ingrained habits of thought and in the succeeding decades and so that now you find that the most of the professor's people working research scientists are have been deeply committed to these habits of thought that any suggestion that the naturalistic explanation may not be sufficient is to them like going back to the old special creation of mindset that they thought they were got gotten away from for good with it finally accepting Darwin's view what criteria could be used to determine if the information content of living organisms had an intelligent or natural cause this is a current need in the research effort to try and define formal criteria quantifiable if possible that will allow one to decide whether a given type of order that scene or complexity we should say seen in nature is likely to have had an intelligent cause or is rather on the other hand explainable by purely natural means I think this concept of specified complexity is important that you have to have particular order of subunits that have biological meaning and if you find a system that has an order like that in it then it's got it's likely in my mind that it came from an intelligent source again a reasoning by analogy to to manufactured the kind of order we find in manufactured items probably also the we would bring in the probability would be quite low probability calculation for the chances of getting the same type of order by chemical means would have to be a very tiny number now exactly how small it would have to be I mean that's something that has to be worked on we're at the beginning of that of that phase of things now does academic freedom allow you to discuss the difficulties of scientific naturalism an origin of life theories well I think ideally academic freedom concept should allow one to freely examine the criticism of Darwinian evolution and the criticisms of chemical evolution in the classroom and even to discuss the possible alternative interpretations of the data that lead one to to an intelligent design paradigm unfortunately I am NOT allowed to discuss these topics in my courses here at San Francisco State it is not fail to be Parliament part of a course outline or a course content to to give counter arguments against the general Darwinian view and certainly not thought to be permissible to to give any kind of serious discussion of alternative interpretation now this raises a very interesting question and that is the question as to why this particular area of science should have this kind of immunity to critical examination I would have thought that that we would have free inquiry in this area as we do in virtually every other area of university life and and for both big issues and small issues we should have that same kind of give-and-take in the only great debate on origins because after all the history of science is full of confrontation of major contending points of view just a couple of outstanding examples come to mind Ptolemaic astronomy and Copernican in astronomy a tremendous debate about the time of the switchover galenic physiology and harvey and physiology a tremendous debate in the in the early 17th century when that was and you can name many examples those are quite low there are others on hundreds of examples on smaller scales of the comparison that should go on all the time between major contending views but somehow or other in our current academic situation regarding the topic of origins and evolution a wall has been built around the subject of neo-darwinism and so one is not really free to to to carry on a scientific critique of this topic how should the origin of life be taught in light of the California Science framework policy which states that nothing in science or in any other field of knowledge shall be taught dogmatically well not dogmatically obviously now another way it's taught now is very dogmatic in the sense that only one particular view out of several major contending views about origins is permitted in generally speaking in university classrooms and also in secondary education level classrooms and if we were to follow the letter of the california guidelines now then the debate would open up and we would we would have this wonderful exchange of views and we would have a chance to make more rapid progress in our and debate on this and students would be better served i think students need to know not about every discussion and dispute that goes on in the scientific world you can't expect them to be able to to absorb that but certainly the major fights they need to have some information about those how is scientific progress impacted when critiques of current theories are suppressed well i think progress will be much less than it could be ideally and i think that in the climate of free and vigorous debate you have the greatest chance of making the greatest strides forward after all there was a very vigorous debate at the time of darwin's publication of Origin of Species he won the day he wrote he wanted rather quickly but he but there was a fight now we have a situation where we have the impression is given that the question of origins has long since been settled and I deny that that's the case I think that the more we learn in molecular biology and the more we learn from chemical evolution studies the less likely is it that the chemical evolution explanation is going to turn out to be the right one and so it's absolutely imperative now that we open up the discussion and have a serious debate on it

Channel: Access Research Network

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Keywords: Creation–evolution Controversy (Literature Subject), origin of life, Dean Kenyon, Abiogenesis, Biogenesis

Id: uJDa9QLP4aE

Length: 53min 40sec (3220 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 05 2014