The Emergence of Life on Earth

okay yes we might as well get started so all things must come to an end and this is the last in our distinguished lecture series on emergence and of course we saved the best for last so we have dr. Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution of Washington geophysical lab and let me tell you a few things about Bob so he started off as a mineralogist in the 1970s that was an exciting time for mineralogy and I'll just point out why because I think it indicates a lot of things it was shortly after the perfection of the automated single crystal diffractometer which did two things to the mineralogy community one it's turned determining a crystal structure from a PhD thesis to a relatively short project so that you could use what you determined to really understand something instead of get stuck in the determination to a lot of people who could not make that transition were very resentful of the new technology and the new people and I bring this up because I think this happens in science all the time and of course bob was one of the people who took advantage of the new technology and invented the field of what at that time we called comparative crystal chemistry where you look at crystal structures as a function of composition temperature pressure whatever else you think is important and because you can determine those structures fairly conveniently you can look for systematics you can look for trends you can create a lot of data those are themes I think that have characterized him ever since and we've all moved on since the 1970s and bob has moved into many things he's a Renaissance man he's a writer of serious science of popular science fiction he's a concert quality trumpet player he's engaged in teaching large undergraduate classes at George Mason University and he's now leading a big project called a deep carbon irva Tory a sloan foundation project which is sort of a seed for hopefully much larger things and we talked a lot about what he should talk about and we sort of emailed back and forth and he could talk for five hours but you probably don't want that especially those of you that have to attend by 8:30 class tomorrow so we finally selected a topic which really highlights emergence and perhaps highlights emergence and what finally is perhaps the most definitive thing at least from our selfish point of view on earth namely the emergence of life on Earth Bob Hazen well it's such a pleasure to be here to talk about this subject which I really feel very passionately about the the question of the origin of life is one which has not just deep scientific implications but deep philosophical implications as well indeed there's probably no subject in which the conflict between science and religion is more clearly etched than in this question of the origin and the evolution of life and so I want to start off by stepping back from emergence and thinking more about the ways that you can think about the origin of life and I think there are four different possibilities for thinking about emergence what is that life was a miracle God created life and you know for many people that first chapter of Genesis God created the heavens and the earth God created plants and animals God created us in his own image that's sufficient but scientists want to know more if the origin of life was a divine creative act a miracle something by definition outside natural law then it's beyond science science cannot address a miracle by definition because it does not conform to natural law there are other possibilities the origin of life could be something it's completely consistent with chemistry and physics and yet so improbable so rare that in a universe of a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars and many of those stars having multiple planets earth-like planets in many cases that perhaps life only arose a few times maybe only once and if that's true then again science is really at a loss to discover in any detailed way how it happened because because if it took a trillion trillion planets billions of years then a graduate students not going to be able to do it in one for your thesis even if we have some good chemical hints it's going to be very difficult then of course there's the philosophical stand that anyone who does origin of life research takes and this really is this interesting this is one field of science that if you decide you're going to go into this field you better believe that this is true and that's belief this is not truth it's just a philosophical stand that that the universe is pregnant with life that life arises through an emergent process and therefore studying in a laboratory has some reasonable chance of gaining insight into how the process happened I can't prove it it's just a hunch but you know that this is something it just happens okay and if you accept that as your hypothesis and you can imagine and approach to the origin of life that involves doing chemistry then why was doing benchtop science studying step by step the key here then is that life began as a series of emergence steps of increasing complexity going from a geochemical world a nonliving world to a biological world okay so that's the point of view that most scientists who work in this have and of course there is also this fourth possibility which you can argue philosophically whether it isn't folded into some of the earlier ones but this idea of intelligent design now the reason I'm bringing this up is I'm sure that this audience does not need need to be convinced but I lecture around the country around the world even about this subject and there's this is a very clear place where people are questioning the validity of science so what's intelligent design it basically says that life is irreducibly complex it's intuitively obvious people say that if you're walking along and you look down on half and you see a watch and you pick it up you look at you say you know that there had to be an engineer you may not know who the designer was but this is vastly too complex the intricacy of the parts intertwined and working the materials the workmanship and this isn't something just a rose spontaneously this was engineered that's intelligent design they say by the same token as simple a single cell is vastly more complex than a wristwatch and therefore looking at it it's intuitively obvious there had to be an intelligent design natural supernatural process something we can to know and so this requires you to accept a combination of both some physical and chemical process that the design used but also some supernatural beyond knowing something extra scientific pseudo scientific if you will type approach and so we come to this question is intelligent design science the proponents of course argued that it is and in one very narrow sense it passes one of the litmus tests of science and we think we need to accept this it does make testable predictions testable hypothesis they say there's absolutely no natural process by which an eye could evolve from a non-seeing organism and you can test that there's no process by which the bacterial flagellum could have evolved there's no process by which the first single cell could have arisen and if you think about it then those if we can go into a laboratory environment and show step by step a project of emergent complexity by which you go from simplicity to complexity from no I to an eye or from no flagellum to a flagellum if you can show that can be done then you've disproved a prediction or intelligent design so it is falsifiable in that sense however it still fails the litmus test the science that there's this untestable unseen designer that's lurking in there and whether they want to claim its god or not that's a separate issue altogether so intelligent design is difficult what are we to do as scientists and faced with this some people argue we should teach intelligent design teach Darwinian evolution and let the children decide as if these are two equally weighted things and then the scientists say no no we can't do that and individuals and societies all around the world they constantly are coming up with these statements which makes us actually look bad it makes us look like we're close-minded like somehow we're afraid of this debate and I would argue yes every educated person in this country should understand this debate but it shouldn't be taught in a science classes we taught in comparative religion or in current events or philosophy so might that but it but it really is a problem for science when you have there it is yeah this kind of statement than american chemical society everybody else so what are we to do as scientists how do we approach this well my point of view is that you have to design a research program and that research program has to demonstrate a transition from a nonliving to a living world and if you can do that step by step if you can basically show that there's a series of steps that go from simplicity to complexity systematically then you have disproved that tenant of intelligent design you've shown it as a simple natural process now you still could argue on the other side of this point of view and you may recall that there are a number of people who have said for example that Stonehenge was built by space aliens that they came in with their flying saucers and they picked up the large stones and set them into place and the sad thing I mean no scientists no anthropologists can disprove that hypothesis that's that is a hypothesis that is basically unfalsifiable at this stage but what we can do what we certainly can do is demonstrate a much simpler process by which a prune under a thousand able bodied people who had rope and had wood and had stone tools and had time and had an organized society and the will to do things like this as humans have always had the will to do things like that could have build it with all technologies that we understand and know and so using Occam's razor using this principle that scientists must rely on that you take the simplest possible explanation of phenomena you have the minimum number of extraordinary assumptions then this has to be accepted as true way that Stonehenge was built and we can falsify again that the idea that there were intelligent designers associated with Stonehenge okay so my outline tonight is to kind of take it as a assumption that there is a natural process by which you can go from geochemical simplicity to biological complexity and the process is called emergent complexity I want to look in detail what emerging complexity is and then apply it to the emergence of biomolecules the first step in the origin of life then the emergence of organized molecular systems and a key step in the origin of life then the emergence of self-replicating systems and finally the emergence of natural selection which follows logically from number four here so this is the outline of tonight's lecture let's look at this thing emerging complexity there's so many definitions of emergence we had a wonderful dinner this evening we were talking about this and we really didn't agree but we all said you know we're sort of talking about the same thing well as far as I'm concerned all emergent from them and arise from the interaction of many different agents they can be physical particles they can be some other aspect of a system which can assume combinatoric ly huge numbers of possible configurations and then you pass energy across that system and what occurs then is some kind of patterning or behavior or or some kind of interesting property which is selected for by the fact that you have energy interacting with those particles so ripples sand dunes the various kinds of braiding that you see in stream beds these are all examples of emergence at a much larger scale of stars you see this - and what you'll see is common to these systems is that in each system there are individual objects which are responding to the local force environment a sand grain only experiences a few contact forces with adjacent grains plus the wind or the water that passes across it the case of stars the spiral arms arise simply by the local gravitational attraction the fields of each star you see these larger patterns emerging in a rather more complex case but still intrinsically the same consciousness arises from the interactions of neurons each neuron only in contact in this case with potentially thousands of others with with variable interactions of those but still each neuron is just experiencing a local environment and yet the collective property the emergent property of consciousness is something that goes beyond what any one neuron experiences this is the character of emergence one of my favorite examples is slime mold Dictyostelium a social amoeba this organism lives most of its life is a single isolated cell you can see the nucleus is the eukaryotic cell but under certain circumstances when the temperature the humidity or the nutrients in the forest floor reach a certain value these individual cells will send out chemical signals and those chemical signals are then quasi responses by adjacent cells they begin to come together to coalesce they form a slug like organism that actually can crawl across the forest floor remember these army bus' these are single-celled organisms that are acting cooperatively and then ultimately what happens is you get a patterning and that patterning results in these stalk like structures new cells spores are released from the tops of the stalks they go spreading out in the forest and then these things melt back into the forest floor and they become single-cell organisms again an amazing behavior collective behavior and emergent behavior which results from the individual objects responding to their local environment you can think of our own bodies in the senses that kind of emergent phenomena not only our consciousness but the whole body we're collection of single cells that interact in this way and so we see this in so many different kind of behaviors that consciousness again this idea of an individual nerve cell that has many dendrites you have a neural connection you have these electrical impulses which cause this collective phenomenon that's consciousness so we can you can mention thousands of examples of this they're all around us all the time it's a part of our natural world and it must have been part of the origin of life we see it at so many scales in astronomy at the scale of planet we see at the scale of stars exploding stars we see it at the scale of galaxies and of course in biology we see it as scales of molecules for example in cell membranes we see it at the scale of cells we see also at the scale of organisms in their social behavior I think it's astonishing this is a photograph of ants tending a fits now how in the world can that be how can ants each and is only responding to local signals by the way it used to be thought it was only chemical signals but recent studies have shown the ants also emit little very high-pitched squeaky sounds so that the center there's there's a kind of oral communication as well but whatever it is each and is only responding to its local environment and yet these amazing collective behaviors that's emergence okay so central assumptions about origin of life research and you have to make some of these just as an experimentalist you have to make your system simple of course the first one is that life is carbon-based and you don't have to do any exotic chemistry we're not talking about silicon chemistry as much as silicon chemistry is very interesting but we're really looking at carbon-based chemistry organic chemistry of a classical kind we also think that life's a chemical process that use the raw materials of an early Earth a planet with oceans atmosphere rocks and minerals nothing exotic there and finally there's a series of emergent steps now what do we mean by emergent steps well basically I think you can reduce the origin of life to four main kinds of emergent steps and this is really the heart and soul of my talk tonight first is you have to make the basic building blocks of life the biomolecules the amino acids which make proteins the sugars that make carbohydrates the lipid molecules that make cell membranes the building blocks of DNA and RNA that's that's fundamental you have to have those and so there has to be a process to make those next you have to organize them into the larger structures the membranes the polymers that are so fundamental to functioning of life the third step is organizing into self-replicating systems collections of molecules that actually make copies of themselves and once you have molecules that make copies of themselves then the natural selection follows inevitably that's just something well well and we'll see how that works through the course of the evening so the idea here though it's you know the idea of going from geochemistry to biochemistry is it's a vast gulf it's very very hard to understand that but if you can imagine the order of life now is a series of separate experimental programs make biomolecules make the polymers and the membranes then find a self-replicating system and then that system begins to evolve if you can think of it that way then you can set up a series of experiments that are focusing on the individual steps of the process that makes that much easier so the first step how do you make the biomolecules well one of the things that seems to be fundamental to all of these studies of the origin of life is that you can't produce complexity in the system by complexity I mean an information-rich small volume that's what life is life is a very tiny volume with a huge amount of information collected from the environment and concentrated there you can't do that unless you start with a complex environment the complex environment provides the Selective pressure to give you that information in a small volume and so what kinds of complexity am I talking about it's very simple any gradients temperature compositional gradients you need cycles hot cold wet dry day night high tide low tide all sorts of cycles you need to have fluxes these are fluid fluxes that pass over from one environment to another that move things around you need to have interfaces that can be mineral surfaces in contact with water it can be the surface of the water and contact err it can be aerosol particles in the upper atmosphere that you need interfaces and finally you need to have chemical complexity and one of the real key things here is that the geochemistry of Earth is incredibly complicated you're talking about dozens and dozens of major and minor elements not just traces of major minor elements that are in a typical gia chemical environment and and to do an origin of life experiment and only use this carbon hydrogen oxygen nitrogen is just an unrealistic way to think about this process okay so the first step is to make biomolecules and and it turns out I'll just give you the punchline for the last sixty years this has been done with a vengeance in virtually any energetic environment on earth or in space or there's carbon hydrogen oxygen nitrogen and energy of some source another you make these molecules do you make the building blocks of life so the idea here is to make carbon carbon bonds one way of thinking about you start with volcanic gases like carbon dioxide carbon monoxide hydrogen disulfide water and you basically build carbon-carbon bonds making two carbon molecules three carbon molecules and so forth that's what we're trying to do now it turns out that this was discovered very early a way to do this in a very efficient way and that's the classic miller-urey experiment I'm sure you've heard about this experiment just a tabletop piece of glass a Perez very simple very elegant it has on it a boiling fluid very gently boiling water that represents the early oceans it has an atmosphere of various gases the original gases they used include ammonia and hydrogen water methane and their little electric sparks that simulate lightning and if you run this apparatus for two or three days it starts first the solution starts turning pink and then brown and you get this black oily goo that starts forming you may get a lot of really interesting organic molecules in fact many of the building blocks of life you'll see in this list amino acids you'll see lipid justy carbohydrates you'll see metabolic molecules the building blocks of DNA and RNA in fact this was so convincing it looked like a balanced diet to people um and in fact the experiment in a sense worked too well because Stanley Miller and many of his followers his disciples people became religiously convinced almost that this had to be the way it was so obvious that this was this was the origin of life and so they they basically denied any support for anybody else Stanley Miller of course justifiably got a great deal of Fame from this experiment but the price of that fame was that he got leadership in a field which he then dominated for at least three decades until NASA came along NASA came along because there are other environments that NASA specializes in besides the surface of a warm wet planet if life is confined only to a warm wet planet with light lightning you're talking about earth and maybe Mars early on and that's it but there's deep space so people like Lou allamandola NASA Ames try to study deep space environments by building vacuum chambers with very cold conditions about 10 Kelvin shining ultraviolet radiation on Isis and you can produce all kinds of interesting organic species when you do this including amino acids including carbohydrates including lipids and then the work that we began about 15 years ago is looking at high temperature high pressure black smoker or deep volcanic environments on the floor of the ocean something Stanley Miller hated he called us ventus as if we were some kind of weird cult religion and and yet here's an energetic environment where you have a lot of chemical energy redox energy the very reduced sulfides coming out of these fluids in contact with much more oxidized water and that's what life uses is its energy source redox couples life are little like electric circuits where electrons are flowing through and this is a great way to to give you that electric potential energy and so what we did in our early experiment was to begin looking at these environment and NASA love this because if life could have arisen and deep dark hot hydrothermal zone then that gives you reason to study not just Mars today because there's deep zone but Europa and Callisto and Ganymede and Titan and you can go down the list of all these even some asteroids all possibly have hydrothermal zones where this kind of chemistry could go on so what we did was take little gold tubes we put various chemical ingredients water and and maybe a little bit of organic material in there sometimes just co2 and water we ran it on high pressure high temperature devices some of this was done with Hatt Yoder who is a great colleague he was in the laboratory every day until shortly before his death at the age of 75 an amazing guy to work with and so we do these these runs we'd analyze them using various classic chemical techniques analytical organic chemistry like a gas chromatography and the idea here is we are trying to make carbon carbon bonds in these environments now there's two kinds of carbon carbon bonds that pop up frequently in origin of life discussions one is making longer and longer molecules by process called Fischer trope synthesis basically making molecules longer by adding ch2 groups and just sort of bumping these things longer so that's one standard process very typical this is an industrial process of great importance and it turns out this is something that you can do very easily in the lab another thing that you might want to do other kinds of carbon let me show you first one of our first experiments this is something we did like one of the very first naive experiments we ran in 1996 so you have just carbon dioxide hydrogen and water in your capsule and you put a little bit of iron metal we thought that might be a good catalyst conditions are very simple 300 Celsius 500 atmospheres the kinds of conditions you might find on a deep ocean volcanic vent or in a subsurface environment ran a thing for 24 hours and what we got was just an explosion of Fisher Chopra actions what you're seeing here is small piece of a gas chromatograph chromatographic trace in which you basically pass a mixture molecules through a column a long column which is coated material so that it some molecules small molecules pass through it more quickly the larger molecules take longer and so versus time which is the horizontal axis you'll see a series of spikes here each spike representing a different compound and the big spikes are just long-chain molecules these alkanes and the number 18 19 20 and so forth that's the number of carbon atoms of an atom remember we only started with carbon dioxide that was the only source of carbon in these runs so we're making some really interesting things very quickly you'll also see other little bumps and Wiggles as you expand this there's some alcohols in here there are some alkenes there's some branched hydrocarbons so you know there's a lot of interesting chemistry going on in these capsules it was very very easy to do this now there's another kind of process too and this is called hydroformylation where instead of adding that ch2 group to make the molecule longer you can add a co this is carbonyl ation or or Hydra formulation you basically you're adding these and you can make longer and longer molecules and this leads to molecules that are very important in metabolic cycles it leads to the kind of molecules that are in the reductive TCA cycle or the Krebs cycle which is a metabolic cycle will meet that a little bit later and so this is a very interesting set of molecules too and some of our experience experiments yield these and indeed if you look at to a variety of transition metal sulfides we've used lots of other minerals as well but these are iron and copper and nickel cobalt sulfides and so forth on a horizontal scale here and what you see in blue I hope there's not anybody who's colorblind who can't see this I apologize for the color scheme it should be changed but some of these are very effective at fischer tropsch synthesis and when you start with a small molecule sometimes as much as his twenty or even thirty percent of those molecules are elongated through this process and others particularly the cobalt and nickel sulfides are very efficient at hydroformylation in that case sometimes over 30% of the molecules are elongated in this way now what this is telling us is that if you have a natural geochemical environment on the ocean floor it needs black smokers where you have nickel and cobalt and Aran and copper sulfides all mixed together that the molecules are going to be produced in profusion and you're going to have to do a hydro formulation here you're going to do a Fischer Tropez action over here and this doesn't even bring in nitrogen when you start adding a mean groups and and making esters and all sorts of interesting chemistry is going on in fact you just get a flood of chemistry so so this kind of process is really interesting and for those of you who are wondering about why this chemistry works it really has to do at the bonding of Co particularly strongly to these that's where the Hydra formulation comes in so there's a lot of details here I mean George Cody could give you an incredible lecture on every chemical step that he's found and it's it's a fascinating process but the really bottom line is that making these molecules is straightforward we now know half a dozen different ways and plausible prebiotic environments to make the small molecules of life this was really a critical partner and I'm pleased to say as a card-carrying mineralogist that it looks like minerals played a fundamental role here minerals are going to come back again and I have to give you a warning here because there is a curiosity about origin of life research it's just a fact of life that humans see in the natural world what they know best a mineralogist therefore the origin of life revolves around minerals there are other people who are molecular biologists as they studied DNA and RNA and for them the origin of life is all about DNA and RNA their lipid chemists who proposed the lipid world there are people who study polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons for them it's the pow world everybody sees in the origin of life what they've got their PhD in I got my PhD in mineralogy and but I am pleased to tell you in spite of that fact is why the kind of minerals have played a key role in the origin of life and and so it's really fun to be able to talk about that tonight okay so you made these molecules it's easy to make the molecules but then you have to do something useful with them and one of the typical T's here is that the prebiotic processes are told you about make vast numbers of molecules not just a few dozen or a few hundred molecules they make tens of thousands of different molecular species but life life isn't like that life is an incredible degree of molecular selectivity idiosyncratic use of molecules you know there's a catalogue of all the known organic species this relatively small organic molecules is called Bo Stein and last time I looked it was six or seven million different molecules now E coli is that's a very common single-celled organism that you've probably heard about um guess how many different small molecules there are in e.coli remember six to seven million to work with it's 500 it's 500 different small molecules in e.coli now that's incredible selection out of all those possible molecules so that was a really good guess though some people I I would have guessed a hundred thousand or something like that so so it is so you have to ask this question what periodic processes contributed the selection and concentration that's that becomes a really fundamental thing well I think there are two processes that were at work here I think we understand both of them fairly well at least in general terms and the first is self selection or self-organization and let me tell you the story about one of the very first experiments that that we did was actually kind of naive in retrospect but it was it was clever at the time the this reverse citric acid cycle or the TCA cycle is telling you about has several steps and what we thought is if we could show that minerals catalyzed those steps then you could show that the citric acid cycle is a core metabolic foundation of all life and it just arose spontaneously and you'd have that cycle that would be you know problem solved basically so one of the key steps in that reverse cycle is going from three carbon molecule pyruvic acid to the four carbon molecule oxaloacetic acid and so we thought if we went to high-pressure and took pyruvic acid and added co2 that you just go from three plus one to four and we make a lot of excel OC to gas and that would be a nice science paper and we'd be able to do this in a week that's not what happened we ran these pyruvic acid in very simple conditions 200 Celsius 2000 atmospheres two hours just perfectly normal conditions so you start out by putting this tiny little drop tiny drop of Rubik acid into the capsule with a small amount of water and in co2 and so it's just a colorless liquid there's just not much stuff there and after you pull the capsules out they're all puffed up they're all swollen so we knew there was a lot of internal gas pressure and so you got to be a little careful these things because you can generate a lot of gas if you break down the pyruvic acid so so we put it in we first put on the liquid nitrogen we froze it down and then snipped off the end and we look back you know it just was like it's like there still was a lot of pressure even after you froze the thing down drop it into a violent just sits there and after about 30 seconds that start hissing and foaming and this yellow brown oily goo starts pouring out of the capsule here we started with one little drop of fruit I guess it weird all this stuff come from and then the smell smell you know organic molecules can smell a lot of different ways at lower temperature 200 Celsius or so it smells like molasses a very sweet sugary smell and if you get up to around 300 smells exactly like Jack Daniels it's it's the most amazing thing I mean and it just fills the room and people would walk by our laboratory needs say can I have some where's the party you know they won and it's just so you're making really interesting organic molecules right I mean the thing is you're not making our cell acidic acid here we're making something else and so then we run that GC that I was telling you about in and it's just a mess this is what chemists call hum pain that is its 10,000 or more different molecules are being produced here I mean it this pyruvic acid it cyclize --is just diels-alder condensation polymerization different ways every one of those Peaks and you just it's just a complete mess and the trouble is here this is very very typical these kinds of experiments the problem is that you're making too many different molecules remember life only uses a few and yet here you're making this vast number of molecules so how do you deal with this and and we just sort of lament it that we just should have run into a complete dead end because this couldn't have anything to do with the origin of life and then we talked to our friend David Deamer at the University of California Santa Cruz who's a world's expert on lipid self-organization he said well have you tried putting into water so what do you mean he said well maybe it'll self organize and then we you said you need to characterize and so we have to Marilyn Fogle who is a analytic organic chemist at our laboratory and she showed that we have made a huge number of molecules that were 10 11 12 13 carbon atoms long lipid type molecules very interesting lengths for self-organization by the way you notice everybody smiling origin of life people are very commonly smiling this is a lot of fun I mean this is this is so that's just a sub thing and yes indeed what was happening they said well maybe these things will self organize and the self organization they're talking about is what basically goes into forming cell membranes as well it's a lipid bilayer these are molecules that are hydrophilic they like water it went in they're hydrophobic at the other end and so when you put them in water the molecules find each other they line up so that the hydrate the water loving ends are on the outside on the inside of the sphere and all the little tails that hate water as far away from water as possible and when we threw this stuff in water bingo is just a pier and they're fluorescent I mean they're just gorgeous little objects and so in spite of the fact that we made thousands of different molecules some subset of those molecules in water self-organized and they make these membranes and it's very clear now I mean you find when you extract molecules from the Murchison meteorite when you extract molecules from Loup alum and dhola's experiment just you know from the miller-urey experiment anytime you do that you get this phenomenon so clearly one step in the origin of life is the selection and concentration of molecules through molecular self-organization they find each other and they select and you make these structures now these aren't cell membranes but they're they show that this process is so intrinsic it's a deterministic aspect of that early world okay oh that's a really interesting question I know we haven't done that experiment it's a very robust process though I mean you can boil this water and they still organize themselves um you can you can put salt in this water and this this is stuff where where in spite if you use pure molecules they tend not to do very well under these extreme conditions but this stuff this just goes gangbusters so so it looks like this is really a very intrinsic part of the natural we're making these kinds of tiny units with insides and outsides now as you know many molecules are important to biology or water soluble many of the amino acids certainly the sugars they don't dissolve in water so they're not going to self-organizing this way and furthermore there's an additional complication that many of these molecules come in left and right-handed pairs and the trouble is that when you do the prebiotic synthesis you make a 50/50 mixture of them and yet when you look at life life uses the left-handed amino acids predominantly and use the right-handed sugars and so there's a chiral handedness a chiral selection that's going on and that's a big mystery and so one of the things we're wondering how in the world does that happen as a mineralogist they went back to the mineral world and one of our hypotheses was that perhaps mineral surfaces play a role what you see here is a schematic diagram of a crystal of calcite a very common carlton calcium carbonate mineral it's the it's the mineral that forms the shells of snails and clams and and limestone coral reefs and so forth and it has left the right-handed surfaces and our hypothesis the surfaces might selectively concentrate left and right-handed molecules and this would be a way than to organize things to select them well it turns out that this is a very important question chirality is important you can imagine how left and right-handed molecules form because you have a central carbon atom with four different things attached to it and you can attach them clockwise or counterclockwise if you will so clearly this is important to questions of the origin of life but it goes far beyond that because if you've bought drugs lately the chances are that some of the drugs you're buying are high relie pure that is they have to be refined and most of the synthesis processes it's easier to make a combination of left and right-handed molecules at the same time so to make them chiral e pure is very expensive and so this is now 200 billion dollar-a-year industry and any new ways of separating molecules is important it's it's it's important for a number of reasons some of them are just kind of amusing there is the left and right-handed version of a molecule called limonene the one version smells and tastes like oranges the other version smells and tastes like lemons and the reason and these are both used as fragrances or flavors and the reason this is happens is because of course the molecules that form your tastebuds are themselves chiral and so they're sensitive to just like a left and a right hand fitting a glove they they react differently to different shaped molecules more sinister aspect is the thalidomide story where one version cured morning sickness but the other version caused birth defects and the trouble here is even if you have a chiral e pure form of litter might in your body it undergoes a process called Rasim ization that is flipping from the left to the right-handed form and back so so over a period of 24 hours you might take the chiral e pure form but within a few hours you've been poisoned by the other and so this really is a very serious concern so here we have this conundrum prebiotic synthesis makes 50-50 mixtures life uses very pure forms of left or right and so you have to ask what's the mechanism of symmetry breaking and so again one of the hypotheses we've been looking as the possibility that minerals do this there are natural minerals that are chiral courses the most common example and the reason there are right and left-handed quartz crystals is because one of the structure elements is a helix it can either be a helix up to the right or helix up to the left and so you get these two different versions of quartz left and right now one of the things people always used to do is take quartz crystals a left crystal or a crystal and crush it into an extremely fine powder and the reason for that is if you want to do experiments on surfaces it's better to have a large surface area and a fine powder is going to increase your surface area the trouble is that destroy is a very important piece of information and and I first sort of realized this when I was a mineral collector this teenager went to Paterson New Jersey and I collected this sample of quartz crystals the biggest ones here about a millimeter across so when you look at these under higher magnification what you see is that there's a red coding that's hematite that's iron oxide and the iron oxide is not uniformly coating these crystals rather its coding only alternate faces quartz has threefold symmetry not six-fold symmetry so the six little triangular faces include three of one kind and three of another kind and what we're seeing here is the fundamental importance so if you're talking about interactions between a molecule and a crystal the different faces are fundamentally important is they have completely different surface structures so hematite sticks to one face it doesn't stick to the other face that's going to be true of any kind of molecular selection so if you want to try to understand chiral selection and mineral surface you can you grind up the crystal you're destroying all that information so a lot of our research in the last few years has been devoted to taking single crystal specimens of minerals things like feldspar the Communist mineral of the alkalis and alumina silicate diopside a member of the PRCA family which are the Communist magnesium and iron minerals and here again is calcite all of these minerals have natural chiral surfaces if you find really nice crystals with mirror smooth surfaces you can do experiments on them various optical spectroscopic chemical absorption experiments and actually see the difference in the absorption and and that's another whole talk exactly how we do that and the experiments it's really fascinating work the bottom line is this works and you can take crystals and show that you get significant concentrations of left and right-handed molecules separating on two phases now as many of you will anticipate in the early Earth there were equal numbers of left and right-handed phases but what you get here is you get the advantage you get local environments local surfaces local volumes where you're concentrating left-handed molecules that we hear right handed molecules over here and if you think about the origin of life it really had to be at a collection of molecules at a place and a time in a very small volume and so here you have an incredible number of experiments going on on different mineral surfaces in different places each one of those an experiment of molecular selection concentration templating organization and maybe then further we see polymerization on some of these surfaces we can also understand in some detail why this is true by the way this isn't just sort of magic if you look at the surface structure this is a density functional calculation of left and right-handed aspartic acid on that calcite surface that I just showed you and when you bring the molecules close you can you can basically try different configurations and find the minimum energy configuration of the molecule in the surface and when you do that the D aspartate attaches very nicely on three different points of attachment in order to have a chiral selection you need to have three non collinear points it's like a the if you go bowling you know they're left-handed bowling balls and right-handed bowling balls and if you're right-handed you can't use the left-handed bowling ball and vice versa well it's the three points well when you look at the Ella sorption there's only two points of attachment it just and it this the service become is much more distorted and just simply a geometrical fact that these three points fit on that surface than these stone and of course then if you look at the mirror image surface the right-handed one fits better than the left-handed so the thing that's really amazing there's an eight kilocalorie horrible difference than this that's a huge energetic difference which essentially means that that under room temperatures and if you had an idealized surface of this sort that you'd have more than 99% enantioselective it on the two phases so it's a pretty major effect now there's still a huge number of experiments to be done there's so many surfaces there's so many different molecules and to understand all the details is going to take a lot of years of work but the fundamental thing here is that the second emergent step that is selection and concentration just the right elements we know it can happen by self-organization of some molecules like lipids and by surface templating of other molecules of mineral surfaces so you know we really have the basic idea of how this works okay now step three and this is the biggie and this has not been solved yet but there's a huge amount of work both experimental and theoretical on how you make a self-replicating system how do you make set of molecules that complicate itself one of the sort of fundamental systems in all biology a core metabolic cycle of every living thing is this reverse citric acid cycle it's a series of molecules going from very simple molecules co2 to carbon acetic acid three carbon pyruvic acid four-carbon oxaloacetate acid you go around this cycle to six carbon citric acid and then that splits into two plus 4 and then 2 2 plus 4 and then that you have 2 cycles and then those split and then you have 4 and then you have 8 and you just double each time you go around the cycle this is an engine of synthesis and furthermore as you go off the side here if you add amino groups and and in other kinds of very simple chemical steps just a few steps away are all amino acids the building blocks of DNA and RNA so you can do a lot with the citric acid cycle this is a great source of metabolic creativity and one of the things we've been trying to do is come up with experimental approaches where you use mineral catalysts and keep make each of these steps go this has sort of been our guiding light in this has been Harold marwitz at George Mason University he for many years was at Yale theoretical biologist who has basically been pushing this idea that that a deterministic aspect of life anywhere in the cosmos is going to be this reverse citric acid cycle it uses just carbon hydrogen oxygen and the small molecules are very simple there's no chiral step in this by the way so this is a pre chiral kind of situation and and he's very persuasive about this as one possibility now we've been trying to do this this is mostly work of George Cody in this very complicated spaghetti diagram shows some of the pathways that we have demonstrated but also there are a few key ones that we have not so of the the 11 main reactions in that cycle we've basically got nine of them to go eight of them go pretty easily the ninth one is sort of a tenuous thing but two of them including that pyruvic to oxaloacetic we've not had any success in getting that to go under any of the catalytic circumstances so so maybe it is maybe there's some special set of circumstances that allows that to happen but that's one possibility so we're studying this as a possible self-replicating cycle that may have gotten going just through mineral catalysts there are other ideas out there the Stewart Kaufmann at the Santa Fe Institute came up with this idea of an auto catalytic network of molecules and this is really kind of the opposite instead of just using a few molecules making a simple cycle he says you let's take advantage of the fact that we have tens of thousands different molecules and when you do some of those molecules are going to catalyze the formation of others and they're going to catalyze the breakdown of others and so eventually you're going to end up with a network of molecules all of whom reinforce themselves but destroy anything that's not in that Network so this becomes a collection and he says it may be a thousand maybe thousand different molecules to begin with and so you have some chemical milieu in which all these molecules are interacting and breaking down and reinforcing and catalyzing each other and that becomes kind of the core network of self-replicating molecules even though it's not bound by any membrane area use this and then gradually as the molecules become more efficient at replicating some of them they're going to start forming new combinations that catalyze a smaller number and and the core set of molecules gets smaller and smaller and smaller until you get basically down to something that can be encapsulated now when you ask to our Kaufmann well what chemicals you're talking about with molecules he says that's for the chemists to figure out so so I'm not sure if you know this is going very far experimentally it's very hard to deal with a collection of ten thousand unspecified molecules and see if they in fact are auto catalytic but it's an interesting idea that's out there and it does make reference to the fact that the early gia chemical environments on earth are going to be extremely chemically complex and this builds in that complexity and then there's the people who promote the RNA world the idea that RNA has this ability both to carry information presumably it you could have a self-replicating RNA molecule that can also act as a catalyst because they're these these ribozymes enzymes that use the RNA building blocks so that so RNA does it all and the idea that this has been very seductive to people in molecular biology that's why I say for them this is the answer to the origin of life they they say all you need to do is show us a way to make a self-replicating RNA molecule and then we've solved the whole thing and then metabolism just sort of gets layered on it somehow to make things more efficient well the RNA world dilemma is that you know it's it's it's a great way to potentially make copies of yourself it's a great way carry information it's possibly great way to catalyze reactions but there's no known way to synthesize it no one's been able to figure out a way how to do that and so you really have to figure out you got the prebiotic soup with all these tential building blocks of life and then you got the RNA world and that gaps a big one to fill so that's really a mystery and I think the conclusion for step three has to be that you know we haven't solved this yet the self-replicating system is the fundamental divide is the fundamental gap and that's what the most exciting work in the origin of life is all right now I think it's going to be done I think you're going to be a laboratory system a plausible prebiotic system that will be shown there's work at Harvard there's work at Scripps there's work at other laboratories in Europe that I think are really on the right track here but you know if we knew all the answers it wouldn't be fun to get up in the morning right I mean that's why we do science anyway once you have the emergence of a self-replicating system I will argue that the emergence of natural selection must follow its inevitable follows-- this is this kind of selective process is going to be inevitable when you have a self-replicating system organic molecules because organic molecules are incredibly mutable with very very small energy differences you can replace a hydrogen with a ch3 you may place an OS group with an SH group you can you know all the different things you do with organic chemistry and this is going to have happened and so it's inevitable then we have self-replicating system of molecules they're going to be variants of those molecules that come along and do things slightly better and because they're making copies of themselves and therefore competing for the resources in the environment any increase in efficiency is going to be rewarded very very quickly okay so this just I think is going to happen but I don't have to just wave my arms about this there is actually a laboratory demonstration of how this can happen and some of you may know about Jack szostak a colleague is at Harvard University when the Nobel Prize a few years ago for for work not related to what I'm going to tell you about but he has worked on something called Optima evolution this is molecular evolution that's now a billion dollar a year industry because it's such a powerful way of taking one molecule to target another molecule so here's what he does okay he starts with a molecule that he wants to target he wants to have basically have a molecule that's designed to bind to another one and so use the molecule called gtp the molecule called gtp is attached to little beads which are put in test tubes or beakers so they're just sort of hanging out there into a solution and then he makes an amazing random pool of RNA fragments 10 to the 14th different randomly produced strands of RNA and these RNA strands are you know typically on the order of hundred Murs so a hundred RNA letters long and a strand that's 100 RNA molecules long will fold up in some way and most of the times it folds up in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with binding to a GTP molecule but once every so often and when you make 10 to the 14th different versions some of those will sort of loosely bind to the gtp so the neat thing you can do is a sequence of experiments where you you take that beaker filled with little balls that have the gtp on it you pour in your solution of ten to the fourteenth molecule some of them stick you let it sit there for 20 minutes or whatever stir it around and then you pour out the solution and you're pouring out most of those ten to the fourteenth molecules but remaining on the gtp are a few RNA molecules that stick fairly well and so you basically wash those you collect them you then go through a series of the standard genetic processes that turns the RNA into DNA you copy it you then basically mutate it while you're doing that and you make another ten to the 14th strand but in this case every one of those ten to fourteen strands is now a mutant of one that used to stick a little bit and so in the second cycle of this process it sticks much better and some of those stick extremely well and when you do this just a half a dozen cycles you end up with a molecule that sticks with absolutely the optimum theoretical maximum binding energy it's it's it's as good as anything could possibly stick now you think about it's a hundred mer and so therefore different DNA or RNA letters and that's four to the 100th power different possible combinations if you were to ask a theoretical chemist to calculate for me a an RNA hundred mer that's going to bind optimally to a GNA target at this point there's there's not enough computational power in the world to come close to that maybe someday when we have principles there will be but now you can't do it but using this you can do it in a couple of days and you basically use evolution molecular evolution simply by selecting for a particular function and every time you do it you come up with a molecule that's optimally engineered to do this so turns out evolution is an incredibly powerful way to design something if you want to you know why would you use intelligent design when you could use evolution to do this so the other thing that's kind of intriguing about this process is remember what I said right at the beginning that if you're going to if you're going to generate complexity you need complexity in your environment you need to have gradients you have fluxes you need to have cycles need to have interfaces you need to have chemical complexity and that's exactly what you have in Jack szostak experiment right I mean you have random RNA pool that's chemical complexity about in vitro processes that's interfaces you have fluxes you have gradients and you have cycles it's all there and that's what drives evolution it's not by the way a random process it's a selective process and selection by definition has deterministic aspects so it's really intriguing to see this come into play and this is going to happen the prebiotic earth because you have all those selective processes going on okay so I think what we see is you can imagine the origin of life and for emergent steps first one is synthesizing the biomolecules the second one is assembling those molecules into some kind of functional polymers two membranes and so forth then comes the big question mark that's how you get to the self-replicating system we're still working in that hard but once you have the self replica system the natural selection just follows inevitably that's a really exciting experimental approach the origin of life I know time is getting late but I want to tell you about one other new thing that's come along which may short-circuit this whole process in a way that that you know a few years ago we couldn't imagined I've been fortunate to be involved in a new scientific program called the deep carbon Observatory we're studying all aspects of carbon within the earth including deep life and all around the world now people are drilling deep wells to look for microbes it turns out that anywhere you drill mile to 3 miles down and you bring up the drill cord there's microbes living in the rocks and typically if you get below temperatures of about 150 Celsius you don't see cellular life anymore but they're now a couple of anecdotal reports I can tell you more about it if you want oh but they're couple of anecdotal ports that something is happening above 150 Celsius and it's not cells but it seems like there's some kind of organized molecular systems down there and what is it and here's one possibility that I've been talking to my colleagues about and right now this is a very viable thought ajan that sell your life as we know it today with DNA and RNA and proteins really does have a temperature limit because some of those molecules are relatively delicate and so the whole system's breakdown and its cellular life as we know it probably doesn't survive but that doesn't mean that there couldn't be self-replicating molecular systems that go to much higher temperatures that are much more robust to select the suggestions from these early sort of anecdotal accounts as there's some kind of biofilms being formed they're not cells they're two-dimensional surfaces that are there that are multi molecular SiC and they're growing on mineral surfaces they're growing laterally they grow more intensively on surfaces that have lots of redox potential they look like electrolytic gels of some kind and it's possible these self-organizing systems on mineral surfaces really represent a kind of a nose you want to call her life we just don't have a taxonomy for what it is it's something no one knows yet they've not yet done the sufficient molecular analysis it looks like they're there there's a polysaccharides I but you know this has not been published yet there's some data from China there's data from one to Foucault rich and so the question is if you have a kind of molecular system that can self-replicate may not be cells but if it has the chemical energy if it has the resources to build itself and grow however slowly and if it lives above 150 Celsius where it's beyond the predation of cellular life and there has been a continuous subsurface network of environments that are above 150 Celsius since the Hadean since the earliest kind of Earth Service Earth history this could be a remnant of an early stage of life's origin of molecular self organization which is persisted because self-replicating and very robust and is survived because it's a temperature higher than cells can eat it and it could be in fact a remnant for the origin of life so one possibility is that we can then actually find on earth today those precursor biochemist trees the our molecules of life and how their organs and how deep could these go well it's it's pretty amazing if you think about subduction zones certainly they're 150 cells the environments at forty kiloliter kilometres so forty kilometers down and a very fast cold subducting slab you could have cellular life that's that's pretty amazing in itself but isn't it not possible even much deeper there's this other domain of something some kind of organic chemistry they can give us real hints about the origin of life so if you want to know more about the deep carbon Observatory and the kinds of things we're studying there's a website and be very happy to tell you more about that later on I conclusions I think you're pretty straightforward I think the origin of life is best understood as a series of emergent steps go from geochemical relative simplicity the by chemical complexity is a series of steps that can be replicated in laboratory experiments it's clear we don't have all the answers at this point but that's the excitement of science is to find out and we're certainly well on our way and I have to end on one sort of philosophical note again this whole scenario described you is very disturbing to some people some some of our friends and relatives and colleagues around the country and around the world are very disturbed by the idea that origin of life is just a chemical process a geochemistry that's led to by a chemistry how can we be created in God's image if it's just a bunch of random molecules that get mixed together and I understand that and I sympathize that I think we all need to recognize that that's a point of view out what I would like to be able to communicate to them is a different way of thinking about life and in fact the universe the sequence of emergent steps which are inevitable and nexor well they're part of the very fabric of the cosmos that from the Big Bang inevitably came hydrogen from hydrogen came stars stars came the whole periodic table the elements when that periodic table came earth-like planets earth-like planets again another emergent step leads to the early steps in the origin of life origin of life itself and and eventually to us and to a University's learning to know itself thank you very much please questions I'd love questions sorry site wondering something special like we see well yes certainly a hydro thermal zones deep on the ocean floor which you're you're much more experiencing very intense fluxes geochemical complexity you have interfaces you have very strong gradients the cycles are much more subtle and may not play much of a role one interesting hypothesis it's out there though is that water has a critical point and it's a it's a specific temperature specific pressure and there are depths of the ocean where there are volcanic systems which are at very close to that critical point in terms of temperature in terms of pressure and just simply the tides rising and falling will cause the critical point to go through a volume of rock on a daily basis and as Alice can tell you there are amazing things that happen chemically at critical points and it's very possible that those specific volumes of the crust are where the most exciting action happens so there's a cycle that does occur but but I agree with you that on ocean floor the day-night wet/dry cycles are not nearly as they're not going to occur so the chirality surface in the trade but it's otherwise implication that we are going to hide things actually somehow although I originally from that one accident rather than sorting out all in some some thumbs up is actually got stained other 100 that handy so I don't see you here oh yes okay this is a very interesting point it addresses some of the philosophical questions but let me get you thinking about this way okay what is the reactive area that's important at any one of these experiments and I would say it's it's probably a few hundred nanometers on the side that's the kind of molecular surface area and if you basically do a quick back of the envelope calculation I could be off by many orders of magnitude but basically if you look at the surface of the earth the total surface area of the minerals you're talking about something in the order of 10 to the 30th 10 - 10 to the 40th separate little experimental surface areas and then you integrate that over and say an experiment takes a few seconds and the molecules then rearrange themselves and you have 500 million years to play with you're talking about on the order of 10 to the 50th different molecular experiments of juxtapositions so yes indeed it's certainly true that it may be random whether it starts here starts here someplace else but start thinking about those combinatorics so the number of different individual experiments on surfaces you know in a laboratory it takes us weeks to do one experiment of one kind of molecule and surface but in a prebiotic environment you could have this this huge number and therefore it becomes perhaps not a random thing it becomes totally deterministic Alessa without one particular mineral and only left-hand-side can keep something yeah here's a different scenario initially you have a lot of mineral surfaces you create little left-handed universes little right-handed universes then through the next one of those becomes more efficient and after a period of competition one of them will prevail simply because it needs the others what yes that's the idea yeah so if you have enough of these experiments going on some of them are going to be more efficient than others and they're going to eventually arise yes and you're absolutely right about this that there are many other ways that chirality may have arisen that there may be some cosmic scale the the CP violation is actually has built-in chirality when you have beta decay electrons are chiral only in one sense and if that could cause a chemical effect biasing towards one kind of molecule another or if there's circularly polarized synchrotron radiation from a rapidly rotating neutron star that could also cause local environments where you had a predominance of one handedness or other or in a completely different vein individual chiral molecules are themselves very strong chiral centers and you can have chiral organization around a molecule independent of a mineral surface completely so there are many different hypotheses many many hypotheses about how chirality arose what I was trying to indicate tonight more importantly is that there are plausible ways to explain chirality and mineral surfaces are one of them so but you're absolutely right that they're you know when you go to chirality conferences you'll have 20 people with twenty different ideas about this hi Julia yes there is one very highly publicized point of view by a British scientist named Graham Karen Smith and he's he argues for the clay world he's a claim in her ologists oh no no what what else is new but he suggests that clay minerals because of their very complicated layer structures and their variability the fact they can stack in different ways could carry a kind of genetic information which might make more copies of themselves and then under certain pressure temperature and aqueous fluid compositions certain clay combinations are self-replicating and they dominate a suite of clays and then some became the templates for organic molecules which followed in that the first life he talks about clay life as being the first life form crystal chemically it just doesn't work it falls it falls apart if if you accept this is any crystal chemist knows that nearest neighbor interactions are much stronger than more distant interactions there's no way for a clay layer up here to communicate to a clay layer down there what it's orientation is and and even spiral growth mechanisms there's no clear way to break Clips apart into many little fragments and you form hollow types that are huge but then how do you break those clay fragments apart to then essentially replicate in two different environments and then how do they mutate and then how do you template the Clay's with organics to make the organic life form in others just it's such a complicated and implausible mechanism to my point of view but it is out there there's a whole there's whole books about this please mama laters but on the edge side yes that you've got one plays got these eight spies and then it goes to next one it's it's certainly it would be nice to be able to test it unfortunately the biggest impediment to testing this is that you know huge billions of dollars that were put into learning how to sequence DNA and RNA no one's going to put billions of dollars in to learn how to sequence clays so so it's really hard to test yeah no yes writing left and right people first it's referring to earlier about the blue house structure 1 1 0 and then hydrate that surface we might become yeah marine environments yeah so the question it has to do with the Energex in the amount of mineral surface area and the two things that come immediately mind of those black smokers all the sulfides that are coming out or nano particles and of course clays which are formed as weathering products so both clays and and hydrothermal systems so zones of serpentinization for example you're going to have huge surface areas being produced there as well so there are natural geochemical environments in which the surface areas are very very high remarkable solvent for organic reactions and then making little vesicles see them Chili's etc so then the obvious question is are there environments you know the earth and other planets and wherever that's basically a sheltered environment maybe that's interesting yeah if you look at the origin you start Big Bang it's true that you form galaxies but as I understand you're always going to trying to make a whole system or random but in order to give what you wanna do you've got to make it less random and suck madness and you can all come to entropy by making it more sanguine some way but as anybody just look at the overall thermodynamics to make sure that all of this makes sense yeah I'm pretty sure you got a Nobel Prize for that yeah it's it's you talking about dissipative systems and it's it's non-equilibrium thermodynamics it's it's but this is yeah so Ilya Prigogine is is the name of the person who and everything I've said about concentrating information is just parroting things that have been said for thirty years so it's it's it's a I think it's a fundamental organizing principle of the cosmos and the fact that it's not sort of a separate law of thermodynamics you know I'm not sure what allows something to become a law of thermodynamics as opposed to just a corollary or a lemma or whatever but but to me that this is an absolute as important a principle as important a law of the cosmos as the first and second laws of thermodynamics and it just hasn't been articulated that way so 60% of the united states so this is sort of a separation between scientists and part of the country so some are what you're saying so today's another day was communicating to the Sun gosh so much so the question is how do I communicate these ideas to audiences that are not as sympathetic as this one and I've done this I'm going to go on to you know creationist groups in Iowa and in in South Carolina and then in Kansas and other places where this is a huge debate and what I try to say is that I mean look if you want to understand the origin of life if you believe in a creator and you want to understand origin of life read Psalm 19 the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork and what that says to me is if you wish to believe that there is a creator that's done this the way to know the Creator is to study creation is to study what the universe is like and when you do that you see that there's this tremendous creative drive this evolutionary drive built into the cosmos it's it's it's a fundamental part of what we see it all around us all the time that in spite of the second law that was related to her you know springtime new plants arise and we see children born and grow from a single cell I mean it's it's we see this all the time you see it all around us it's not a violation of natural law it is is in fact a fundamental natural law and it's an extraordinary part of if you want to believe in a creator it's it's part of understanding what the how the Creator did it and so I don't see the conflict between that I mean that's a very spiritual way of thinking about what us study and so I try to make that connection and for some people it works in a lot of people it doesn't but I try to get people who are of faith they have a deep faith that's one of their ways of knowing and you can't tell them they're wrong what you have to do is say here's how the way I see their world meshes are the way you see the world I know I mean but it's a matter of being respectful to different ways of knowing I mean epistemologies you know can we as a scientist prove that our way is is better I mean we believe it is but that's a you know that's a belief but you there's no concrete wave in that to somebody else so you have to make sure we understand what we can inform that question and if you really want to understand a creator why wouldn't you study i'm created in god's image visualize what who is God because then I agree God my image and as I wouldn't go there with these audiences yes hi step to the successful basically ineffable and curl over to regain without my ship the clinical staff which is one of the self revocation seem to be very difficult to manage in summary and this thing is that it was relatively easy we would be new mindful to you refusing this I am applying real-time Jim there is a missing link here in the immediate speaks to the soon uncomfortable situation that there is some kind of special event or occasion or process or environment where this must happen and then this hand this processes phenomena doesn't repeat itself in in his so geological history of the history of of Iran or maybe or since the nucleus and system the state of energy working so in table points to a kind of a special situation which is uncomfortable if you're a scientist right but isn't enough for one is it really uncomfortable no I'm a fire but I can see now open an argument for suspicion of creation but if that special situation where something like that deep environment it doesn't have cells as the molecules and that's where they learn to record okay what we're going to are stinking that I have a deep environment this good case of look but then she just says we have not done the right experiment but well that's the point I'm trying to make is that all these other experiments they're going on with a different kind of natural environment yeah so for this experiment to forever replication that experiment is not going on at least we haven't recognized it yeah that's true but what kind of but the other side one is it into spatial surgery yeah but special situations how Hastert happened throughout the history of Earth the moon forming event was it was a singularity the beginning of plate tectonics from going from a vertical kind of plume tectonics to that was a transition in Earth history the Devon with lots of irreversible singularity events and this is just one of them I think is it go chemical yeah I mean you can think of the initiation of subduction which was not org you know modern plate tectonics the radix addition of course that was biological but it certainly was you know the snowball earth events yeah now I understand your point it's a very interesting it's again philosophical s110 to know the history and that were like was once it got here once you got this is a free by a simple mimic on what you see this is a singularity of course one of the very serious speculations right now is that all life on Earth came from Mars Mars was warm wet habitable probably sometime before Earth if life arises quickly then it could be so life arose on Mars you had an impact event lifted Martian meteorites that came to earth fairly easily through gravitational answer and then then earth becomes seated by Mars before it starts itself that's and there are plenty of people who are talking about let's go to Mars and find the precursor of earth life so yeah of course it just defers the it just transfers the question to someplace else so so I mean in that sense that you still have to ask the origin question but but it is intriguing that now there are a lot of serious NASA scientists who are arguing that could happen trigger for the self replications was a singular astronomical event and then which radiates a dust ball still the best part in such a way that you make my handed all right free box rectified if that is true if we can have a some place else to go all the oldest fossils are three point five or so there seem to be if you believe in certain kinds of if you accept that certain kinds of isotopic signatures can point to life there's isotopically like carbon at 3.8 in some rocks but you know who knows I mean the window could be could be 4.4 there are oceans there are deep wet environments very early Systema that's what I am but you're physically it looks as if life is wonderfully but that's the big surprise The Tree of Life yeah huge groups arose for one species back family and certainly many people talked about multiple origins of life you know life arising a million times but then it was a highly competitive environment and eventually if you do various various computer models can give you different answers but if you have one form of life that becomes sufficiently more efficient than everything else it just eats everything else so that's one possible explanation so we don't know if there may be self-replicating cycles arising all the time and they're distinctly consumed by micelles we just don't know at this point so it's so I think that's one of the very exciting frontiers and kind of it's got to be done it's going to be done in the lab you

Channel: UCTVSeminars

Views: 49,249

Rating: 4.6645703 out of 5

Keywords: life on earth, Robert Hazen, science, origin of life

Id: W1fRfV_TTAo

Length: 91min 21sec (5481 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/easilypersuadedsquid]

Robert Hazen examines the question of the origin of life. This lecture is mostly about life as an emergent property of chemical reactions.

[u/gintonicisntwater]

Pretty cool talk. I didn’t know about chrystals affecting chirality of molecules they are in contact with.

[u/agumonkey]

The Emergency of Life on Earth, 2020