Scientists are Clueless on the Origin of Life | Lecture @ Andrews University

[Music] all right it's my pleasure to to introduce dr james m tour into our chemistry seminar uh it's a i i just got to be honest i was super excited uh when i heard that he was going to be here number one we have kind of crossed paths professionally at least the area that i did my graduate work in molecular electronics dealing with organic chemistry and how to put molecules together this has been a big area that dr tour has made numerous contributions in fact he's a prolific organic chemist who knows how to make things make uh chemical structures that are very intricate very challenging very complex and he and his group have published over 700 papers uh over the last number of decades uh he graduated as a chemistry major uh back in 1981 and uh has been a chemist ever since and so uh he has done a great amount of work dealing with chemicals and how they behave and how you they come together and so i i think his comments on this topic on the origin of life and what chemist and what scientists know about it are very pertinent so i'm very glad that he's able to join us and i also just want to say i think he did his phd in purdue that's just down the road from us here and so he does have some uh some midwest connections and uh i don't want to say a whole lot you can read more about james tour uh just by uh googling him and looking on wikipedia i thought there was a a pretty good article describing dr tour his work and some of his uh comments that he's been making in the public so it's with uh uh great uh excitement and anticipation and with honor that i uh want to introduce uh our main speaker here today and i want to leave enough time for him to talk and if you have questions that you would write them in the q a part and if you have general comments that's good for the the chat part but if you have an important question that you would like to ask dr martin hanna and myself will be moderating the questions and uh getting those ready for dr tour so without further ado dr tour thank you for joining us and i'm going to turn the time over to you welcome to our chemistry seminar program and welcome to all of our guests from around the world thank you for joining us thank you so much for that introduction and uh i appreciate the opportunity to be with you today appreciate that i'm going to talk about uh the origin of life today i'm going to share my my screen here so scientists are clueless on the origin of life this is just gives a little background on some of the things that i've been involved with these are companies launched from our research in the past five years and uh just so that you get an overview of the things we've worked on dots is a uh is a company that works on on carbon or graphing quantum dots and that's a public company now weebit's also a public company that's uh it builds computer memory to terminal memory rather than three terminal memory based on uh silicon oxide switches zeta energy is a battery company and that is located just a little bit south of of houston about about 25 miles south of houston neuro cords is a company that uh is working on the the restoration of spinal cords optic nerves and peripheral nerves uh texting tips that's uh that was a a uh it was just some advice that i gave to a friend and and he started a company around it roswell biotechnologies is um is a company that is is planning to do the whole human genome map for hundred dollars in one hour using actually a molecular electronic chip and uh they're located in southern california and doing very well rust patrol is a product that's on the market and uh it's it's able to to uh it's it's the best rust rust inhibitor on steel uh really just tremendous particularly carbon steel uh really works extremely well carbon green technology is a carbon material that is very good in removing certain ions from water particularly in mining streams variant is a drug that we use for the treatment of pancreatic cancer and it is uh uh being it is in uh the the uh trials right now moving into trials in in md anderson cancer center across the street ligc limited is graphene foams for devices it's a way to make graphene from uh carbon films using using a laser just a co2 laser is found in any machine shop and so that's actually probably going to spin off into five different companies it's a very powerful technique we first published on it in 2014 and now in the literature there's probably two or three papers per week coming out on on the use of of uh this laser-induced graphene for devices universal matter is a company that was started last year that's the conversion of anything carbon into graphene uh so you could go to universalmatter.com and see a little video on how that works but in 10 milliseconds we can convert any carbon material with no solvent into graphene and i mean any carbon material and the vast majority of things that you see around you in your world are including you are made out of carbon nano robotics is a company that we use nano machines in medicine to drill into cells either deliver drugs or to kill the cells we've killed super bacteria kill cancer cells and so we have two studies going on at md anderson across the street and several other studies going on on uh killing super bacteria neuro new means i haven't named it yet it doesn't have a name yet but that's using carbon nanoparticles for traumatic brain injury stroke and dementia and more that's a company that will start this year universal uptake is just getting going right now uh i think that's going to be the name uh again i don't choose the name i'm not an officer or director in any of these companies that's how i can have all of these i just just get them started capturing co2 from flue gas and the storage of diverse gases and then universal echem again this is not sure that what the ultimate name is going to be that's for the generation electrochemical generation of ammonia electrochemical generation of uh of hydrogen peroxide and then also uh the development of lithium-air batteries and then just two other sort of investment vehicles so we we've been involved in several efforts across a number of different uh areas from pharmaceuticals to to high-tech materials and and aerospace materials and things like that okay so this is going to be a technical lecture and uh with intent no god gods are intelligent designers going to be mentioned science is going to be used to critique the scientific research if i talk about god during the the the main part of this talk people will want to dismiss it and say oh this is all about god so i'm not even going to mention god this is going to be i'll just use science to critique the science then at the end i'm going to bring in a scriptural perspective but it'll be obvious that'll be just at the end so so the scientists among you are going to have to deal with the as it's presented all right so this is a car and this is not fully all the parts of a car you know because some of them you see are obviously still put together there's still pieces put together the antenna is still there and and but there's a lot of parts there and i'm not sure how many people that are watching this would be able to put this card back together even if they had directions but if you had no directions think about trying to put this car back together be kind of hard but all the parts are clean and nice and all you know gathered together in a single room but what if they were not gathered together in a single room what if you had to gather them and put the parts of the cart together and mind you this is much less parts than are needed to make a cell to make one cell has a lot more parts than this and imagine if you had to to somehow find these or accumulate these and if they weren't all in one room what if all of these parts were scattered throughout planet earth and you had to find parts some would be on top of a mountain some at the bottom of an ocean and and you got to find the parts and put it back together before the parts decompose by the way it's kind of hard to think about that and many people say well you know the these things are not limited to earth okay well now find it find it out there find it out there uh the parts have been scattered out there and they they happen to come to earth on meteorites over a period of many many years so find the parts put it back together it's kind of hard right that's what we're up against in origin of life try to put something together and now the parts go bad you know say a certain part is there on earth and you're waiting for other parts to come and in the meantime the parts go bad they rust out and they decompose same thing happens to organic molecules they decompose they undergo oxidation if you don't want an oxygen-rich environment okay how about a nitrogen-rich environment ammonia that'll do other chemical reactions so these these chemicals don't last long so you got to have them all in the same place all at the same time or within a reasonable amount of time because the parts go bad it's hard to think about how to make a cell so what's the origin of life this is a cell highly complex it's got all sorts of organelles and all sorts of features here and some people say oh well you know this is a modern cell cells weren't that complex they were more like bacteria okay you think a bacterium is is is uh is simple you think a bacterium is simple in structure and in composition and in the coordination of parts and i'll tell you one of the problems in origin of life is that a lot of the people that work in it will be an expert in one thing now we have the good fortune of of uh having worked in the area of organic synthesis so we know what it's like to have to build molecules we don't buy molecules and kits like biology biologists we have to make them abenitio and also we work in this area of nanosystems where we try to put molecules together to form systems that work yet both of these tasks within cells you have to have the make the basic components if you want to do this from origin of life and you've got to assemble them molecules don't care about life organisms care about life but chemistry on the contrary is utterly indifferent to life without biologically derived entity acting upon them molecules have never been shown to evolve toward life never molecules don't evolve that is a a term that has been taken out of biology and people have thrown it into origin of life chemistry it is utter nonsense molecules do not evolve they don't move toward life they have no reason to move toward life they're utterly indifferent to life almost every chemical synthesis experiment in origin of life can be summed up by a protocol analogous to this and so people always send me things oh what about this paper on this trust me if it's on the chemical synthesis side it fits into this paradigm you purchase some chemicals generally in high purity from a chemical company mix those chemicals together in water in high concentrations or in a specific order and uh some uh with some set of carefully devised conditions you obtain a mixture of compounds that have a resemblance to one or more of the basic four classes of molecules chemicals needed for life which are carbohydrates nucleic acids amino acids and and lipids you need all four of those for life but it's not just a single carbohydrate there's many of them and then there's polymers of them which is hard to do they don't just hook together by themselves nucleic acids nucleic acids have have a nuclear base and then they're hooked up to a carbohydrate and then a phosphate and then you want to hook them together they don't hook together by themselves enzymes do this there's no easy chemistry to do this there's no prebiotic chemistry that does this amino acids you got to have about 20 different amino acids and they're all different and and you've got to have them uh uh you have to have these pieces and you have to have lipids the lipids the amino acids nucleic acids and the carbohydrates are all chiral chiral meaning that they have a non-superimposable mirror image there are a number of different isomers isomers increases at two to the n where n is the number of sterogenic centers and so it is really hard to make these even in racemic form let alone the the the currently pure form that you would need for for making life then you publish a paper making bold assertions about origin of life from these functions crude mixtures of stereochemically scrambled intermediates much like miller did in 1952 the original miller uri experiment things haven't changed much if you think of it fundamentally the world thought they were right on the verge of solving the origin of life but it turned out to be much harder than they thought we are now uh over two-thirds of a century past that think of things that have happened in two-thirds of a century since then i mean we have we have space travel we have we have uh internet connectivity we have the structure of dna we have the entire silicon error all of that's happened in the last two thirds of a century 66 67 years 68 years nothing's happened since then that has added anything fundamentally to the origin of life problem then they engage with the ever gullible press to dial up the knob of unjustified extrapolations then they watch the mesmerized layperson exclaim you see scientists understand how life form then they encourage a generation of science textbooks writers to make colorful deceptive cartoons of raw chemicals assembling in the cells which then emerge as slithering creatures from a prehistoric pond the synthesis problem is this molecules that compose living systems always almost always show homochirality the only ones that don't are very very simple molecules when mole when building molecular systems constant redesigns are needed which take the synthesis back to step one so if you do something wrong you got to go back to step one it's it's often impossible to remove a morty once it's been attached so if if a natural system is going along hundreds of millions of years to get to a certain point and uh oh i put a methyl group there how am i going to get that thing up nah sorry you can't get it off you got to go back 400 million years okay i'll go back 400 million years uh how do i go back i don't know how to go back i don't know why to go back because i don't even know where i'm going towards so i don't even know that it is a wrong methyl group and i don't know how to go back because i never kept the laboratory notebook so i'm lost synthetic reactions do not know how to stop their current course of progression or why to stop there's no targeted goal they don't know that they're moving toward life molecules are indifferent to life they don't know that they're going in this direction time although claimed to be the savior of abiogenesis can actually be the enemy for example carbohydrates or kinetic products they undergo carmelization or the cannazara reaction where the where uh uh with formaldehyde which is a presumed uh prebiotic chemical the formaldehyde plus the aldehyde will will convert the formaldehyde to formic acid and the aldehyde will reduce to the alcohol so these things decompose so even if you have it it's not going to stay around very long prebiotic systems do not have the ability to easily purify structure to organic chemists if you can't purify you're in big trouble because the impurities take up the starting material and gum up the works they get in the way of all the processes you want to do the free hydroxyls that are not the hydroxides you want go adding in there it's a big problem reagent addition order is really important you can't just added reagents in just in any order you want chemistry is very exacting it's it's like baking a cake you can't you can't put in the icing uh you know when you when you're you're making the dough i mean you got to wait for the icing and and the same thing in chemistry orders of magnitude more difficult parameters of temperature pressure solvent light no light ph atmospheric gases no gases have to be carefully controlled build complex systems there's no other way around it if people can't do it if people can't do this there's no way this chemistry is happening under a rock somewhere the mass transfer problem is the killer of all roots because when you if if you take a certain material say you start with a kilo of material you take that kilo of material go go 20 steps forward you might have five milligrams of material left and this is in a modern laboratory well go back and make more you can't because you don't remember you didn't keep a laboratory notebook so you can't go back and make more so it's a big big problem and so you every time you run out of material and route to something something that you don't even know you're going toward you're dead that's it it kills it because we don't keep a laboratory notebook so let me just illustrate this with these nano cars which we make these are little cars we build these little motors into them and these spin if you shine light on them and they'll spin unidirectionally and that'll push these nano cars across the surface here's a little motor here's what they look like these are very small these are about two nanometers this way by three nanometers this way and and uh you can park about 50 000 of these across the diameter that's this diameter of a human hair uh here's a nano car and a surface and you can see it moving along so in this synthesis of nano carts which are very simple comparative biological system but at least this is a nano system that's put together to do some function uh here here's some of the steps that you got to go along to do this let's just focus in on one part of it you know here you're cooling it to five degrees and and uh you treat manganese oxide then you cool it to minus 10 to minus 15 to make this azo species and uh that's going to end up adding across this thiocarbonyl at minus 50 and uh to give the episulphide and so we're going to read the procedure here but you see here this is it reflux and ethanol so this is at 80 degrees this is in reflux and toluene so this is about 110 degrees then you're minus 10 then minus 50 degrees and then this one's at room temperature this one's at 60. this one's at 130 degrees what's with all the temperature why all the temperature changes because you have to do this if you don't do this the chemistry doesn't work you need different reactions for each step you can't just throw everything together and boom it forms doesn't happen that way you got to work this way this is the way the chemistry occurs all right and then we build these axles so just take one step just think about the intricacies that's needed just for that one step that i had in the box to an oven dried three neck round bottom flex it has to be dry uh with the hydro zone 33 and magnesium sulfate hydro zone 33 a certain amount magnesium sulfate a precise amount was added it was added a dichloromethane to this suspension was quickly added manganese oxide at five degrees the reaction flask was immediately immersed and stirred in a cold bath ranging from -15 to -10 for an hour and a half after this period the reaction mixture was cool to minus 50 then transferred to a sling filtration tube connected to an oven dried three neck round bottom flask the deep purple filtrate that contained the intermediate 36 was collected and the sling tube was rinsed with pre-cooled dichloromethane i mean this is this is hard stuff you don't know how to do this you don't have to do and you have a brain you have a mind you don't know how to do this because you're not a trained chemist even for a trained chemist this is hard this is hard even for a trained chemist and this procedure is abbreviated so that it but a trained chemist knows different things if i were to have to describe this for an untrained person there'd be a lot more detail all of this has to be done to build any complex molecule you can't just do this under a rock then you have to identify if you don't know what you have you don't know what you're going toward and so you identified so we use these tools like nmr that dissect these things and and it's hard to do this and uh i try to figure out these molecular structures so here's what we have to write to convince the world that we we got the structure of that molecule here's what we had to write but this is not it that's that was just page one here's page two of the characterization so in order to convince the community that we got what we got we have to go through all this characterization so on this one paper on nano cars there were 281 supplemental pages of characterization data to convince the world that we got what we got you say well nature doesn't use nmr yeah nature uses enzymes at each step to assess molecular structure if the if it's not the right structure there's other enzymes that are called in to chop that stuff up because if you leave the wrong structure in there it gums up the works for the next steps but remember this is prebiotic this is before enzymes nobody knows how this is done everybody's clueless [Music] all right so when you take a nano car and and uh the first nano car we made the motor would spin at one point at 1.8 revolutions per hour all right then we learned if we pull out that sulfur ring these are called faringa motors uh uh originally designed by ben ferringa and then we built these into the nanocar if we go to a five-member ring now then it spins at three million rotations per second that's faster than any macroscopic motor so small changes make a huge difference well how do you do this in nature how can nature pull out that sulfur there's no way once you've inserted that you can't extract it that's it so if you make something that doesn't work very well you can't go back and fix it and in fact even today there's no known method to do that so you had to go back to step one in order to make this you couldn't just take a poorly functioning thing and make it good no you had to go back to step one all over again so that was just making the molecules nobody knows how to do that now you have to assemble them into a working system a protocell is a self-organized indulgently ordered spherical collection of lipids proposed as a stepping stone to the origin of life so this is just a vesicle if you just take oil and water and shake it up really good you'll get these little beads and and those can be somewhat analogous to vesicles usually you need some higher shear but you'll get some and some people say well if you have that that's essentially a cell that's the membrane of a cell the lipid bilayer and and uh but let's look at some of the these so-called protocell experiments they purchase homochiro-diaceal lipids from a chemical company or they synthesize some stereo scramble lipids sometimes they might use a mono monoaceo lipid then they add those lipids to water and observe a small amount of it to form simple and expected thermodynamically driven assembly of those lipids into a synthetic bi-layer vesicle upon agitation sometimes the researcher will add other molecules that get engulfed by the vesicles as it forms and they publish a paper claiming that the synthetic vesicle is a protocell and suggestive of early early forms of cellular life they engage with the media to ramp it up and the lay person says oh they made life huh no they didn't cells are extremely complex they have there there's there's the outside of the bilayer is different than the inside they have lots of things going through without things going through they they would never work you have to allow certain things in and allow other things out these are proteins that allow things in these are these are the the carbohydrates carbohydrates cover the surface these are sugars covering the surface and these are really hard to make you try to do carbohydrate synthetic chemistry it is really hard protection deep protection is this is crazy hard if you look at carbohydrates if you just take the carbohydrate the carbohydrate d pyranose just and you have six of these to make the hexamer you can have over one trillion constitutional isomers if you have the wrong isomer the cell doesn't work these are made by enzymes and not just the original enzymes in the dna plant template these are made by other enzymes that that may be functioning in in from other cells come in and the just these things to tune that cell uh to work every if you mess up the the carbohydrate structuring just get the wrong one that will shut the cell down these things every disorder within a cell has something to do with carbohydrate dysfunction it's very hard to have to do this and now the origin of life people are saying well you don't need such complexity how much complexity do you need well it's been calculated you need at least 256 protein coding genes you're going to need at least 256 genes to put a pro different proteins to put this thing together so people no no you don't need that you you do you do and they just try keep saying it's simpler simpler than that and then the rest happen by evolution that's a bunch of nonsense you need some level of function to have a cell or you don't have a cell all right then there's the interactomes the non-covalent interactions the non-covalent interactions covalent means hooked together by a chemical mod and then there's the non-covalent interactions these are very important that's why when a cell is dividing it takes information puts it on each side and then it clamps down and splits apart to make two cells you don't dehydrate cells and get them rehydrated and get them working again and the reason for that is the non-covalent interactions are very important for information transfer it is estimated that the protein protein interactions just protein protein not protein nucleic acid not not not just not nucleic acid nucleic acid uh just protein protein interactions in a single yeast cell a simple cell of a single yeast cell there are 10 to the 79 billion combinations 10 to the 79 billion combinations of how those could be arranged only a few of those are going to work just to show you how big a number that is the number of elemental particles elemental particles in the universe is 10 to the 90. but elemental particles do you mean atoms yeah it could mean that you want to mean not just atoms you want it to mean uh uh electrons protons and neutrons okay that that that's irrelevant whether we're talking of of an atom or its hundred different components it doesn't matter when you're talking about numbers like this it doesn't matter that's 10 to the 90. this is 10 to the 79 billion this is a crazy crazy big number this is a one with 79 billion zeros after it that's the number of combinations just protein protein interactions you get that wrong information transfer doesn't occur information transfer occurs through electrostatic interactions or virtual photons that are traveling at the speed of light you slosh one electron to the next to the next these are really complex within a cell most biologists don't even know what i just told you they don't even know this yet they'll be convinced that we we figured out the origin of life without even knowing the details of the complexity that's here all right origin of life protocol 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 that's what the nonsense is like you think that you could just throw all this in the cell and it's going to start working there's this huge complex order to the assembly you can't make the molecules but even if you could you don't know how to put it together you can't just take all the parts in that car and just throw it throw it in there and hey it's gonna work right you need one sprout it doesn't work critical for life is the origin of information dna or rna the information is primary the matter that we're talking about which is all we've talked about so far is secondary the information is primary we don't even know how to get the requisite molecules let alone the code how do you hook these together which is your primary code there's much more information buried mind you in carbohydrates than even in dna and rna in the amount of information that can be stored in sugars just by gazillions more information people think wow dna is amazing well i'm telling you you could put more information in carbohydrates so it's not it's and that's not limited to a single set of dna other enzymes from other dna are acting upon those carbohydrates to change it it's amazing this is just amazing try to build a cell even hypothetically okay assemble a dream team your smartest people and and i'll and i'll give you everything you need so i'll give you all the components all your amino acids in homo cairo form all your dna all your rna whatever you want i'll give you i'll give you everything now no no no uh even if i gave you the the four classes of chemicals in in homo cairo form you wouldn't know how to hook those together but i'll i'll give you the dna and the rna all hooked together so i'll hook it together you you want uh you you want enzymes hooked together too okay we'll give you any enzymes you want so now you even have the enzymes you have the dna you have the rna and then you have all the amino acids everything you want now just assemble a cell go ahead do it you can't you can't and you know you can't you wouldn't even know where to begin you think you're going to make a vesicle and just inject all of those mixed up chemicals in there and it's going to work you know better than that it won't work so even if you had all of those parts which you have not got you've you've not gotten those because remember they're spread out but even if i gave them to you even if you have all those you wouldn't know how to put it together that's how clueless we are you say what about synthetic cells in 2010 craig vendor's group copied an existing bacterium genome and transplant transplanted it into another cell so in other words you cut you take the genome you copy it and then you transplant that into a cell so you take out the existence it's it's like you took the the computer control chip from from one car you buy and and you take it out and you put it in another car so so so if my control chip goes bad in my car and i go to the auto parts store and i buy a new control chip and i stick that in can i claim that i made that car i made it i put in the control chip no i i copied it i took a copy of the same chip and i just put it in this is this this is what the so-called synthetic cells were the people thought they made cells they didn't all right so this is the type of nonsense that's written for for for students to read life began with little bags i'm quoting 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 this is on in a book by regis which is science writer from oxford university press on what is life well few origin of life researchers which stated so shamelessly that these are little bags of garbage but that's precisely what origin of life people have been making is little bags of garbage but those little bags of garbage have no more resemblance to living cells than a big bag of garbage resembles a horse all right how did life begin this is written by by uh uh uh by nobel laureate uh uh jack sostek in nature in 2018. this is in the innovations in section and uh this is to explain to the to the lay reader not not the experienced origin of life reader but the lay reader of of of nature which is already an elevated uh uh just the common person on the street doesn't read nature uh here's what he said the early atmosphere had no oxygen it consisted mainly of nitrogen and carbon dioxide with smaller amounts of hydrogen water and methane okay i'm okay with that so my nitrogen it probably means n2 and ammonia lightning asteroid impacts ultraviolet light from the sun acted on the atmosphere to generate hydrogen cyanide a compound of hydrogen carbon and nitrogen okay i'll give him that even though he doesn't know but we'll give him that raining in volcanic raining into volcanic or crater lakes the cyanide reacted with iron brought up by the waters circulating through the rocks it's no idea there's a total speculation but okay you want that fine the resulting iron cyanide compounds accumulate over time building up into a concentrated stew of reactive chemicals now mind you if you're a chemist you know iron cyanide compounds are not that reactive that's like a sink for cyanide life as we know it requires rna some scientists believe that rna emerged directly from these reactive chemicals nudged along by dynamic forces in the environment that is a statement of utter nonsense utter nonsense i i don't i i nobody knows how rna could have emerged nobody knows what that means that's not a that's not a term used in synthetic chemistry nudged along that's not a term used we have no idea what that means jackson is nobel laureate smart guy biologist nucleotides the building blocks of rna eventually formed huh how'd they do that eventually formed they joined together to make strands of rna had they joined together nucleotides don't join together we don't know any chemistry for doing that without having say a dna synthesizer where you protect d protect block unblock this is hard to do nobody knows a prebiotic system that's going to easily do this let alone the code which you need for rna and oligonucleotide is not rna oligonucleotide is just some random sequence rna is an exact sequence that has a code it's like taking a box of letters lots of letters and saying hey there's your book you wanted me to write a book for you here's your book that's just a box of random letters well that that that's your book no it's got no information in it that's the difference between ligonucleotides and rna once rna was made some strands of it became enclosed within tiny vesicles formed by spontaneous assembly of fatty acid lipids in the membranes creating the first protocells again he has absolutely no idea rna was made some strands of it became enclosed had to get enclosed in there and formed by spontaneous assembly of fatty acid lipids into 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 the encapsulated dna no idea how that would happen so here's the simple picture that he showed innovations in that he said these are simple sugars they are not this is this this is uh propane trial one two three propane trial this is ethylene glycol but if somebody wants to say these the sugars you can't have it both ways either this is a double bond or it's not if it's a single bond there it is then you can't have this you can't say this is a double bond and this is a single bond these are not simple sugars these are alcohols you want to call these cyanide derivatives what happened to your multiple bonds you got to have multiple bonds somewhere phosphate and then they made an rna nucleotide so heat comes with uv light heat and uv light will take these things and form an rna nucleotide no no and he says this is rna r ribo ribonucleic acid this is rna uh that cannot be ribose because there's no stereochemistry without sterochemistry that cannot be ribose if you want to claim that's a sugar you you you left out some bonds but okay if that's a sugar you left out some some other atoms but okay if you want to claim that's true it can't be claimed to be ribose because it's got no stereochemistry here is what the reason he said that is because sutherland showed that he could get a a nucleotide he could get a nucleotide but look at all the steps that he had to go through depending on how you count it's about 12 steps and these are crazy hard steps even for experienced chemists not under a rock type chemistry and uh but does this look like heat and light will take simple sugars and make this no but what he says is the heat and light so the world goes away you can take cyanide derivatives iron cyanide and you can just take these and form an rna just by heating light no way you see how it's just not not it's not true so then you go back and you look at some of sutherland's syntheses well so he wants he wants to take this compound and make this compound all right so here's what he's got to do so for so he in in this reaction look what happens um to to do this you get all these other products so this is what he wants to make there's the nmr spectrum look at all the exactness of what he goes through and even will all of that in a clean laboratory not under rock he gets not this but he gets all of this junk too look at all this other stuff and then you'd say okay well then what he does is he purifies this out and he uses this and he carries it on the next step no there's the other thing that they don't talk about is they will take the mixtures and they'll say ah we made what we wanted now we didn't bother purifying it and taking it away from that so that we could bring we just bought pure one two three propane trial and then we carried that on to the next step but whoa whoa whoa you mean you bought that and you carried it on you didn't carry on what you made well no no that that's just a technicality that's just it's technicality how many syntheses do you think are done that way in in an organic laboratory i mean you can just buy the final product if you wanted to and and uh uh and then and then you want to go ahead and start making these sorts of things and say you made it and so it's built on a house of cards the whole thing you didn't really take that and carry it on well the separation's really hard yeah you bet it's hard even with your advanced high pressure liquid chromatography and you leave it to somehow in a prebiotic earth under a rock or in a cave it's going to purify so here's my colleague my colleagues who's not an origin of he's just a really good synthetic chemist and and he has he has no he has no horse in this race but i showed him this article of sastek i said what do you think he says this is one of the worst worst one i have read in a while sastek is weaving a story based on pure conjecture and wishful thinking definitely not worthy of a publication in in a journal like nature he provides no references for the processes that are well quote unquote well understood he uses the term scientists believe based on no evidence whatsoever in summary this article is junk again i didn't write this i am astonished that he that he as a nobel laureate can just gloss over chemical details are you the only one calling these guys out that's what he wrote all right look at the exquisite exactness that is put into this chemistry to get these things to go so when you read this everything is is is just exquisite and then and then they'll get the compound and then they say well we didn't really use it we just scaled it up to uh to simplify the handling procedures using normal synthetic organic methods well why didn't you use what you you made because it was a little blip in your hplc and you claimed it without purifying it or without really using that reaction then you went ahead and scaled it up another way or you bought it that's cheating look at this exactness the preparation of cyanoacetylene on copper one was suggested as a way to conveniently prepare and store it for use when needed here's how it was made so what i'm talking about for you non-chemistry we're just talking about cyanoacetylene that one compound to make that one little compound that one right there look at what he had to go through copper chloride was mixed with potassium flour to generate the newlin catalyst at 70 degrees centigrade then a separately generated source of acetylene gas was prepared from calcium carbide where do you get all this calcium carb he bought it where did he get potassium chloride he bought it where do you get copper one clark he bought it this gas was bubbled through a newland catalyst to prepare uh acrylonitrile all right so he's bubbling this gas through and that's an unstable compound that needs proper isolation of storage acrylic nitrile is nasty which was then treated with kcn potassium cyanide for one hour then five equivalents of ammonia as a 13 molar ammonia ammonium solution adjusted to ph 9.2 with sodium hydroxide to generate the desired amino propionitrial all of the reactions were executed in separate clean vessels oh find that under a rock and properly isolated prior to proceeding to the next reaction yeah you properly isolated you properly purified before bringing it on this is just a sampling of the preparations okay and and and all the other things he made were racemic and not chiral anyway then he goes on to even higher level extrapolations that quote all the cellular subsystems could have arisen simultaneously through common chemistry oh crazy this is crazy i you're probably just falling out of your chairs right now that all cellular subsystems could have arisen simultaneously through common chemistry where on earth did you get that statement that's quoting from nature chemistry one of the highest chemistry journals around and that has raised the level of supposition from mere molecule types to now complex cellular cellular subsystems you're going to make a whole cellular subsystem where molecules are working in concert toward a common goal give me a break how close have researchers come to making an artificial cell well in november 2018 there was this article published in science which is top journal biologists create the most lifelike artificial cells i was like i want to see that i want to see that with the most like life artificial cells so i go to the original article here's an original article uh communication and quorum sensing in non-living mimics of eukaryotic cells so they're saying they've they've made non-living mimics but they're communicating in quarantine they took semi-porous micro capsules made of plastics they're made of plastics from acrylate polymerization containing clay you put clay in it because clay is positively charged bind dna which is negatively charged we're prepared using modern microfluidic fluidics techniques so you do this in a fabrication facility fabrication facilities like it it it's it's it's like a shop where you you build computer chips with all of these differences and then and and uh clays have a hyphenated bonding dna dna so dna was present so you put you take these plastic spheres you make plastic spheres you put dna uh clay in there but they're semi-porous so then you throw in some dna the dna is gonna diffuse through the semi-porous membrane and stick to the clay okay all right then they buy ribosomes mrna messenger rna enzymes and reagents these are either purchased or isolated from living things and then they add the medium and the expected chemical reactions ensue you get protein synthesis and the newly formed proteins then diffuse out and go into other micro capsules that's just normal diffusion the micro capsules that are closer to that first one get more because they're near the ones that are further away get less and they're calling that quorum sensing that is just normal diffusion the ones that are close get more the ones that are further away get less if if you're standing in a swimming pool and somebody pours in 10 gallons of boiling water you're going to feel that but the person on the other side of the swimming pool isn't going to feel that 10 gallons of water getting poured in in the opposite corner why because the diffusion chemistry of forming proteins in this way is done all the time in industry in test tubes it's done all the time this is far from the press-hyped claim of gene expression and communication rivaling that of living cells you can buy a kit to do this you can buy a kit you just mix these things in the kit and it does this this is quarantine this is the most life-like artificial cells what that underscores is yeah that's the most lifelike which means you're nowhere close that's what it means i just got this a couple of weeks ago dear mr tour this is an email that was sent to me i meet with a number of men and i've been showing your videos on how outlandish proofs or anything is but this article was thrown out there as proof that it could be possible could you point me to a critique of this article it would be of a great help thank you well i don't want to do critiques for everybody but i i clicked on this to see what was said here's the article comes out researchers solve puzzle of origin of life on earth whoa they solved it they did it says it right there researchers solved puzzle of origin of life on earth and it's not just in science sick daily it was in a bunch of other journals too it came out so i went to the article and i read it prebiotic amino acids bind to and stabilize prebiotic fatty acid membranes huh this is a portion of the of of the abstract he he he takes a vesicle takes a vesicle and you add certain things and and the organic compounds some of the organic compounds go in that vesicle and help to stabilize it they help to stabilize it from high concentrations of magnesium and that solved the origin of life well that's what was written so i contacted one of the authors here and i said could you help me out here how did this do this so i'm not going to comment on that right now because because uh uh after pushing and pushing first he said he he would he would comment and then he learned who i was he said i'm not going to talk to you about this i said you know this is why wouldn't you talk to me about this so he says uh it'll take some time for me to answer your questions it was very simple questions but he wanted sometimes he said he'll do it this coming weekend so i'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt but but um here's what it is people take a little idea of trash it's a trashy idea that they find a little bit of something on meteorite or they make a little bit of some some stairs scrambled something in a laboratory and somebody says oh so you see that's been made so i'll build upon that and that gives a little more trash and then i'll build upon that and i'll build upon that and all of a sudden they extrapolate to life it's all based on a house of cards on top of another heist of cards on top of another one you know they don't even purify the chemicals going along but those people don't know it because they haven't read the articles or they look at the meteorite and it's all stereo scrambled garbage and i look at some of the ancient by 35 year old one of one of the meteorite articles was sent to me by the author of that paper who said he's going to get to me over the weekend it's a 35 year old paper and and you look at it and that was the extraction from the meteorite did did you watch your chloroform did that chloroform have a little bit of a sugar in it to begin with i mean did anyone breathe on that chloroform if anyone breathed on it that could be where the where the sugar came from where the carbohydrate came from and if you didn't guys didn't breathe it how about the manufacturer where it came from did did somebody happen to sneeze in the factory that day when the chloroform was being made i mean how scrupulous you got to be to to have i didn't say in scrupulous how scrupulous you have to be in the care in trying to find a little bit of something on a meteorite when you have earth where life is ubiquitous this stuff's hard to do all right it's fool's gold it's fool's gold because if you take if you take uh uh chemists were trying to make uh um gold from other elements and they found that you could take iron and if you added sulfur to it you would get what looked like gold and then they knew it wasn't gold because it didn't have the same ductility this didn't have the same other point but they thought they were getting close no you can add sulfur all day to iron you're never going to get gold the only way you'll transfer convert iron into gold is you got to change the number of protons and that that's hard to do you need some nuclear reactor system and and uh that costs a lot more than gold and so this is what they're doing they'll find a little something they say okay why are you bothering us let us do our research we're on the right track you're not on the right track you're making fools gold this is why it has to stop in 1775 the french academy in paris refused to entertain any further proposals for perpetual motion machines the devices just didn't work as advertised the mature science of thermodynamics which gave us a theoretical account for why the perpetual schemes failed lay a hundred years in the future life likewise origin of life researchers seemed sadly adrift and it and its inability to advance bears witness of that fact so i think there's a time for a call we need a timeout a change is warranted the demands addressing the hurdles such as the origin of life's code uh routes to the complex assembly and interact ons that are essential mass throughput lots of questions or some conjectures as to why these things don't need to be addressed uh have so-called scientific facts ever been shown to be wrong okay so so scientific so-called scientifics have they ever been shown to be wrong before well does the universe have a beginning if prior to the 1960s lots of signs in 1950s the majority of scientists believe the universe had no beginning it always existed that scientific fact quote unquote fact changed in 1964 with the steady state theory replaced the uh uh uh steady state theory was replaced by the big bang theory uh darwinian theory to punctuated equilibrium the scientific fact changed in 1972 eldridge and gould uh proposed that the degree of gradualism commonly attributed to charles darwin is virtually non-existent in the fossil record so that changed in 1972 climate change killed off dinosaurs that scientific quote-unquote fact changed in 1980 when it became due to an asteroid impact that's the alvarez hypothesis random mutation and natural selection as suggested by darwin and taught as fact are recognized by many evolutionists since the 1990s to be insufficient to account for the complexity of life these things that people my age learned that random mutation natural selection account for life it's a bunch of nonsense that many evolutionists now feel that this neutral drift is quantitatively more important in understanding genetic differences between organisms just the the normal drift change between me and my children and their children and so forth all right how long ago did dinosaurs become extinct or better to say how stable is soft tissue one of these is going to has changed scientific fact is being questioned since 2007 when mary higby schweitzer a paleontologist at nc state led the group that discovered the remains of blood cells in dinosaur fossils and later discovered soft tissue remains from tyrannosaurus rex specimens in 2015 research researchers reported finding structures similar to blood cells and collagen fibers preserved in the bone fossils of six cretaceous dinosaur specimens which are approximately 75 million years old 75 million years old and you're finding blood cells and collagen fibers that tells us that that at least soft tissue hangs around a long long time something we never thought about before or scientists or dinosaurs uh uh did not become extinct until more recently one of the two uh one can think of these being thousands of years tens of thousands of years maybe a hundred thousand years but 75 million years old um it's hard it's hard so these things so facts things that are put forward as facts that aren't are always subject to change claims that mislead the patient taxpayer are unhateful unhelpful and the public will eventually distrust scientific claims let me see something 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 student if they will not embrace our conjectures as facts will lead to continued division between scientists and non-scientists which can yield public reluctance to fund our research we must tell the truth with specificity it's the fact say it if it's not a fact say it blackballing scientists if they bear legitimate non-conformist views by excluding them from professional societies and academies withholding their funding or denying them tenure is anti-scientific and will the advancement of science so i'm not a one for god of the gaps as a scientist i would never say that we will never understand the origin of life one day in the distant future we might understand life's origin and evolution of complex systems that will not lessen god but we will see him as all the more magnanimous but until that time we can't go on saying that we understand these things i can as a scientist i can say i can't i can never say we will never know i can't say that we might know something but as of right now we are clueless scientific fact versus the bible so now now i'm getting away i'm getting away from from the science part let me talk about scientific fact in the bible a scientific fact water has two hydrogen atoms one oxygen atom that will be the same throughout the universe and that will never change there's never been discordance between scientific facts and statements in the bible so there is 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 to fit a scientific theory is a frustrating endeavor all of those so-called facts that changed were all in in the last in the last 60 years do not 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 distinction this leads to the confusion of generations of students and even professors themselves many professors are confused because they think that somebody understands that now they if they if they really looked at the origin of life they'd see nobody understands to the student who's inundated with misinformation deuteronomy 13 verses 3 and 4 tells us 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 revere keep his commands and obey him serve him and hold fast to him many people are dreamers in this and and so much of what's said is just a bunch of storytelling these are dreamers you're not to listen to them the lord your god is testing you to find out whether you really love him with all your heart and with all your soul he's testing you i pray you passed the test i'm going to close with this because in a group of this side this is my last slide group of this size i never assume anything for where people are with jesus christ but let me say this about god he says i even i am the one who wipes out your transgressions for my own sake and i will not remember your sins god invites you the message of the gospel is come he invites you he says i will forgive your sins for my own sake what is this for my own sake i want i will wipe out your transgressions for my own sake and i liken it to this if if one of my kids went to jail i would go and bail them out and even if they said dad i deserve to be here i would say you're my child you're getting out we'll deal with that but i'm not going to leave you here some people think that they're not worthy of so gracious of salvation god said i'm doing it for my own sake i love you so much i'm taking you out of that romans 10 9 says this that if you confess with your mouth that jesus is lord and believe in your heart that god raised him from the dead you will be saved this is what the scriptures say salvation that if we confess with our mouth that jesus is lord that jesus is lord we are sinners that are separated because of our sin there's nothing we can do to get past that so god provided a way he provided a way in his son his son died for our sins on our behalf that does away with our sins he rose from the dead and he's seated at the right hand of his father many people saw him he was seen by over 500 people at one time he ate with his disciples he ate with them he talked with them he instructed them he invited them to feel his hands and his feet he invited them to stick his finger in the holes in his hands lest you think it was it was a an imposter acting like jesus no this guy he still had the holes in his hands from the crucifixion he still had a hole in his side from where a spear was driven right up into his heart and he he told he told thomas he didn't ask him he told thomas he said thomas stick your hand into the hole in my side he told him to so he invited him to stick his hand into a hole in his side and just reach up there and feel that hole this was really jesus risen from the dead we must believe in the resurrection now i'll tell you something i share with people all the time about jesus and his resurrection and i have a 10-minute conversation with them 15-minute conversation with them they go from not believing in the resurrection these are all educated people i only speak to educated people because that's who i'm around they go from not believing in the resurrection of jesus christ to believing in the resurrection of jesus christ in a 15 or 20 minute conversation these are educated people how do they go from not believing to believing they haven't had time to investigate the history of this i have since then there's a lot of it but how can a person go from not believing to believing in a simple short conversation these are educated people these are either undergraduates at rice or graduate students or post-docs or professors or medical students or medical professors from across the street all the time every week i see somebody go from not believing to believing somebody receiving the kindness of the lord jesus and salvation how is this done how do they go from not believing to believing and i'll tell you i think it's because the truth of the resurrection is already on your heart it's already there the barrier would be way too high for us to believe something so incredible as a resurrection and make that a requirement for salvation if god didn't place the truth of it already there the truth of the resurrection is already there whether you're listening to this live or you listen to the recording of this i invite you to send me an email if you do not know the lord this is not for christians this is not for people who already know jesus to don't tell send me an email and say well can you meet with me anyway my answer will be no this is only for people who do not know the lord but you want to hear more i invite you into a zoom conversation just me and you alone send me an email to tour rice.edu t-o-u-r-rice.edu or just google gym tour my name will come up you'll find my email google me and i will i will email me and i will set up a zoom conversation just me and you will meet 30 minutes i will share my story and in 30 minutes you will walk out a believer in jesus christ saved you will because i've seen it over and over again i invite you to do that and with that i'm going to close and i thank you for inviting me i went a bit over time but i didn't go over time if you look at the time that you gave me to start so i stayed within the time that you had allotted to me thank you thank you professor tour um we that definitely generated a lot of uh excitement interest in the chat we've got some questions uh i totally agree we got a later start with some of the introductions uh they were very nice but uh you're doing great thank you and for all those who are staying with us we really appreciate it um so if you have a few more moments we would like to address some of the questions that have popped up in the q and a and one of my colleagues david novak who's a biochemist um has one of the most upvoted questions so um it's a phrase that he has shared with me a few times and i would like to see uh if we can uh i'll i'll just ask the question that's it many if not all chemical reactions in the cell are simultaneously at non-equilibrium states is there any research that demonstrates that you can have multiple simultaneous non-equilibrium reactions in a single reaction chamber that's at homeostasis no and and also also that that uh the amount of energy to keep a cellular system in a non-equal equilibrium state is enormous enormous amount of energy to keep things in the non-equilibrium state so there are things that i mean you can see things in nature that that uh um that are in a non-equilibrium state so for example a hurricane just just came through nearby here and uh these are these are things and but it's a very regular pattern in a cell you have so many non-equilibria going on things that are out of equilibrium but it takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep it there we have no idea how that is done we know how many atp molecules a lot of this has been calculated recently by brian miller and uh he's a physical chemist and he's done a lot of calculations on this uh discounting a lot of what jeremy england had proposed because it's very hard to have something like a cellular system i mean a cell is just utterly utterly amazing so the short answer is no okay our next question uh that's was about here that's a little longer but i'll try to read it quickly i don't know if you can see them uh in many faith communities including the seventh-day adventist church there seems to be deep confusion about the basic definition goals and claims of the origin of life research abiogenesis in the theory of evolution uh can you address the differences between the ongoing abiogenesis research which seeks to explain the origin life and the theory of evolution explains what seeks to explain observable biodiversity only after the emergence of self replicators so basically it sounds like what's the interesting origin i got it i got it okay so no i didn't address evolution at all in this time because i wasn't asked to i could have and and uh i have um certainly we see it you know evolution is a very slippery term evolution can be used for very simple little reactions that you can do all the time in labs simple changes in in in in biochemical systems you can see that it's done all the time in the lab and i don't like to use the term macroevolution microevolution because because uh uh again there's there's these things are not clear where the line of demarcation is nor do i nor do i like to say that it is impossible to generate a new species because you can generate a new species this is done you see this in nature so for example sometimes plants will double their dna for some unknown reason they'll double their dna so now you have a new species so these things are seen but what you never see is evolution of a complex system how does one system turn into another by system i mean this how does so whenever i talk about you never see you never see evolution of a complex system people will always present to me the immune system because the immune system is presented into something and it morphs and it changes depending on what it's presented with it's an amazing system but that immune system never becomes a digestive system never becomes an auditory system never becomes a an optical system it remains an immune system so what i like to talk about is evolution of a complex system because you have to have system change upon system change upon system change in order to have evolution as we know it you don't see evolution to generate for example change in body plans it's evolution of a complex system not only have we never seen it there has never even been a proposal on how it could happen so i'm not saying hey show me show me how this happened just show me how it could happen because what i feel when i talk to to evolutionists is that they are the greatest storytellers in the world they say how had well there was a change here and a change here and change here and change here and then this happened with no detail no detail and as soon as you start probing for detail everything starts withering around the edges and then you present them with another question and they'll do just the opposite with another story uh they don't even have a a a system with something that they can describe where you could change where you could change a complex system there's not even that so so i you know and i can present it in that way so yeah i just don't see a model as a chemist i don't see it as a chemist i don't see it now if you want to tell me stories fine i tell you stories about i went to the north pole and saw santa claus you can tell stories of whoever you want but without the chemical backup it's hard for me to embrace it i'm not saying we won't have the answer someday i'm just saying as of today we don't yeah um i resonate uh i think those of us who have been in the in the lab and have had to struggle with making molecules and simple ones i built some systems with porphyrins and perylene's and um it and it was nowhere near a photosynthetic reaction center and uh and i could see the beauty and the challenge that uh life has to have a photosynthetic reaction center which has to be one of the first uh large uh systems here on on planet earth but i i digress because we do have a few other questions um i i'm gonna bring up this next one that's here because um i think you addressed it but maybe you could just we had someone ask um you seem very animated about people claiming to have abiogenesis absolutely figured out i have not seen many scientists actually make this claim there is no agreement at all about a theory of abiogenesis that is claimed to be anything like decisive right any thoughts about that right right but then what is put forward is an image to the world if you ask the typical person on the street most people would say oh yeah scientists have created life in the lab scientists are very close because of i showed you an article i just showed you an article that came out and says puzzle was solved for life's origin i've seen all of those and and so yes scientists in their papers they do big extract origin of life people do affect big extrapolations like like sastek did in that nature article those are big big extrapolations but he he he stayed short of saying that we've made life yes but those extrapolations and then they get turned up a few orders of magnitude when it gets turned into the press and do these guys ever call that information back no and and so no the the world thinks it's been done so much so that even scientists in the lab and scientists don't even know the difference between abiogenesis i'm saying scientists i'm not talking about economics professors although they think they're scientists okay they're saying i'm not i'm not talking about about uh um you know uh uh some someone in in performing arts scientists many times confuse abiogenesis and evolution they lump the whole thing together i have sent articles that i've written on abiogenesis to my colleagues in evolutionary biology and they will respond back jim evolution has been proven get off of it and i'm like uh um the article wasn't even on that they they the whole thing is merged in their minds and uh uh so so uh yeah they they the most origin of life people that i know will stay short of saying that they generated life but their projections and what they'll and i've got other articles i just wrote a chapter in this book it was put out by the discovery of institute something about uh uh the mystery of the origin of life you know it's still it's still a mystery something like that i haven't i have a chapter in there where i give exact quotes from what people have written in research articles not press but research articles and to say and just dissect it point by point by point no basis for saying this no basis for saying this no basis for saying this so although they have not said that they created life they have become very close in suggesting it such that as soon as it hits the press people think they did it and yeah i'm animated you got a problem with that i'm animated with everything yeah so some scientists are not yeah i'm animated about this thing but i'll tell you you get these things and you get people firing at you because you take on the mainstream either you go away and suck your thumb or you're gonna be animated you should come see one of my lectures we have that in common i'm very animated too at times uh just on that topic real quick i'm thinking about life um you talked about obviously all these car parts coming together and how complex uh so one thing i've been looking for i'm going to kind of go off from the not from these questions this is my own how many chemicals do you think it takes um to make the simplest living system you you talked about we got to have all these different groups is there a number that we you know is it like 100 chemicals uh no no but but by i don't know what you mean by chemicals if you want to talk about you know we have carbon hydrogen oxygen nitrogen sulfur selenium and we we probably have uh you know iron i don't know maybe i would say molecules molecules but but let's see see molecules i don't know what you mean by molecules there are four basic types but within that within the carbohydrates you have several different carbohydrates and if you want to say only those that are homochiral and not talk about the other ones that other people would have to deal with that you have to deal with along the way those are homo cairo now when they start hooking together every one of these carbohydrates structures like i said you have one trillion combinations just from a single d mannose think about this if you just had a single a base in dna a a a there's only one way to put that together that's that that that's six a's in a row that's it if you have six d mannoses there's over one trillion ways to put that together because of the different branching that can occur in the anomeric center over one trillion so i don't know what you mean by how many different molecules do you need to put together so i don't even know i i wouldn't even know how to calculate that it's or not yeah i i've actually just tried to google and look to see if anybody like do we even know what we're trying to make you know what how many organic chemicals are we having to pull together here but see the the the argument ryan is that they'll keep saying well a simple cell doesn't need all of those okay great okay what's the simplest thing what does a simple cell need i mean i i was speaking to to uh to an evolutionary biologist just recently and i said how many protein-coding genes do you think you need he says none he said none he says all you need is maybe rna one rna i said and and how would that one rna make itself i don't know but maybe that's all you need you see so so you try to define life as something that is not life and then you make it so simple that oh yeah i can put rna in in a lipid bilayer but it's not life like anything that we know and what we do know from uh um from the fossil record is that the earliest cells that we can identify the earliest cells that we can identify have a complexity that are at least as complex as the simplest cells that we have today that we know from the fossil record very interesting dr hannah did you want to bring up a question i'll share one of the questions here that has been getting some attention from those who are watching the the questions online in our system uh what what are your thoughts dr tour on michael russell's theory of how we move from carbon to carbon dioxide to methane in water connected with a hydrothermal vent uh apparently russell proposed this theory even before scientists knew that there was such a thing as higher hydrothermal vents do you know about that i don't know i don't know about michael russell but i've read about hydrothermal veins look hydrothermal vents give you they give you a hot temperature and you have carbon but this doesn't address any of the problems this falls in so how did the molecules get made hydrothermal vent just gives you thermal you show you so you have a high temperature you have some salt there a lot of these reactions you got to cool and molecules are going to fall apart at these temperatures biological molecules fall apart when you put them near a hydrothermal vent i mean these things don't hold up a lot of times so so i it doesn't address any of the problems that i put forward on just the basic chemicals nor does it address any of the assembly problems none of them are addressed he's just trying to put out there a few more things of okay here's a hot zone it goes from a hydrothermal vent then to a cold zone then back to a hot zone that means this is just changing to temperature and concentration gradients and and throwing up some chemicals from the earth but these are all simple chemicals that don't do it if you could do this easily i'll tell you it'd be done in the lab if a hydrothermal vent could do this we'd have done this in the lab by now yeah so i don't think much of it the next question that comes up says that many if not all chemical reactions in the cell are simultaneously at non-equilibrium states oh that was already yeah that was dr novak's yeah we already got that uh people are asking for access to powerpoints but i think we're just going to make this video uh i don't not necessarily public available um you have a lot of uh talks that are already out there what would you say to somebody dr tour if they wanted to have more information i mean you can watch the video i mean this is going to go out and this is going to be there in perpetuity in fact i told you i'd like a copy of this for my own dr james tour i'll put it up on my youtube site it'll be out there for everybody to see and i think that's great i put it out there for everybody to see but you'll get a lot more information than this if you just get that book that was just came out 2020 uh the the the by the discovery institute i'm just one of uh i don't know 15 contributing authors to that something like that and uh uh i have a lot more in there in that chapter excellent um and by the way i have several articles that i've written that are on the free journal inference if you just type inference james tour it'll pop up and that's a online journal and i've written several articles with a lot more detail than what i just gave you thank you that's that's wonderful here's another question that relates to my field of theology someone asks since it's difficult for science to explain the origin of life uh why are more christian scientists not willing to explore the option of intelligent design why is that such a hard sell well i don't know you know you know i i never mentioned intelligent design in this whole thing and the reason i don't i don't uh speak about intelligent design is because i don't have a way to measure that and i'm sympathetic to the arguments and and uh but as a scientist i hold i i hold myself to the same standards that i hold my colleagues how did you measure that on what basis can you say that there is no chemical tool to measure intelligent design i don't have a tool for that so i can't i i i don't go saying that now by by my faith i believe that god created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them that he did and uh the details of that i don't know but uh uh i know to the extent that is written in the book of genesis on how he did that uh but but but that's what i know but as far as as a scientist what i can say i can't put that forward so so i don't know i don't know what goes on in the minds of other scientists but i can tell you most of it in my opinion most of it is that is that they're busy with other things this is not even this is not even on their plate this doesn't even it's disney i mean until a few years ago i never started even thinking about this it was that that i heard some things in a meeting and i and i got all riled up and upset about crazy claims and i said i wrote my first article on origin of life and it's propagated from there and then people have gotten upset with me which i thought was was without scientific merit and so then i had to write more to defend what i had written so so uh but most of them don't even engage in this they don't even think about this they think you know evolution it's all worked out origin of life you kind of know from the foremost reaction formaldehyde bone you got all your carbohydrates and it went from there and so they don't even think about it it's my guess thank you thank you thank you that's it for me ryan back to you yeah uh how much time do you have dr tour well uh uh let's try to wrap it up okay boy there's a lot of questions i would i would love to ask you um as well there's there's some here uh do you know any of the work that's going on with lee cronin i'm trying to think if i know yeah i know he and i were on on the incredible podcast recently oh i think i may have seen you guys have a discussion um yeah i know his work because i studied some of his work to prepare for that podcast talk and and um what are some of the challenges that are that you would how would you comment on his work and some of the challenges to their approach he's nowhere close to life absolutely nowhere close he's got some auto catalytic reactions that that are not random at all if you look at his experimental setups they are extremely complex and he has youtube videos of his lab all these different and even with that he's just doing an auto catalytic reaction but what he is doing is he is redefining life not as we know it with all these different elements that have to have so you can just google what is needed for life you see all these seven points that what life does he's trying to redefine life what is a simpler life form trying to redefine and redefine so that he can somehow try to target that but even what he's shown is just simple auto catalytic reactions which have been around for 100 years so i don't think a whole lot of it what's bothered christians about it is that when i had this discussion with him on on that podcast is that is that it bothers christians that i didn't draw blood that i didn't stick anybody's nose in the comments that they had made i would just say things and then let it go because in the circles in which we deal as scientists to scientists which it was with lee and i i really commendly that he got on and spoke with me uh because most scientists in origin of life will not even speak with me and you try to figure out why that is you try to figure that out they'll say well you know tours faith has influenced his his world view and so we can i'll i won't mention anything of faith just science i mentioned nothing of of faith in in that podcast other than when it was asked as you know was a believer you know that was it and then then i said you know emphatically not just a simple little believer i believe jesus christ is the son of god and he's risen physically from the dead that's what i believe but but but other than that it was pure science but we don't we don't try to stick anybody's nose and things in these sort of discussions and so i just addressed them as scientists scientists and uh uh other other than one little comment where i kind of lost myself i mean i just addressed him in a cordial manner that bothered christians because they felt that i should have drawn blood and that that was the only thing that was going to make them happy that doesn't sound very christian yeah and yeah that's right and my scientists colleagues who've seen it and said wow you really did a great job you were very respectful i mean they really honored that well we really appreciate i really appreciate your approach and and for saying some things i think it's uh providing great perspective uh often has felt similar you know in a lot of ways as a chemist who has tried to make things and to just assume a lot of this just works itself out is very disingenuous about our knowledge and you are starting to bring that to light and i really appreciate that but i think we'll go ahead and wrap things up for today and i've asked we've asked our the chair of the chemistry department here uh dr david randall uh if he would just give a closing thought and to send us out but uh i really appreciate uh what has been said and all the comments and for people joining us here today and we'll try to make the video available in our community here and uh dr randall uh the window is yours thank you very much uh dr tour we're really honored uh for uh such a scientific someone who's so scientifically distinguished uh and who's also done a lot of thinking and explaining and having animated that discussions about uh the topic of abiogenesis so i think you've given us a lot to think about and or remind us of which is you know topics like the um chirality of molecules and basically how hard it is to do organic synthesis right all these crazy different conditions you have to do and just putting molecules together is it's a really hard job so we're grateful again for uh the time you took uh to share uh with us some of your latest thoughts on the topic of abiogenesis i think a lot of the chats that we had come into the panelists were grateful for your time and that we were able to put this talk together so thank you again for doing this and um that concludes our presentation today so thank you again [Music] you

Channel: Dr. James Tour

Views: 64,250

Keywords: Dr. James Tour, Jim Tour, Science, Faith, Jesus, nanomachines, NanoEngineering, Bible, Professor, Chemistry, Origin of Life, Clueless, OOL, Abiogenesis, Scientists are Clueless, Facts don't care, molecules don't care, evolution, intelligent design

Id: OYHHIBIZF8o

Length: 88min 21sec (5301 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020