Stephen Meyer is the author of Return of the God Hypothesis and the director of the Discovery Institute. James Tour is a synthetic organic chemist and professor at Rice University, renowned for his work in nanotechnology and his skepticism toward the current scientific models explaining the origin of life.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Meyer and Tour contrast biological evolution with the more complex challenge of chemical evolution, where modern science still struggles to explain how nonliving chemicals could give rise to life. They critique early experiments like the Miller-Urey experiment, emphasizing that producing basic molecules is far from creating life itself. Meyer and Tour also argue that as scientific understanding deepens, the complexity of life's origins becomes more daunting, raising both scientific and philosophical questions about the adequacy of the current mainstream scientific explanations and theories for the origin of life.
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>> Peter Robinson (00:00):
Two questions,
how do higher forms of lifeevolve from lower forms of life?
Charles Darwin answered that question,or at least thought he did.
But the other question is one thatDarwin never even attempted to answer.
Where does life comefrom in the first place?
Scientist and philosopherStephen Meyer and chemist James Tour,
(00:24):
Uncommon Knowledge now.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson,
we're filming today in Fiesole, Italy.
Stephen Meyer earned his undergraduatedegree at Whitworth College and
(00:45):
his doctorate in the historyof science at Cambridge.
Now the director of the Center for Scienceand Culture at the Discovery Institute,
Doctor Meyer's books includeSignature in the Cell,
Darwin's Doubt, andThe Return of the God Hypothesis.
James Tour received his undergraduatedegree at Syracuse University and
(01:06):
his doctorate in synthetic organic andorganic metallic,
I can't even say what this fieldis in synthetic organic and
organometallic chemistry, from Purdue.
Now a Professor at Rice University,Doctor Tour's areas of research include
nanoelectronics, graphene electronics,silicon oxide electronics,
(01:28):
and carbon research into whatthe rice website terms quote,
environmentally friendly oil andgas extraction, close quote.
Doctor Tour has publishedmore than 1000 peer reviewed
research papers andholds several hundred patents.
Steve and Jim, [INAUDIBLE] Darwin,
(01:51):
a couple of quotations here.
As I mentioned earlier, there are twopieces to Charles Darwin, and
the second piece is evolution, hiselaborate theory that random mutation and
natural selection can lead to,or did lead to the creation or
origin of many different species.
(02:12):
Now, that we won't go into it,agree with it, or disagree with it,
it's an explanation, it's a body ofthought, it's a kind of discipline.
But the other piece,the first piece is this,
Darwin simply assumes that life exists.
His theory calls for evolving fromsomething that's there in the first place.
(02:36):
Here he writes in a letter to a friendin 1871, if and what a big if,
we could conceive in some warm littlepond that a protein compound was
chemically formed, ready to undergostill more complex changes.
That's Darwin in 1871, more than twodecades after he published on The Origin
(02:56):
of Species, and he's still wonderinghow life might have originated.
Now, Richard Dawkins,contemporary Oxford zoologist quote,
Darwin made it possible to bean intellectually fulfilled atheist.
But of course, Darwin only made itpossible to be an intellectually fulfilled
(03:17):
atheist if you believe this is a question,but it's my surmise.
You can only say that Darwin made itpossible to be an intellectually fulfilled
atheist if you believethat prior question,
where does life comefrom in the first place?
Is either trivially easy to answer, or
in some basic way doesn't matter,is that correct?
>> James Tour (03:37):
Or it has been solved, but
neither of those threeconditions have obtained.
It's not trivially easy to solve,it hasn't been solved, and
it is actually quite an importantpart of the whole naturalistic
story that Darwin and modernNeo Darwinists have attempted to tell.
(03:58):
And you're right, there's a distinctionbetween what's called chemical
evolutionary theory, which attemptsto explain the origin of the first
life from simpler non-living chemicals,and biological evolutionary theory,
which attempts to explain the originof new forms of life from simpler,
pre-existing forms of life.
Darwin's theory was a formof biological evolution,
an attempt to explain the originof new forms from simpler forms.
(04:20):
But he presupposed,as he put it in The Origin, one or
very few simple forms at the baseof his famous tree of life and
did not account for where that camefrom simpler prebiotic chemicals.
>> Peter Robinson (04:31):
Before we continue, and I've got loads more to ask, obviously,
why am I a layman comingto this a century and
a half after Darwin publisheson the origin of his species,
scratching my head and saying,fellows, this first question,
where does life come from in the firstplace, that's a pretty big one.
How is it that a sort of interestedlayman can only suddenly realize you
(04:56):
guys have this elaborate, what about this?
Did science simply treatit as unimportant or so
easy that they get to it sooner or later,the question of the origin of life.
>> James Tour (05:08):
Nobody knows the origin of life,
nobody has ever known the origin of life.
But people assume,very much like the Babylonians assumed,
that it came out of a stinking pond.
That's where they saytheir life came out of,
and their gods came out of that same pond,and that's the primordial soup model.
And that model persists today, you lookin any textbook from elementary school
(05:33):
to advanced college textbooks, and itwill speak of the primordial soup model.
Life came out of that, that therewere molecules that came together,
and they formed higher orderstructures and that formed a cell and
that led to life,that is a bunch of nonsense.
>> Peter Robinson (05:52):
Okay, hold on, I remember those textbooks with flasks and
tubes, so let's take a moment there.
First of all, you said somethinginteresting, Darwin's warm little pond.
Darwin is working ina great tradition here.
The Babylonians had mythsinvolving the primordial soup.
So, let's take a moment here,
(06:13):
the famous Miller Urey experimentsof the 1950s, very simple.
Two flasks, closed system with tubes,one flask has ammonia, methane,
and a few other elements tosimulate the primordial atmosphere.
Another flask has water tosimulate the primordial ocean.
(06:34):
And then electricity gets introduced tosimulate lightning, and what do you know?
Amino acids seem to settle out of this.
And in early experiments, according tomy reading, there were five amino acids,
which could be described as centralbuilding blocks of life I'm told, in later
experiments, they refined it, improved ita bit, and they got up to 22 amino acids.
(06:58):
And there it seems to have stopped,the scientists, that's close enough.
We can extrapolate fromwhat's going on there.
Keep this up for a billion years andyou'll end up with life, and
James Tour says?
>> James Tour (07:08):
It's garbage that doesn't work, yes,
they made a number of amino acids.
They also made amino acidsthat are totally unnatural.
And so, they had many amino acids.
I think that there may have beena dozen or so of the amino acids, but
it doesn't matter.
All of them were achiral, which means theydidn't have the handedness that one wants.
Organic molecules, aside from the verysimplest of organic molecules,
(07:33):
have two handedness.
You either have a right-handed model ora left-handed model.
Your right and your left handare mirror images of one another.
If you put your right hand up to a mirror,it will appear as your left hand.
The two are non-superimposable,
that's why your right hand can'tfit in a left-handed glove.
Molecules are like that,organic molecules are like that as well.
(07:55):
He made both of the images,you have to have one and not the other.
So, there were other experimentsthat talked about resolving these,
separating these.
But that's the easy part,that's actually quite easy.
But what was presumedfrom that experiment,
which was actually a very nice experiment,I'm not belittling that experiment at all,
(08:17):
is that we would very soonfigure out the way to life.
That's what was assumed.
And so, that was 75 years ago,so think about that.
Think of what has beendone in the last 75 years,
where you have this whole silicon era,which started in 1960.
You have computers, you have space flight,you have landing on the moon,
(08:38):
which was in the 1960s, a long time ago.
You have all of this internetconnectivity, the medical advances.
We still don't know howthese things come together.
You have to take the amino acids andpolymerize them, hook them together,
that's a big problem,nobody has solved that.
>> Peter Robinson (08:55):
Jim, could I, may I read a little bit from a paper of yours,
one of your thousand peer reviewed papers.
I don't understand a word of this, butI'm going to quote a little bit and
ask you to help me understand it,quote, this is the title of the paper.
Are present proposals on chemicalevolutionary mechanisms accurately
pointing toward first life.
(09:17):
All right, you describe work thatyou have done in assembling what
you call nano cars, tiny little vehicles.
Here's a quote,I'm quoting you in this paper.
So, here's something to consider as wethink about the problem of The Origin
of Life.
Designing nano cars, to which you'vealready devoted about a dozen
(09:39):
intricate pages of how you designthese tiny little vehicles.
Designing nano cars is child'splay in comparison to the complex
molecular machinery andinformation processing systems at work in
the synthesis of proteins, enzymes,DNA, RNA and polysaccharides.
(09:59):
Let alone their assemblyinto complex functional
macroscopic systems, close quote.
Is this layman correct in saying,as we have learned
more about chemistry,as we have achieved the ability
to manipulate chemistry more andmore accurately.
(10:21):
We have learned that the question ofhow life first began is far bigger and
far more complicated andfar more elusive than Darwin and
Miller and Urey ever conceived.
>> James Tour (10:35):
Yes, this happens all the time, we see this every time we try to
make something,the goal post goes further away.
It's not that the cell is evolving,it's that we understand more of the cell.
So, we're here, we move a little bitcloser to maybe solving this, but
the cell, the target, has moved miles and
(10:55):
miles further away because we're like,no, I have to make that to.
I have to solve this problem to, so
when you just think a cell is a bunch ofprotoplasm, the targets not very hard.
But then when you learn about the cell andthe complexity of it, and
you see that biochemistryis extraordinary, and
(11:16):
there's so many layers to thisthat I never even thought about,
because I didn't have the tools to seeit 50 years ago, but now I see it.
And then you think about how those mightbe solved, how you might solve those,
and then you see layers ofother things you have to solve.
So, though people may saywe're getting closer,
(11:37):
the target has moved much further away.
So, I would never say that it willnever be solved, as a scientist,
I can't say that, but I just say thatthe solution is very far from today.
>> Peter Robinson (11:50):
Okay. >> Stephen Meyer
historical context?
I did my PhD on Origin of Life Biology,and one of my Cambridge supervisors
who also worked on the history of thatfield, had a well-known quotation.
She said that behind the question ofthe origin of life is a deeper question.
And that is the question of what are wetrying to explain the origin of?
(12:16):
And in 1859, in the 1860s,1870s, the scientists,
the early evolutionary biologists,
assumed that that question was going tobe pretty simple and easy to understand.
Thomas Henry,>> Speaker 3: And they assumed that why?
>> Stephen Meyer (12:31):
They assumed it because they thought life was very simple.
Thomas Henry Huxley, who was Darwin'sfamous bulldog, said that the cell was
a simple, homogeneous globuleof undifferentiated protoplasm.
And they thought that life wasessentially a kind of chemical.
It was made of an essential substancecalled protoplasm, which was a kind of
Jello or goo that could be producedby a few simple chemical reactions.
(12:53):
And our knowledge of what the simplecell is actually composed of,
as Jim has just said,has advanced massively since then.
Huxley had no idea,Darwin had no idea what we would discover.
And now we know that inside living cells,we have at the very least,
an information storage, transmission andprocessing system, which is part of
(13:14):
a whole automated system forbuilding proteins and protein machines.
These nano machines that Jim makes,
as you correctly point out,as he puts it, child's play.
He has these massive chemical recipesthat are involved, multiple steps,
interventions and
manipulations to build the much simplerminiature machines that he can build.
(13:36):
They're much simpler than the onesthat are found inside cells.
And so, the problem has, as he puts it,it's receded off into the distance,
because our knowledge of the complexity oflife has meant that it's much, much harder
to envision how that might have arisen bya series of undirected chemical processes.
>> Peter Robinson (13:54):
Reading your work, Steve, if I understand it correctly,
there's a big moment.
And funnily enough,
the big moment happens at about the sametime as the Urey Miller experiments.
And that big moment is Watson and crickin 1953, and you get the double heel.
They understand the structure of DNA and
suddenly they can seehow complicated DNA is.
(14:16):
And every living cell, first of all,I wanna make sure I get this right,
every living cell contains DNA,is this correct?
>> James Tour (14:23):
DNA, RNA, proteins.
>> Peter Robinson (14:25):
So, a few quotations that you present in your book,
Signature in the cell, Bill Gates.
DNA is like a computer program,biotechnologist Leroy Hood.
DNA represents, quote, digital code.
Richard Dawkins himself,
the machine code of the genes isuncannily computer like, close quote.
(14:48):
So, doesn't this pose just a gigantic new problem?
Again, let Stephen Jay Gould and Doc,whatever they wanna argue about evolution,
we are concerned with this first box andit's still empty.
And the first box is the first life.
(15:08):
And not only is it empty, but tourcomes along and says, you have no idea,
the simplest forms of liferequire such complex chemistry.
And then Meyer comes along andsays, well, wait a minute, fellas,
what about Watson and Crick?
Every cell contains DNA and
you're not going to create a three billionitem long strand of DNA with hitting
(15:30):
ammonia with lightning no matter howmany times you do the experiment.
Is that not correct?
This empty box is now.
>> Stephen Meyer (15:38):
A couple of things. >> Peter Robinson
awe, really?
Exactly, we go back to the Miller Urey experiment,
two big classes of problems.
One is that they synthesize the amino
acids using alleged prebiotic gases.
They synthesize
(16:03):
it based on
gases in those
flasks that
don't simulate
(16:29):
the actual
atmosphere on
the early earth.
(16:50):
But secondly, the amino
acids that they produced and
there was a mixture of other
things that had to be eliminated for
(17:14):
those amino acids to hook up
in a way that would be life friendly.
But they also didn't explain
how they would hook up and
(17:36):
how they would hook up in the precise
sequence to actually form proteins.
So, it's the differencebetween letters and
words that means something,
(18:00):
you have a bag of scramble letters and
you dumb them into the table.
That does not give you a tripple
word score in the game, okay?
(18:23):
But the discovery is seminal but
it's the beginning of a whole
series of discoveries and
what historians and
(18:45):
biologists call molecular
biological evolution.
In 1953,
double helical structure
of the DNA molecule, but
(19:08):
then five years later Francis Creck
who was a codebreaker in WWII
realises that the subunits
along the spine of the DNA
(19:31):
molecule are functioning like
alphabetic characters in
the digital characters in
a section of software Infact.
(19:53):
George Gamal one of the great
physicists of the time realized
very quickly that the strings of a,
c, g and t's along the spine
(20:17):
of DNA could be represented
as a digital bead string.
And so, what you have and
what Creek realizes is how
(20:38):
the sequence hypothesis is
that DNA is contains information for
the construction of the proteins and
(20:58):
protein machines that
are needed to keep cells alive.
So, very much like your modern
cad chem technology that is
(21:21):
used in a bowing plant where
an engineer will sit in a council,
write some code, the code
is then translated into
(21:43):
another machine code that
can direct the function of
the manufacturing apparatus.
So, maybe the code from
(22:04):
the engineer would ut
the rivets on the airplane
wing in just the right place.
Or younger people are aware
(22:26):
of this 3D printers where we
have digital information
directing the construction
of three dimensional or
(22:47):
other structures,
that's what going in inside cells,
it's not that there is code,
it's just that the code is
(23:09):
directing the production
of 3D proteins and
protein that are absolutely
essential of what the cell does.
(23:30):
So, even the simpler cells
contain DNA and DNA Experiments,
there's a problem called
interfering cross-reactions,
(23:54):
where you get, yes, two or
three, maybe four or
five protein forming amino acids.
But there's all kinds of other chemicalcompounds that are also synthesized in
(24:14):
those same experiments, and they willquickly react with the things you want and
form, in the case ofthe Miller Urey experiment,
the sludge was called melanoidin.
And it's moving ina life-unfriendly direction.
So, what the chemist hasto do is effectively
intervene to removethe byproducts that are unwanted,
to allow only the things that are wantedto continue on in the simulation.
>> Peter Robinson (24:37):
The chemist has to play God, which is cheating.
>> Stephen Meyer (24:39):
Exactly, it's an intelligent intervention, and
therefore not a simulation of anundirected chemical evolutionary process.
>> Peter Robinson (24:47):
Lemme sum up, if I may, where I think I now understand things
stand, andI'm gonna quote Jim one more time.
This is a different article calledClueless on the Origin of Life,
quoting you.
Two thirds of a century since the MillerUrey experiment, origin of life research
has not made any progress whatsoever,not made any progress whatsoever.
(25:09):
We've been to the moon,satellites in space, internet, but
on the origins of life, zippo.
We can even say that suggestions onhow life might have formed really
show how life probably did not form.
Nothing even resembling a syntheticcellular structure has arisen from
its independent components,let alone a living cell, not even close.
(25:34):
Are you both willing to stand with thatas a good, tight summary statement?
>> Stephen Meyer (25:37):
I am, but I have quite a small difference with Jim on this,
perhaps, andthat I think that is progress.
I think that we've definedhow difficult the problem is.
>> Peter Robinson (25:49):
He's playing semantic games.
>> Stephen Meyer (25:50):
It is a semantic game in a way.
But it's an important point because,as I was just saying, that for
the chemists to move the molecules ineven a modestly life-friendly direction,
they invariably, in their simulations,
have to remove things they don't want,use purified reagents.
They are inputting informationinto their system.
(26:14):
And therefore the logic of thesesimulation experiments run like this,
we're gonna do an experiment underconditions that we think model what was on
the prebiotic earth, andthen we're gonna see what happens.
Well, in order for the molecules tomove in a life-friendly direction,
invariably there has to be an intelligentinput into the system to manipulate
(26:34):
the chemical conditions tomove them in that direction.
So, what's actually being simulated?
Aren't they actually thensimulating the need for
intelligence to move from simple chemistryto more complex life-relevant chemistry?
But even their intelligence is nonsense.
Their intelligence shows that this doesn'twork, they're so clueless on this thing,
(26:55):
they say, okay, we'll do this,and it solves this problem.
No, you just introduced ten more problems,
this is a bunch of nonsense,the whole area is a scam.
>> Peter Robinson (27:08):
Glad you don't have any strong feelings about this, Jim.
I believe I understand the dead end,
could we go now to this question thatDNA raises the question of information?
>> Stephen Meyer (27:22):
Sure.
>> Peter Robinson (27:22):
All right, this is Steve Meyer in your book,
Signature in the Cell,quote, DNA sequences do
not just possess information inthe strictly mathematical sense,
developed by the famed MIT scientistClaude Shannon in the late 1940s,
instead, DNA sequencesconvey instructions.
(27:43):
They perform functions,they possess specified information.
Okay, as far as I can tell, it's reallyimportant to understand this, but
you're gonna have to help me do that.
>> Stephen Meyer (27:56):
Sure.
>> Peter Robinson (27:56):
So, we start with Shannon information, and
as I understand it,Shannon is working on telecommunications.
He's trying to come up with mathematicalalgorithms that let you convey lots of
phone calls down a,>> Stephen Meyer: Communication channel.
Communication channel, right?
And he has this basicinsight that the information
(28:17):
an event conveys is inverselyproportional to the event's probability.
So, the sun comes up this morning,it tells us nothing new,
that's a very probable event.
The sun doesn't come up, and we know itis conveying information about some new
(28:37):
event in the world,is that roughly, correct?
>> Stephen Meyer (28:40):
Roughly, it might be.
>> Peter Robinson (28:42):
[LAUGH] You're not happy with that?
>> Stephen Meyer (28:42):
Well, maybe coins or
dice might be better->> Peter Robinson: Go ahead, go ahead.
Ways of getting at it, the basic idea of Shannon information
is that information is relatedto the reduction of uncertainty,
that's the intuition.
So, if I flip a coin andit's got two sides, and it comes up heads,
now I've reduced a certainquantifiable amount of uncertainty.
(29:03):
It was either gonna be a head ora tail, and now it's a head.
But if I roll a die, there are sixpossible outcomes, and so the amount of
uncertainty reduced when it comes upthree, rather than one, two, four, five or
six, is greater than the amount ofuncertainty reduced by flipping the coin.
And so, you can see thatthe information measures the amount
(29:24):
of uncertainty reduced is related tothe probability of the event taking place.
The head has a one in two chance, the die,one side of the die, a one in six chance.
So, there's more uncertaintywith the more improbable event,
more uncertainty reduced whenthe more improbable event occurs.
And so, what Shannon does,is he's able to quantify the amount of
(29:46):
information carrying capacityin a string or bit string.
But what he can't do, andwhich he was very explicit about saying,
is that his mathematical measure ofinformation carrying capacity doesn't tell
you whether the string,the series of characters, is meaningful or
functional or specified toperform a function in any way.
(30:07):
So, a very simple example that conveysthe difference is you might think of if
you type at random 20 characterson your typewriter keyboard and
put that string out, andthen right below it,
you might write a line of poetry,time and tide wait for no man.
Both strings have identicalamounts of Shannon information
(30:28):
because they're using the samealpha character symbol system,
but one has a qualitative elementthat the other doesn't have.
They're both equally improbable, butone has a qualitative element, and
that is that the arrangement ofthe characters is specific to perform
a communication function.
And that's the kind of information->> Peter Robinson: That we
(30:50):
see->> Stephen Meyer: Well,
it's the kind of information thatinvariably indicates a designing
intelligence.
If you see a line of poetry that'smeaningful, you right away know there was
a poet, but if you just seerandom characters like that,
it might be that somebody arrangedthem for that in that way, but
it also could be the productof monkeys at the keyboard.
So, early on in the 1950s, we havecrick with his sequence hypothesis.
(31:16):
He's working in the immediate wake ofthe Shannon information revolution, and
he specifies that DNA does nothave mere Shannon information.
He says that the sequence of basesin DNA are sequenced specifically
to perform a function.
And so, that you have an origin of liferesearcher named Alessia Orgel coined
this term specified complexity.
(31:37):
Complexity is a synonym forimprobability, and so
you have a specified improbablearrangement when you have that.
That's what we mean in ordinaryparlance by information, or
in our careful writing onthe origin of life problem,
we define what needs to be explained asthe origin not of Shannon information, but
of specified information orspecified complexity.
(31:58):
Something like time and tide wait for
no man as opposed to the randomcharacters of the monkey would type out.
And crick was absolutelyadamant early on that DNA
doesn't have just Shannon information,it has specified information.
>> Peter Robinson (32:11):
Now we come to the moment when the two of you become really
controversial.
Up to this moment, pointing out that theUrim Miller experiments have gone nowhere,
that we know less than nothing aboutwhere the origins of life might have
come from less than nothing,as you put it.
Actually, what we've done is demonstrateways that life probably didn't form,
(32:34):
that as I take it, you two are veryirritating to the scientific community,
but they can live with you.
>> Stephen Meyer (32:40):
Well, even our friend Richard Dawkins acknowledges that no one
knows how life evolved by undirectedchemical evolutionary processes.
So, you're right,this is actually not controversial.
The critique is not controversial at all.
Yeah, it's annoying,but not controversial.
>> Peter Robinson (32:52):
So, here's the point where the two of you cross a line, and
by the way, I feel an urge tograb you by the collars and
save you from crossing over that line,but I'll get to that.
This is Steve in signaturein the cell quote.
The functionally specified information inthe cell points to intelligent design, for
(33:13):
which every one of our listeners is gonnasay I know what they mean, they mean God.
Intelligent design asthe best explanation for
the ultimate origin ofbiological information, why?
Experience shows that large amounts ofsuch information, especially codes and
languages, invariably originate from anintelligent source, I wanna repeat that.
(33:39):
Experience shows our ownlived experience as humans.
When you see a line of poet,well, as Bill Clinton said,
when you see a turtle on a fence post,you know it didn't get there by itself.
We recognize intelligence, invariablyoriginate from an intelligent source,
from a mind or personal agent.
(33:59):
In other words, intelligentactivity is the only known cause of
the origin of functionallyspecified information, close quote.
So, what Meyer is saying,now pay attention to this one, Jim,
because this guy is just radioactive.
What Meyer is saying hereis that when we see DNA,
(34:21):
in the simplest cell wereally have no choice.
We have to suppose that there issome intelligent design behind it,
are you gonna let him get away with that?
>> James Tour (34:33):
No, I'm sympathetic to what he's saying because we have no other
answer.
I mean, I don't normally go downthat line to say that there's so
many problems before you even getto thinking about this question of
intelligent design and this information,but I talk about the information.
We have no idea how to solvethe information, but there's so
(34:55):
many steps that you have to getthrough before you even get there.
You want DNA?
DNA isn't gonna do anything unlessit has lots of enzymes supporting it
from around sothat it can help to translate it to RNA.
And RNA isn't gonna just startreacting with amino acids on its own,
it needs all sorts of support enzymes.
So, there's all thesepieces that are missing.
(35:16):
You don't even get to take advantageof the information that's there because
the chemistry doesn't let you,the chemistry just doesn't let you.
>> Stephen Meyer (35:23):
Peter I've really appreciated Jim's work, because he's
addressed not just the informationproblem, which has been the main focus of
my work, but all the biomacromoleculesthat have to be prebiotically synthesized
to make it possible to even begin tothink about the origin of a cell.
You have to have the saccharides,the sugars, you have to have the lipids,
you have to have the proteins,the enzymes, you have to have the DNA.
(35:45):
There's all these different classes ofmolecules but I focused on the information
question, and I think that is at somelevel the most fundamental question,
because it's all about not justthe presence of the constituent parts,
it's about how they need to be arrangedin order to perform biological functions.
>> James Tour (36:01):
But see, even the DNA is a piece of this informational code.
But everything in the cellis informational code.
The saccharides, the way sugarsare put together bears information.
That's how cells tell one another apart.
I mean, they bump into these other cells,they see what the saccharides are.
>> Stephen Meyer (36:24):
Signaling molecules.
>> James Tour (36:24):
Yeah, it's all based on this.
All the amino acids, all the proteins,
those all have information sothat they know what molecule to build.
Every piece of the cell is information.
And so,to just focus on DNA being information,
every piece of your cell is information.
(36:44):
How does this information get translatedif you don't have fidelity in information
transferred?
We tried this years ago in my lab totry to make a starting molecule and
have it make a duplex,
a daughter molecule just like itselfnot using biological entities.
And what happened was the fidelity killedus, meaning that it was only 70% pure so
(37:09):
you have 30% still in there now,reproducing junk.
And before you know it just,>> Stephen Meyer: Each generation that
gets worse and worse andworse, because you're not,
It's just a mess.
>> Peter Robinson (37:21):
So boys, there are two ways you could argue I think,
you could argue, and this is the,I'll give you the easy one.
I'll give you the one that for the sake ofyour careers, you really follow this one.
If you take my advice,>> Stephen Meyer: It's too late
for me [LAUGH].
You're both in plenty of trouble but follow this one and
(37:41):
the trouble will be at least moderate.
You can say, wait a minute,even the simplest cell contains DNA.
And then towards DNA,you don't know the half of it.
The saccharides, the cell is jammed,it's bristling with information.
And the summary of that line ofthinking is not only do we not know how
(38:03):
the origin of life began, but the ideathat the question is uninteresting or
easy, or that the universegiven enough time would have
produced it in a random way that,ladies and gentlemen,
given the state of knowledge today,that is preposterous and stop.
(38:23):
You could just stop there, but the twoof you, no, you may not yet because.
>> Stephen Meyer (38:28):
I want to explain why I didn't.
>> Peter Robinson (38:30):
No, you'll get a chance, but the alternative is the two
of you here, let me reada quotation because you keep going,
you cross the line, Jim, even you.
I'm gonna quote you fromyour article one more time.
Those who think scientistsunderstand how prebiotic chemical
(38:51):
mechanisms produce the firstlife are wholly misinformed.
Nobody understands how this happened,you're good so far.
It would be far morehelpful to expose students
to the massive gaps in our understanding,so far so good.
And a lot of people thinking, okay,good, Jim, just stop there, but
(39:13):
you don't stop there, you go on.
It would be far more helpful to exposestudents to the massive gaps in
our understanding thenthey may find a firmer and
possibly a radically differentscientific theory, close quote.
And everybody says,there goes tours opening the door to God,
you guys cross the line.
(39:34):
It's not enough to say science should bemuch humbler about its claims because
something that we thought we wouldget to for the last 150 years,
not only have we not gotten to,it baffles us more than ever.
You guys go on to say, and what we seeis evidence of intelligent design.
>> James Tour (39:52):
I don't know how you can take what I just wrote and
suggest that I was suggesting, God,why can't we just have a wholly
new scientific theory, this whole,>> Peter Robinson: Which would be?
Which would be, I don't know yet.
>> Peter Robinson (40:06):
Okay, that's fine.
>> James Tour (40:07):
I don't know yet.
>> Peter Robinson (40:09):
That won't satisfy Steve.
>> Stephen Meyer (40:10):
He's not in quite as much trouble as I am.
>> Peter Robinson (40:12):
Okay, so we have here at this table the eminent Jim Tour,
thousands of papers and materials thatI can't even begin to understand.
Brilliant man, says, it is enough to saywe don't know, and Steve Meyer replies.
>> Stephen Meyer (40:26):
There's a logic, a scientific logic,
that points to the role ofintelligence in the origin of life.
There's a famous information scientistnamed Henry Kessler, who was one of
the first information scientists toapply information theoretic concepts and
informational concepts to the analysisof the molecular biology to DNA and RNA.
(40:48):
And he said that the creation of newinformation is habitually associated with
conscious activity.
That's what we know from our uniform andrepeated experience,
which is the basis of allscientific reasoning.
In my PhD thesis, I studied the methods ofhistorical scientific reasoning pioneered
by, among others, Charles Darwin.
And the key idea there in historicalscience is that if we wanna explain
(41:11):
an event in the remote past, we wantto invoke, we want to explain it by
reference to causes which are knownto produce the effects in question.
And I came across this principlefirst in one of Darwin's mentors,
Charles Lyell, the great geologist,who said essentially that.
And I asked myself a question,
the Lyell phrase was by referenceto causes now in operation,
(41:34):
that's what we wanna explain past eventsby reference to causes now in operation.
And I asked myself a question,what is the cause now in operation for
the construction of specifiedinformation or digital code?
And I could think of only one.
And I ended up writing a 500-page booklooking at all the different proposals
that had been made for explainingthe origin of that digital code.
(41:56):
And all of them came up short, eithertheoretically, empirically, or both.
But we do know of a cause thatproduces specified information, and
that cause is intelligence, it's mind.
And so, using the Darwinian logicof the historical sciences,
it's actually possible to affirmthe intelligent design as the best
explanation for the origin of information.
(42:18):
Whenever we see information andwe trace it back to its ultimate source.
Whether we're talking about computercode or information in a radio signal or
hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraphin a book, we always come to a mind,
not a material process.
And so, the discovery ofinformation in a digital form and
a specified form of information atthe foundation of life, I argue, provides
(42:40):
a powerful indicator of the activity ofa designing mind in the origin of life.
And that's using the standard historicalscientific method of reasoning that Darwin
himself used.
>> Peter Robinson (42:49):
Okay, as far as I can tell, so you cross one line, but
you do stop short of another line meaningyou're not going to start talking about
God and say that this proves the existenceof the God of the Hebrew scriptures, or
the God of the Baptists, orthe God of the Presbyterian.
No, it's intelligence, and there's a long,
long way from what we can say musthave been involved in forming DNA.
(43:15):
There's a huge distance from thatto Hinduism, to any known religion,
and so you're being within your own,>> Stephen Meyer: In my work,
Within your own work,
you're quite modest,you draw lines yourself, is that right?
>> Stephen Meyer (43:30):
Well, in the book signature in the cell, I argued for
the need for an intelligent agent of somekind to explain the origin of the first
information necessary toproduce the first life.
I do think you can make further argumentsthat point not just to a mind of some
kind, but to a sort of a generictheistic understanding of God.
But you have to bring the cosmology andthe physics in the fine tuning and
(43:51):
the origin of the universe.
And so, I have a subsequent bookthat actually looks at the question,
what is the identity ofthe designing intelligence?
>> Peter Robinson (43:58):
And that is, The return of the God.
>> Stephen Meyer (43:59):
Return of the God hypothesis.
But in Signature in the Cell,
I argue that a mind of some kind isrequired based on our uniform and
repeated experience of what it takes tocause the origin of specified information.
>> Peter Robinson (44:13):
Okay, Doctor Tour, are you down for any of this program?
Or do you wanna just say,>> James Tour: Well,
I wish you could see what I see,
even if you just take a cell,very simple cell,
and you ask scientists to lookat this cell, life is going on.
(44:35):
If you just put molecules,align them in that way,
is it gonna run, is it gonna operate?
We don't even know what gotthis cell going, we don't know.
So, if you ask a scientist,a cell just died, what is it we just lost,
all the molecules are right there,and could you get it going again?
(44:58):
We don't even know how to describe whatlife really is when it comes to even
a simple cell, we don't even know that,that's how clueless we are.
I wish you could see this, becauseyou don't understand the magnitude of
the human deficiency in even understandingwhat life is in the simplest of organisms.
(45:19):
And people will say, well,
life was much simpler at the startof the evolutionary process.
This has already been calculated,
bioengineers have already figured out whatis the minimal operation that you need?
What are the fewest components thatyou need to have a cell operating?
And you take that and, okay, solet's say we make all of those components.
(45:40):
By the way, none of those 15 componentshave been made, none of them.
Now, if you could make them,now what would you do?
Under realistic prebiotic conditions.
>> James Tour (45:48):
Yeah, even if you could make them in your current lab?
I'll give them their own labs, make them,or just take them from a living cell, go
to a living cell, use that as your supplychain, take it from the living cell.
Now what do you do?
Just putting them in proximity,is this going to run?
Nobody in their right mind would say yes,no scientist would say,
(46:10):
it's not just putting them together.
You don't know how to put them together,but even if you could,
now how does it even start running?
We don't even know whatwe're going toward,
which gets back to that philosophicalexperiment that his professor was
talking about,what are we going toward in life?
We don't even know what life is,molecules don't care about life,
molecules are in,they don't move toward life.
(46:32):
There's no propensity for a moleculeto move toward life, it has no brain,
it has no action that wants to bringit toward life, they don't know.
I don't know what you want me to do,I'm just here, what do I do?
And then even if we could say I want youto move toward life, you'd be like, okay,
just tell me which direction to go,I don't know.
>> Stephen Meyer (46:51):
Jim has an amazing talk looking at some of the prebiotic
experiments, and they're basicallyimplementing complicated recipes.
They start with purifiedchemical reagents and
then they combine them injust the right measures,
right proportions under the rightconditions and temperatures.
And then they get a reaction, andthen they pull out what they want and
(47:14):
then they go get those same chemicals offthe shelf in a more purified form and
they take the next step andit's one step after another.
And at every step along the way there'sthis problem of what's called investigator
interference.
And if you go back and you relate thisto the idea of an informational measure,
if we think of informationas excluding one option and
electing another a bit of information,a head, not a tail.
(47:35):
At every step of the way, the investigatoris excluding one option or
excluding maybe a whole bunchof options and electing another.
They're importing information to movethe experiment in a modestly life friendly
direction, they're nowhere near,as Jim is saying, actual life.
But the logic of these simulationexperiments actually supports intelligent
design, because the idea is you'resimulating what must have happened on
(47:58):
the early earth to get life to go fromsimple chemistry towards more complex,
life friendly chemistry.
>> Peter Robinson (48:03):
Repeated intelligent intervention.
>> Stephen Meyer (48:06):
There is a repeated intelligent intervention in every one of
these simulation experiments.
So, what's being simulated?
>> James Tour (48:11):
Every one of those simulations you say it's intelligent,
it's stupid.
It's stupid because itdoesn't get you there.
They are doing things that,in their own mind, is intelligent, but
it's stupid because it's not moving there.
>> Stephen Meyer (48:25):
This is nowhere in my script, and
maybe it's a dud of a question.
But I'm going to ask you,because you are such a brilliant man, and
you understand things atsuch a level of detail.
If I take a petunia seed andit comes to me in the packet from Burpees,
and all these seedsare little dead things.
(48:49):
And I put it in a pot, and I put somewater on, now, I can predict, and
you can predict,that we'll come back in two days and
there will be a little shoot, anda week later, there will be a flower.
But if I say, why, how did that happen?
Are you telling me thatat the moment of life,
(49:10):
the moment something passesfrom inertness to life,
that remains a mystery to us today?
>> James Tour (49:19):
Yes, it remains a mystery.
What is the very even thing we'redescribing when we talk about life?
I've had scientists, I used to do thisdemonstration from my own children.
So watch, I'm having scientists overtonight, watch what's gonna happen.
I said, you have a cell, it just died,what is it you just lost?
And then they startarguing with one another.
(49:39):
There were two questions,I said, what is it you lost, and
how would you get it going again?
They could never get to how we got itgoing again because they could never
figure out what it is we justlost when the cell died,
that's how mysterious life is.
Now, that's not to say thatwe won't one day know,
I can never say that, as a scientist,I can't say we will never know.
(50:00):
There's a whole lot of things we figuredout, if you asked a man in 1700,
will we ever be able to walkon the moon and come back?
He'd be like, no, we don't even havespace flight, I mean, how can I say?
How can I say?
I don't know what the future holds,but all I know is,
it's not gonna happen tomorrow.
It's not gonna happen in ten years, with€40 million being thrown at this thing,
(50:21):
that's more money down the drain.
You're better off lettingthe taxpayers keep that money,
because they're goingin the wrong direction.
We don't even know whatwe're going toward.
>> Stephen Meyer (50:30):
This is where Jim and I differ just a little bit, because I think
these origin of life experiments haveactually revealed what is necessary to
move chemistry in a life friendlydirection, and that is intelligence.
They are providing evidential support for
the intelligent design hypothesisbecause of the logic of the simulations.
>> Peter Robinson (50:51):
Let me flip the question here, why is science as
a profession so hostile tothe notion of intelligent design?
If I google on critiquesof intelligent design,
they just type in those words andwow, do I get hits.
The American Association forthe Advancement of Science, quote,
(51:12):
the lack of scientific warrant for so
called intelligent designtheory makes it improper to
include as a part of science educationthe American Society of Agronomy.
I didn't know such a thing existed, butthere's an American Society of Agronomy,
quote, intelligent design has neithera substantial research space nor
testable hypotheses asa scientific discipline.
The American Chemical Society, we urgeeducation authorities to support curricula
(51:36):
that affirm evolution as the onlyscientifically accepted explanation for
the origin anddiversity of species, close quote.
Even though everybody knowsevolution doesn't even attempt
to answer the question.
>> James Tour (51:47):
This is for the origin?
>> Peter Robinson (51:49):
I'm quoting you, I got this off the web, who knows?
We urge education authorities to supportcurricula affirm evolution as the only
scientifically accepted explanation forthe origin and diversity of species.
>> James Tour (52:03):
This is how stupid this is, scientists are like everybody else.
We want to allay our fears, we don't wantto look bad, we don't wanna spend 40
years doing things, andpeople say that was a bunch of nonsense.
We're just like everybody else, andthey keep throwing this stuff out there,
and then you oppose them, andthey get all upset with you,
and they don't want you intheir little societies.
(52:26):
And it's like Groucho Marx said,
I don't wanna be part ofa society that would have me.
Who wants to be part of this,this is really nonsense,
what these people are putting forth,because you can't even define this thing.
And that's what allthe experiments are showing,
we need something radically different.
I don't know what that different is, but
(52:47):
all I can tell you is everything that weare doing now is not getting us there.
>> Stephen Meyer (52:51):
Okay, there's an historical background to this because
science arises in the 17th centuryin a decidedly theistic milieu,
and the design hypothesis waspart of the practice of science,
because scientists have,>> Peter Robinson: Galileo, Kepler,
Newton.
>> Peter Robinson (53:10):
Galileo had his troubles with the church,
he was a believer in God.
These early scientists were,>> Stephen Meyer: Newton, Boyle, Kepler,
they all made design arguments.
Right, right, right. >> Stephen Meyer
because there are two contextsof scientific inquiry,
how do things function?
I look at an automobile I canunderstand in terms of the laws of
internal combustion.
But I can't understand the origin ofthe automobile apart from Henry Ford.
(53:32):
I can understand the iPhone by referenceto the electronic equations e equals ir,
but I can't understand itapart from Steve Jobs.
And so, the scientists beginningin the late 19th century wanted to
say that the kind of explanations anddescriptions we use to explain or
(53:53):
describe the ongoing operation of nature.
And they would be properly materialisticprocesses that would be invoked,
are also sufficient toexplain the origin of things.
And we have to limit ourselves tomaterialistic explanations for everything.
But there's a fallacy,>> Peter Robinson: It just doesn't work,
>> Stephen Meyer (54:10):
It doesn't work,
well it may work, butit hasn't turned out to work.
Because the problem is,if you're asking about the origin of life,
there are two basic possibilities.
It might be the result of unguided,undirected material processes,
but it may be also the resultof the activity of a mind.
And if you decide in advance you'renot going to consider the mind,
(54:30):
the creative intelligence option,
then you will necessarily electa materialistic explanation.
And it may not be the best, because theevidence you have may be actually pointing
to a different type of cause.
And that's the argument for intelligentdesign, that when we see this specified
information, this is an indicationof the activity of intelligence.
This is what we know from everythingin our uniform and repeated experience,
(54:51):
which is, properly speaking,the basis of all scientific reasoning.
>> Peter Robinson (54:54):
If it is the goal of human beings to become smarter,
to know more, not less,to become smarter, not stupider.
To embrace options that seemreasonable and from which we can learn,
rather than ruling them out andremaining willfully stupid,
then intelligent design ought to beconsidered, is that the argument?
>> Stephen Meyer (55:14):
Exactly,
otherwise you have a sub rationalform of historical biology.
It would be like walking into.
>> Peter Robinson (55:20):
Are you calling Jim Tour sub rational?
>> Stephen Meyer (55:22):
No, no, he's not sub rational, he's doing great stuff.
His work actually,>> Peter Robinson: You're trying to
get a rise out of Jim.
Yeah, his work actually sets up the argument that I'm making.
>> Peter Robinson (55:30):
Okay. >> Stephen Meyer
possible options and you decide you'renot going to consider one, then,
What kind of work
is that?
>> Stephen Meyer (55:37):
It'd be like going into the British museum looking at
the Rosetta Stone and saying, well,
I'd like to say that a scribehad something to do with it.
But because I can't invoke creativeintelligence as an explanation,
I'm pretty much stuck with wind anderosion.
But we know it wasn't wind anderosion, something else played a role.
>> James Tour (55:55):
If I pick up this banner of intelligent design to
which I'm really quite sympathetic.
It's a way of trying to negateeverything that I'm saying.
What I'm doing is I'm pointingout the obvious to everybody.
There are so
many scientists that don't work in thearea of origin of life that agree with me.
(56:19):
They see exactly what I see, this isnot unique, this is not hard to see.
Everybody sees what I see except theseguys that are working in the field.
>> Stephen Meyer (56:28):
He's performing a chemical accounting.
>> James Tour (56:30):
Yes. >> Stephen Meyer
experiments, yeah.
Yes, if I start invoking intelligent design,
this is a way to dismiss me.
>> Stephen Meyer (56:35):
Won't be useful.
>> James Tour (56:36):
Yes, it's not useful for what I'm trying to put forward.
>> Peter Robinson (56:40):
Gentlemen, a couple of last questions here.
Shoot me down if you want to,
but I'm gonna take a step awayfrom science, from pure science.
Here's Thomas Aquinas in The Summaaround the year 1270, quote.
Now, whatever lacks intelligence,
whatever lacks intelligencecannot move toward an end unless
(57:03):
it be directed by some beingendowed with intelligence,
as the arrow is directed by the Archer,close quote.
Meyer looks at DNA and says,the code implies a coder tour.
Looks at these fantasticallycomplex chemical processes required
(57:24):
to produce even a nano vehicle ofthe kind you're working on and
says, the assembly implies an assembler.
And 750 years ago, Thomas Aquinas says,the arrow implies an Archer.
Our wing edging toward a pointin which the teleological
argument of Thomas Aquinas,the argument from design,
(57:49):
the arrow implies an Archer,the creation implies a creator.
Is that becomingintellectually respectable?
>> Stephen Meyer (57:58):
It's being revived by discoveries in modern science.
I attended a conference early in my careerin which I heard one of the leading
origin of life researchers ofthe 1970s and eighties, Dean Kenyon.
Repudiate his own theoryof chemical evolution,
understanding that it had not explainedthe origin of the information in DNA.
(58:20):
His book was calledbiochemical predestination.
He gave a talk at a conference, said,I can't accept my own work anymore.
And he said instead, it's time for
the philosophers to reopenthe natural theological question,
which is, does nature point tothe reality of a designing mind?
And he then later embraced thisnew theory of intelligent design.
(58:44):
And so, what I think the teleologicalargument is the classical design argument.
And I think it's being resuscitated,revived by discoveries in biology,
such as the ones we've been talking about,discoveries in physics,
such as the fine tuning thatthe physicists are talking about.
So, I think the teleological argumentis absolutely back on the table and
its modern science that has put it there.
>> Peter Robinson (59:06):
Jim. >> James Tour
scientists are seeing this,but they're not speaking up.
They're not speaking upbecause they're afraid to, but
they are seeing the barriers thatare there and there is no solution.
The only ones that are not speaking up arethe ones that are making their living from
this thing.
(59:26):
But nobody wants to speak up andgets get this abuse.
My hope is that as youngpeople come into this,
these organizations will begin to change.
That's my hope, that people willbegin to be more open minded here.
Okay, there was a major article in nature just a month or so ago,
Jim, right, by two authors thatare leading researcher origin of life
(59:50):
researchers, Johanna Xavier and Nick Lane.
And they, Joanna had previouslyactually commended both Jim and
me for raising these serious problems.
And then she went on with Nick to writean article in nature saying, hey,
we can't keep sweepingthis stuff under the rug.
And so, I think there is a shift starting.
There are a lot of origin of liferesearchers are pretty terrified of Jim
(01:00:12):
tour because he knows the chemistryas well or better than they do.
And he's performing thischemical accounting and
saying these experimentsare nothing plausible.
They're not getting results thatare plausible, they're not consistent with
what we know about what would havebeen happening on the early earth,
we need another approach.
Last question, I'm going to stepeven further from science now.
(01:00:38):
It just seems to me that the questionis one of aptness or appropriateness.
What is the correcthuman response to life?
So, I'm gonna ask a question and see ifyou think it's an appropriate response.
That's the first question,
the second question is whether it'suseful in scientific thinking in any way.
(01:01:02):
So, the two choices wouldbe the first choice,
which we've already ruled out,which is 19th century,
and, well, we have here this empty box,but it's going to be filled with Jello.
The origin of life isn't terriblyimportant or interesting,
we'll get to it sooner or later.
We know so much more now aboutthe complexities of life and
(01:01:25):
so much less about how it might havebegun that an old verse came to mind.
And here it is, I'm gonna hit you withsomething from the late bronze age,
this is from proverbs.
There be three things whichare too wonderful for me,
yeah, four which I know not.
(01:01:46):
The way of an eagle in the air,the way of a serpent upon a rock.
The way of a ship inthe midst of the sea and
the way of a man witha maid if we could hold
ourselves in wakefulnessif we were truly woke,
we would fall to our knees everyday at the sheer mystery of life.
>> James Tour (01:02:11):
Yeah, I agree, life is utterly amazing.
This is why I wrote an articlethat started out that
the life that we see here around us,we can't explain.
It should be like every other planetwe've been to, it should be barren.
And we have this ubiquitous lifeeverywhere you turn over a rock,
(01:02:35):
it's teeming with life.
There's life, andthen you put it under a microscope.
There's life, there's all of this life,and we can't even explain it.
We can't even define what it is, and it'sutterly amazing, really utterly amazing.
>> Peter Robinson (01:02:51):
Steve?
>> Stephen Meyer (01:02:51):
I think that our familiarity with life,
we see it all around us, has made us,inures us to what's awesome about it.
And one of the great things aboutmolecular biology is that in opening up
just the interior of the cell, just one,you see these amazing processes going on.
I remember when I was first takingmolecular and cell biology and
(01:03:12):
other students in the class would, withno particular ideological axe to grind in
the discussion, would just say,keep saying, no way, no way.
How does that happen?
We have a little animation, our website,called journey inside the cell,
that just shows the process by which thisdigital bit string is threaded through
the ribosome.
The transfer RNA's come, andin a very mechanical way,
(01:03:35):
the information directs this processof the building of the protein.
And I've had a friend, an engineer,a longtime friend of my father's,
an engineer, who had an epiphany justseeing that animation and thought,
there must be a God, there must be a God.
>> Peter Robinson (01:03:50):
Steve Meyer, James Tour, thank you.
>> James Tour (01:03:52):
Thank you.
>> Peter Robinson (01:03:53):
For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover institution and
Fox Nation today, from Fiesole,Italy, I'm Peter Robinson.
[MUSIC]
Two questions,
how do higher forms of lifeevolve from lower forms of life?
Charles Darwin answered that question,or at least thought he did.
But the other question is one thatDarwin never even attempted to answer.
Where does life comefrom in the first place?
Scientist and philosopherStephen Meyer and chemist James Tour,
(00:24):
Uncommon Knowledge now.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson,
we're filming today in Fiesole, Italy.
Stephen Meyer earned his undergraduatedegree at Whitworth College and
(00:45):
his doctorate in the historyof science at Cambridge.
Now the director of the Center for Scienceand Culture at the Discovery Institute,
Doctor Meyer's books includeSignature in the Cell,
Darwin's Doubt, andThe Return of the God Hypothesis.
James Tour received his undergraduatedegree at Syracuse University and
(01:06):
his doctorate in synthetic organic andorganic metallic,
I can't even say what this fieldis in synthetic organic and
organometallic chemistry, from Purdue.
Now a Professor at Rice University,Doctor Tour's areas of research include
nanoelectronics, graphene electronics,silicon oxide electronics,
(01:28):
and carbon research into whatthe rice website terms quote,
environmentally friendly oil andgas extraction, close quote.
Doctor Tour has publishedmore than 1000 peer reviewed
research papers andholds several hundred patents.
Steve and Jim, [INAUDIBLE] Darwin,
(01:51):
a couple of quotations here.
As I mentioned earlier, there are twopieces to Charles Darwin, and
the second piece is evolution, hiselaborate theory that random mutation and
natural selection can lead to,or did lead to the creation or
origin of many different species.
(02:12):
Now, that we won't go into it,agree with it, or disagree with it,
it's an explanation, it's a body ofthought, it's a kind of discipline.
But the other piece,the first piece is this,
Darwin simply assumes that life exists.
His theory calls for evolving fromsomething that's there in the first place.
(02:36):
Here he writes in a letter to a friendin 1871, if and what a big if,
we could conceive in some warm littlepond that a protein compound was
chemically formed, ready to undergostill more complex changes.
That's Darwin in 1871, more than twodecades after he published on The Origin
(02:56):
of Species, and he's still wonderinghow life might have originated.
Now, Richard Dawkins,contemporary Oxford zoologist quote,
Darwin made it possible to bean intellectually fulfilled atheist.
But of course, Darwin only made itpossible to be an intellectually fulfilled
(03:17):
atheist if you believe this is a question,but it's my surmise.
You can only say that Darwin made itpossible to be an intellectually fulfilled
atheist if you believethat prior question,
where does life comefrom in the first place?
Is either trivially easy to answer, or
in some basic way doesn't matter,is that correct?
>> James Tour (03:37):
Or it has been solved, but
neither of those threeconditions have obtained.
It's not trivially easy to solve,it hasn't been solved, and
it is actually quite an importantpart of the whole naturalistic
story that Darwin and modernNeo Darwinists have attempted to tell.
(03:58):
And you're right, there's a distinctionbetween what's called chemical
evolutionary theory, which attemptsto explain the origin of the first
life from simpler non-living chemicals,and biological evolutionary theory,
which attempts to explain the originof new forms of life from simpler,
pre-existing forms of life.
Darwin's theory was a formof biological evolution,
an attempt to explain the originof new forms from simpler forms.
(04:20):
But he presupposed,as he put it in The Origin, one or
very few simple forms at the baseof his famous tree of life and
did not account for where that camefrom simpler prebiotic chemicals.
>> Peter Robinson (04:31):
Before we continue, and I've got loads more to ask, obviously,
why am I a layman comingto this a century and
a half after Darwin publisheson the origin of his species,
scratching my head and saying,fellows, this first question,
where does life come from in the firstplace, that's a pretty big one.
How is it that a sort of interestedlayman can only suddenly realize you
(04:56):
guys have this elaborate, what about this?
Did science simply treatit as unimportant or so
easy that they get to it sooner or later,the question of the origin of life.
>> James Tour (05:08):
Nobody knows the origin of life,
nobody has ever known the origin of life.
But people assume,very much like the Babylonians assumed,
that it came out of a stinking pond.
That's where they saytheir life came out of,
and their gods came out of that same pond,and that's the primordial soup model.
And that model persists today, you lookin any textbook from elementary school
(05:33):
to advanced college textbooks, and itwill speak of the primordial soup model.
Life came out of that, that therewere molecules that came together,
and they formed higher orderstructures and that formed a cell and
that led to life,that is a bunch of nonsense.
>> Peter Robinson (05:52):
Okay, hold on, I remember those textbooks with flasks and
tubes, so let's take a moment there.
First of all, you said somethinginteresting, Darwin's warm little pond.
Darwin is working ina great tradition here.
The Babylonians had mythsinvolving the primordial soup.
So, let's take a moment here,
(06:13):
the famous Miller Urey experimentsof the 1950s, very simple.
Two flasks, closed system with tubes,one flask has ammonia, methane,
and a few other elements tosimulate the primordial atmosphere.
Another flask has water tosimulate the primordial ocean.
(06:34):
And then electricity gets introduced tosimulate lightning, and what do you know?
Amino acids seem to settle out of this.
And in early experiments, according tomy reading, there were five amino acids,
which could be described as centralbuilding blocks of life I'm told, in later
experiments, they refined it, improved ita bit, and they got up to 22 amino acids.
(06:58):
And there it seems to have stopped,the scientists, that's close enough.
We can extrapolate fromwhat's going on there.
Keep this up for a billion years andyou'll end up with life, and
James Tour says?
>> James Tour (07:08):
It's garbage that doesn't work, yes,
they made a number of amino acids.
They also made amino acidsthat are totally unnatural.
And so, they had many amino acids.
I think that there may have beena dozen or so of the amino acids, but
it doesn't matter.
All of them were achiral, which means theydidn't have the handedness that one wants.
Organic molecules, aside from the verysimplest of organic molecules,
(07:33):
have two handedness.
You either have a right-handed model ora left-handed model.
Your right and your left handare mirror images of one another.
If you put your right hand up to a mirror,it will appear as your left hand.
The two are non-superimposable,
that's why your right hand can'tfit in a left-handed glove.
Molecules are like that,organic molecules are like that as well.
(07:55):
He made both of the images,you have to have one and not the other.
So, there were other experimentsthat talked about resolving these,
separating these.
But that's the easy part,that's actually quite easy.
But what was presumedfrom that experiment,
which was actually a very nice experiment,I'm not belittling that experiment at all,
(08:17):
is that we would very soonfigure out the way to life.
That's what was assumed.
And so, that was 75 years ago,so think about that.
Think of what has beendone in the last 75 years,
where you have this whole silicon era,which started in 1960.
You have computers, you have space flight,you have landing on the moon,
(08:38):
which was in the 1960s, a long time ago.
You have all of this internetconnectivity, the medical advances.
We still don't know howthese things come together.
You have to take the amino acids andpolymerize them, hook them together,
that's a big problem,nobody has solved that.
>> Peter Robinson (08:55):
Jim, could I, may I read a little bit from a paper of yours,
one of your thousand peer reviewed papers.
I don't understand a word of this, butI'm going to quote a little bit and
ask you to help me understand it,quote, this is the title of the paper.
Are present proposals on chemicalevolutionary mechanisms accurately
pointing toward first life.
(09:17):
All right, you describe work thatyou have done in assembling what
you call nano cars, tiny little vehicles.
Here's a quote,I'm quoting you in this paper.
So, here's something to consider as wethink about the problem of The Origin
of Life.
Designing nano cars, to which you'vealready devoted about a dozen
(09:39):
intricate pages of how you designthese tiny little vehicles.
Designing nano cars is child'splay in comparison to the complex
molecular machinery andinformation processing systems at work in
the synthesis of proteins, enzymes,DNA, RNA and polysaccharides.
(09:59):
Let alone their assemblyinto complex functional
macroscopic systems, close quote.
Is this layman correct in saying,as we have learned
more about chemistry,as we have achieved the ability
to manipulate chemistry more andmore accurately.
(10:21):
We have learned that the question ofhow life first began is far bigger and
far more complicated andfar more elusive than Darwin and
Miller and Urey ever conceived.
>> James Tour (10:35):
Yes, this happens all the time, we see this every time we try to
make something,the goal post goes further away.
It's not that the cell is evolving,it's that we understand more of the cell.
So, we're here, we move a little bitcloser to maybe solving this, but
the cell, the target, has moved miles and
(10:55):
miles further away because we're like,no, I have to make that to.
I have to solve this problem to, so
when you just think a cell is a bunch ofprotoplasm, the targets not very hard.
But then when you learn about the cell andthe complexity of it, and
you see that biochemistryis extraordinary, and
(11:16):
there's so many layers to thisthat I never even thought about,
because I didn't have the tools to seeit 50 years ago, but now I see it.
And then you think about how those mightbe solved, how you might solve those,
and then you see layers ofother things you have to solve.
So, though people may saywe're getting closer,
(11:37):
the target has moved much further away.
So, I would never say that it willnever be solved, as a scientist,
I can't say that, but I just say thatthe solution is very far from today.
>> Peter Robinson (11:50):
Okay. >> Stephen Meyer
historical context?
I did my PhD on Origin of Life Biology,and one of my Cambridge supervisors
who also worked on the history of thatfield, had a well-known quotation.
She said that behind the question ofthe origin of life is a deeper question.
And that is the question of what are wetrying to explain the origin of?
(12:16):
And in 1859, in the 1860s,1870s, the scientists,
the early evolutionary biologists,
assumed that that question was going tobe pretty simple and easy to understand.
Thomas Henry,>> Speaker 3: And they assumed that why?
>> Stephen Meyer (12:31):
They assumed it because they thought life was very simple.
Thomas Henry Huxley, who was Darwin'sfamous bulldog, said that the cell was
a simple, homogeneous globuleof undifferentiated protoplasm.
And they thought that life wasessentially a kind of chemical.
It was made of an essential substancecalled protoplasm, which was a kind of
Jello or goo that could be producedby a few simple chemical reactions.
(12:53):
And our knowledge of what the simplecell is actually composed of,
as Jim has just said,has advanced massively since then.
Huxley had no idea,Darwin had no idea what we would discover.
And now we know that inside living cells,we have at the very least,
an information storage, transmission andprocessing system, which is part of
(13:14):
a whole automated system forbuilding proteins and protein machines.
These nano machines that Jim makes,
as you correctly point out,as he puts it, child's play.
He has these massive chemical recipesthat are involved, multiple steps,
interventions and
manipulations to build the much simplerminiature machines that he can build.
(13:36):
They're much simpler than the onesthat are found inside cells.
And so, the problem has, as he puts it,it's receded off into the distance,
because our knowledge of the complexity oflife has meant that it's much, much harder
to envision how that might have arisen bya series of undirected chemical processes.
>> Peter Robinson (13:54):
Reading your work, Steve, if I understand it correctly,
there's a big moment.
And funnily enough,
the big moment happens at about the sametime as the Urey Miller experiments.
And that big moment is Watson and crickin 1953, and you get the double heel.
They understand the structure of DNA and
suddenly they can seehow complicated DNA is.
(14:16):
And every living cell, first of all,I wanna make sure I get this right,
every living cell contains DNA,is this correct?
>> James Tour (14:23):
DNA, RNA, proteins.
>> Peter Robinson (14:25):
So, a few quotations that you present in your book,
Signature in the cell, Bill Gates.
DNA is like a computer program,biotechnologist Leroy Hood.
DNA represents, quote, digital code.
Richard Dawkins himself,
the machine code of the genes isuncannily computer like, close quote.
(14:48):
So, doesn't this pose just a gigantic new problem?
Again, let Stephen Jay Gould and Doc,whatever they wanna argue about evolution,
we are concerned with this first box andit's still empty.
And the first box is the first life.
(15:08):
And not only is it empty, but tourcomes along and says, you have no idea,
the simplest forms of liferequire such complex chemistry.
And then Meyer comes along andsays, well, wait a minute, fellas,
what about Watson and Crick?
Every cell contains DNA and
you're not going to create a three billionitem long strand of DNA with hitting
(15:30):
ammonia with lightning no matter howmany times you do the experiment.
Is that not correct?
This empty box is now.
>> Stephen Meyer (15:38):
A couple of things. >> Peter Robinson
awe, really?
Exactly, we go back to the Miller Urey experiment,
two big classes of problems.
One is that they synthesize the amino
acids using alleged prebiotic gases.
They synthesize
(16:03):
it based on
gases in those
flasks that
don't simulate
(16:29):
the actual
atmosphere on
the early earth.
(16:50):
But secondly, the amino
acids that they produced and
there was a mixture of other
things that had to be eliminated for
(17:14):
those amino acids to hook up
in a way that would be life friendly.
But they also didn't explain
how they would hook up and
(17:36):
how they would hook up in the precise
sequence to actually form proteins.
So, it's the differencebetween letters and
words that means something,
(18:00):
you have a bag of scramble letters and
you dumb them into the table.
That does not give you a tripple
word score in the game, okay?
(18:23):
But the discovery is seminal but
it's the beginning of a whole
series of discoveries and
what historians and
(18:45):
biologists call molecular
biological evolution.
In 1953,
double helical structure
of the DNA molecule, but
(19:08):
then five years later Francis Creck
who was a codebreaker in WWII
realises that the subunits
along the spine of the DNA
(19:31):
molecule are functioning like
alphabetic characters in
the digital characters in
a section of software Infact.
(19:53):
George Gamal one of the great
physicists of the time realized
very quickly that the strings of a,
c, g and t's along the spine
(20:17):
of DNA could be represented
as a digital bead string.
And so, what you have and
what Creek realizes is how
(20:38):
the sequence hypothesis is
that DNA is contains information for
the construction of the proteins and
(20:58):
protein machines that
are needed to keep cells alive.
So, very much like your modern
cad chem technology that is
(21:21):
used in a bowing plant where
an engineer will sit in a council,
write some code, the code
is then translated into
(21:43):
another machine code that
can direct the function of
the manufacturing apparatus.
So, maybe the code from
(22:04):
the engineer would ut
the rivets on the airplane
wing in just the right place.
Or younger people are aware
(22:26):
of this 3D printers where we
have digital information
directing the construction
of three dimensional or
(22:47):
other structures,
that's what going in inside cells,
it's not that there is code,
it's just that the code is
(23:09):
directing the production
of 3D proteins and
protein that are absolutely
essential of what the cell does.
(23:30):
So, even the simpler cells
contain DNA and DNA Experiments,
there's a problem called
interfering cross-reactions,
(23:54):
where you get, yes, two or
three, maybe four or
five protein forming amino acids.
But there's all kinds of other chemicalcompounds that are also synthesized in
(24:14):
those same experiments, and they willquickly react with the things you want and
form, in the case ofthe Miller Urey experiment,
the sludge was called melanoidin.
And it's moving ina life-unfriendly direction.
So, what the chemist hasto do is effectively
intervene to removethe byproducts that are unwanted,
to allow only the things that are wantedto continue on in the simulation.
>> Peter Robinson (24:37):
The chemist has to play God, which is cheating.
>> Stephen Meyer (24:39):
Exactly, it's an intelligent intervention, and
therefore not a simulation of anundirected chemical evolutionary process.
>> Peter Robinson (24:47):
Lemme sum up, if I may, where I think I now understand things
stand, andI'm gonna quote Jim one more time.
This is a different article calledClueless on the Origin of Life,
quoting you.
Two thirds of a century since the MillerUrey experiment, origin of life research
has not made any progress whatsoever,not made any progress whatsoever.
(25:09):
We've been to the moon,satellites in space, internet, but
on the origins of life, zippo.
We can even say that suggestions onhow life might have formed really
show how life probably did not form.
Nothing even resembling a syntheticcellular structure has arisen from
its independent components,let alone a living cell, not even close.
(25:34):
Are you both willing to stand with thatas a good, tight summary statement?
>> Stephen Meyer (25:37):
I am, but I have quite a small difference with Jim on this,
perhaps, andthat I think that is progress.
I think that we've definedhow difficult the problem is.
>> Peter Robinson (25:49):
He's playing semantic games.
>> Stephen Meyer (25:50):
It is a semantic game in a way.
But it's an important point because,as I was just saying, that for
the chemists to move the molecules ineven a modestly life-friendly direction,
they invariably, in their simulations,
have to remove things they don't want,use purified reagents.
They are inputting informationinto their system.
(26:14):
And therefore the logic of thesesimulation experiments run like this,
we're gonna do an experiment underconditions that we think model what was on
the prebiotic earth, andthen we're gonna see what happens.
Well, in order for the molecules tomove in a life-friendly direction,
invariably there has to be an intelligentinput into the system to manipulate
(26:34):
the chemical conditions tomove them in that direction.
So, what's actually being simulated?
Aren't they actually thensimulating the need for
intelligence to move from simple chemistryto more complex life-relevant chemistry?
But even their intelligence is nonsense.
Their intelligence shows that this doesn'twork, they're so clueless on this thing,
(26:55):
they say, okay, we'll do this,and it solves this problem.
No, you just introduced ten more problems,
this is a bunch of nonsense,the whole area is a scam.
>> Peter Robinson (27:08):
Glad you don't have any strong feelings about this, Jim.
I believe I understand the dead end,
could we go now to this question thatDNA raises the question of information?
>> Stephen Meyer (27:22):
Sure.
>> Peter Robinson (27:22):
All right, this is Steve Meyer in your book,
Signature in the Cell,quote, DNA sequences do
not just possess information inthe strictly mathematical sense,
developed by the famed MIT scientistClaude Shannon in the late 1940s,
instead, DNA sequencesconvey instructions.
(27:43):
They perform functions,they possess specified information.
Okay, as far as I can tell, it's reallyimportant to understand this, but
you're gonna have to help me do that.
>> Stephen Meyer (27:56):
Sure.
>> Peter Robinson (27:56):
So, we start with Shannon information, and
as I understand it,Shannon is working on telecommunications.
He's trying to come up with mathematicalalgorithms that let you convey lots of
phone calls down a,>> Stephen Meyer: Communication channel.
Communication channel, right?
And he has this basicinsight that the information
(28:17):
an event conveys is inverselyproportional to the event's probability.
So, the sun comes up this morning,it tells us nothing new,
that's a very probable event.
The sun doesn't come up, and we know itis conveying information about some new
(28:37):
event in the world,is that roughly, correct?
>> Stephen Meyer (28:40):
Roughly, it might be.
>> Peter Robinson (28:42):
[LAUGH] You're not happy with that?
>> Stephen Meyer (28:42):
Well, maybe coins or
dice might be better->> Peter Robinson: Go ahead, go ahead.
Ways of getting at it, the basic idea of Shannon information
is that information is relatedto the reduction of uncertainty,
that's the intuition.
So, if I flip a coin andit's got two sides, and it comes up heads,
now I've reduced a certainquantifiable amount of uncertainty.
(29:03):
It was either gonna be a head ora tail, and now it's a head.
But if I roll a die, there are sixpossible outcomes, and so the amount of
uncertainty reduced when it comes upthree, rather than one, two, four, five or
six, is greater than the amount ofuncertainty reduced by flipping the coin.
And so, you can see thatthe information measures the amount
(29:24):
of uncertainty reduced is related tothe probability of the event taking place.
The head has a one in two chance, the die,one side of the die, a one in six chance.
So, there's more uncertaintywith the more improbable event,
more uncertainty reduced whenthe more improbable event occurs.
And so, what Shannon does,is he's able to quantify the amount of
(29:46):
information carrying capacityin a string or bit string.
But what he can't do, andwhich he was very explicit about saying,
is that his mathematical measure ofinformation carrying capacity doesn't tell
you whether the string,the series of characters, is meaningful or
functional or specified toperform a function in any way.
(30:07):
So, a very simple example that conveysthe difference is you might think of if
you type at random 20 characterson your typewriter keyboard and
put that string out, andthen right below it,
you might write a line of poetry,time and tide wait for no man.
Both strings have identicalamounts of Shannon information
(30:28):
because they're using the samealpha character symbol system,
but one has a qualitative elementthat the other doesn't have.
They're both equally improbable, butone has a qualitative element, and
that is that the arrangement ofthe characters is specific to perform
a communication function.
And that's the kind of information->> Peter Robinson: That we
(30:50):
see->> Stephen Meyer: Well,
it's the kind of information thatinvariably indicates a designing
intelligence.
If you see a line of poetry that'smeaningful, you right away know there was
a poet, but if you just seerandom characters like that,
it might be that somebody arrangedthem for that in that way, but
it also could be the productof monkeys at the keyboard.
So, early on in the 1950s, we havecrick with his sequence hypothesis.
(31:16):
He's working in the immediate wake ofthe Shannon information revolution, and
he specifies that DNA does nothave mere Shannon information.
He says that the sequence of basesin DNA are sequenced specifically
to perform a function.
And so, that you have an origin of liferesearcher named Alessia Orgel coined
this term specified complexity.
(31:37):
Complexity is a synonym forimprobability, and so
you have a specified improbablearrangement when you have that.
That's what we mean in ordinaryparlance by information, or
in our careful writing onthe origin of life problem,
we define what needs to be explained asthe origin not of Shannon information, but
of specified information orspecified complexity.
(31:58):
Something like time and tide wait for
no man as opposed to the randomcharacters of the monkey would type out.
And crick was absolutelyadamant early on that DNA
doesn't have just Shannon information,it has specified information.
>> Peter Robinson (32:11):
Now we come to the moment when the two of you become really
controversial.
Up to this moment, pointing out that theUrim Miller experiments have gone nowhere,
that we know less than nothing aboutwhere the origins of life might have
come from less than nothing,as you put it.
Actually, what we've done is demonstrateways that life probably didn't form,
(32:34):
that as I take it, you two are veryirritating to the scientific community,
but they can live with you.
>> Stephen Meyer (32:40):
Well, even our friend Richard Dawkins acknowledges that no one
knows how life evolved by undirectedchemical evolutionary processes.
So, you're right,this is actually not controversial.
The critique is not controversial at all.
Yeah, it's annoying,but not controversial.
>> Peter Robinson (32:52):
So, here's the point where the two of you cross a line, and
by the way, I feel an urge tograb you by the collars and
save you from crossing over that line,but I'll get to that.
This is Steve in signaturein the cell quote.
The functionally specified information inthe cell points to intelligent design, for
(33:13):
which every one of our listeners is gonnasay I know what they mean, they mean God.
Intelligent design asthe best explanation for
the ultimate origin ofbiological information, why?
Experience shows that large amounts ofsuch information, especially codes and
languages, invariably originate from anintelligent source, I wanna repeat that.
(33:39):
Experience shows our ownlived experience as humans.
When you see a line of poet,well, as Bill Clinton said,
when you see a turtle on a fence post,you know it didn't get there by itself.
We recognize intelligence, invariablyoriginate from an intelligent source,
from a mind or personal agent.
(33:59):
In other words, intelligentactivity is the only known cause of
the origin of functionallyspecified information, close quote.
So, what Meyer is saying,now pay attention to this one, Jim,
because this guy is just radioactive.
What Meyer is saying hereis that when we see DNA,
(34:21):
in the simplest cell wereally have no choice.
We have to suppose that there issome intelligent design behind it,
are you gonna let him get away with that?
>> James Tour (34:33):
No, I'm sympathetic to what he's saying because we have no other
answer.
I mean, I don't normally go downthat line to say that there's so
many problems before you even getto thinking about this question of
intelligent design and this information,but I talk about the information.
We have no idea how to solvethe information, but there's so
(34:55):
many steps that you have to getthrough before you even get there.
You want DNA?
DNA isn't gonna do anything unlessit has lots of enzymes supporting it
from around sothat it can help to translate it to RNA.
And RNA isn't gonna just startreacting with amino acids on its own,
it needs all sorts of support enzymes.
So, there's all thesepieces that are missing.
(35:16):
You don't even get to take advantageof the information that's there because
the chemistry doesn't let you,the chemistry just doesn't let you.
>> Stephen Meyer (35:23):
Peter I've really appreciated Jim's work, because he's
addressed not just the informationproblem, which has been the main focus of
my work, but all the biomacromoleculesthat have to be prebiotically synthesized
to make it possible to even begin tothink about the origin of a cell.
You have to have the saccharides,the sugars, you have to have the lipids,
you have to have the proteins,the enzymes, you have to have the DNA.
(35:45):
There's all these different classes ofmolecules but I focused on the information
question, and I think that is at somelevel the most fundamental question,
because it's all about not justthe presence of the constituent parts,
it's about how they need to be arrangedin order to perform biological functions.
>> James Tour (36:01):
But see, even the DNA is a piece of this informational code.
But everything in the cellis informational code.
The saccharides, the way sugarsare put together bears information.
That's how cells tell one another apart.
I mean, they bump into these other cells,they see what the saccharides are.
>> Stephen Meyer (36:24):
Signaling molecules.
>> James Tour (36:24):
Yeah, it's all based on this.
All the amino acids, all the proteins,
those all have information sothat they know what molecule to build.
Every piece of the cell is information.
And so,to just focus on DNA being information,
every piece of your cell is information.
(36:44):
How does this information get translatedif you don't have fidelity in information
transferred?
We tried this years ago in my lab totry to make a starting molecule and
have it make a duplex,
a daughter molecule just like itselfnot using biological entities.
And what happened was the fidelity killedus, meaning that it was only 70% pure so
(37:09):
you have 30% still in there now,reproducing junk.
And before you know it just,>> Stephen Meyer: Each generation that
gets worse and worse andworse, because you're not,
It's just a mess.
>> Peter Robinson (37:21):
So boys, there are two ways you could argue I think,
you could argue, and this is the,I'll give you the easy one.
I'll give you the one that for the sake ofyour careers, you really follow this one.
If you take my advice,>> Stephen Meyer: It's too late
for me [LAUGH].
You're both in plenty of trouble but follow this one and
(37:41):
the trouble will be at least moderate.
You can say, wait a minute,even the simplest cell contains DNA.
And then towards DNA,you don't know the half of it.
The saccharides, the cell is jammed,it's bristling with information.
And the summary of that line ofthinking is not only do we not know how
(38:03):
the origin of life began, but the ideathat the question is uninteresting or
easy, or that the universegiven enough time would have
produced it in a random way that,ladies and gentlemen,
given the state of knowledge today,that is preposterous and stop.
(38:23):
You could just stop there, but the twoof you, no, you may not yet because.
>> Stephen Meyer (38:28):
I want to explain why I didn't.
>> Peter Robinson (38:30):
No, you'll get a chance, but the alternative is the two
of you here, let me reada quotation because you keep going,
you cross the line, Jim, even you.
I'm gonna quote you fromyour article one more time.
Those who think scientistsunderstand how prebiotic chemical
(38:51):
mechanisms produce the firstlife are wholly misinformed.
Nobody understands how this happened,you're good so far.
It would be far morehelpful to expose students
to the massive gaps in our understanding,so far so good.
And a lot of people thinking, okay,good, Jim, just stop there, but
(39:13):
you don't stop there, you go on.
It would be far more helpful to exposestudents to the massive gaps in
our understanding thenthey may find a firmer and
possibly a radically differentscientific theory, close quote.
And everybody says,there goes tours opening the door to God,
you guys cross the line.
(39:34):
It's not enough to say science should bemuch humbler about its claims because
something that we thought we wouldget to for the last 150 years,
not only have we not gotten to,it baffles us more than ever.
You guys go on to say, and what we seeis evidence of intelligent design.
>> James Tour (39:52):
I don't know how you can take what I just wrote and
suggest that I was suggesting, God,why can't we just have a wholly
new scientific theory, this whole,>> Peter Robinson: Which would be?
Which would be, I don't know yet.
>> Peter Robinson (40:06):
Okay, that's fine.
>> James Tour (40:07):
I don't know yet.
>> Peter Robinson (40:09):
That won't satisfy Steve.
>> Stephen Meyer (40:10):
He's not in quite as much trouble as I am.
>> Peter Robinson (40:12):
Okay, so we have here at this table the eminent Jim Tour,
thousands of papers and materials thatI can't even begin to understand.
Brilliant man, says, it is enough to saywe don't know, and Steve Meyer replies.
>> Stephen Meyer (40:26):
There's a logic, a scientific logic,
that points to the role ofintelligence in the origin of life.
There's a famous information scientistnamed Henry Kessler, who was one of
the first information scientists toapply information theoretic concepts and
informational concepts to the analysisof the molecular biology to DNA and RNA.
(40:48):
And he said that the creation of newinformation is habitually associated with
conscious activity.
That's what we know from our uniform andrepeated experience,
which is the basis of allscientific reasoning.
In my PhD thesis, I studied the methods ofhistorical scientific reasoning pioneered
by, among others, Charles Darwin.
And the key idea there in historicalscience is that if we wanna explain
(41:11):
an event in the remote past, we wantto invoke, we want to explain it by
reference to causes which are knownto produce the effects in question.
And I came across this principlefirst in one of Darwin's mentors,
Charles Lyell, the great geologist,who said essentially that.
And I asked myself a question,
the Lyell phrase was by referenceto causes now in operation,
(41:34):
that's what we wanna explain past eventsby reference to causes now in operation.
And I asked myself a question,what is the cause now in operation for
the construction of specifiedinformation or digital code?
And I could think of only one.
And I ended up writing a 500-page booklooking at all the different proposals
that had been made for explainingthe origin of that digital code.
(41:56):
And all of them came up short, eithertheoretically, empirically, or both.
But we do know of a cause thatproduces specified information, and
that cause is intelligence, it's mind.
And so, using the Darwinian logicof the historical sciences,
it's actually possible to affirmthe intelligent design as the best
explanation for the origin of information.
(42:18):
Whenever we see information andwe trace it back to its ultimate source.
Whether we're talking about computercode or information in a radio signal or
hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraphin a book, we always come to a mind,
not a material process.
And so, the discovery ofinformation in a digital form and
a specified form of information atthe foundation of life, I argue, provides
(42:40):
a powerful indicator of the activity ofa designing mind in the origin of life.
And that's using the standard historicalscientific method of reasoning that Darwin
himself used.
>> Peter Robinson (42:49):
Okay, as far as I can tell, so you cross one line, but
you do stop short of another line meaningyou're not going to start talking about
God and say that this proves the existenceof the God of the Hebrew scriptures, or
the God of the Baptists, orthe God of the Presbyterian.
No, it's intelligence, and there's a long,
long way from what we can say musthave been involved in forming DNA.
(43:15):
There's a huge distance from thatto Hinduism, to any known religion,
and so you're being within your own,>> Stephen Meyer: In my work,
Within your own work,
you're quite modest,you draw lines yourself, is that right?
>> Stephen Meyer (43:30):
Well, in the book signature in the cell, I argued for
the need for an intelligent agent of somekind to explain the origin of the first
information necessary toproduce the first life.
I do think you can make further argumentsthat point not just to a mind of some
kind, but to a sort of a generictheistic understanding of God.
But you have to bring the cosmology andthe physics in the fine tuning and
(43:51):
the origin of the universe.
And so, I have a subsequent bookthat actually looks at the question,
what is the identity ofthe designing intelligence?
>> Peter Robinson (43:58):
And that is, The return of the God.
>> Stephen Meyer (43:59):
Return of the God hypothesis.
But in Signature in the Cell,
I argue that a mind of some kind isrequired based on our uniform and
repeated experience of what it takes tocause the origin of specified information.
>> Peter Robinson (44:13):
Okay, Doctor Tour, are you down for any of this program?
Or do you wanna just say,>> James Tour: Well,
I wish you could see what I see,
even if you just take a cell,very simple cell,
and you ask scientists to lookat this cell, life is going on.
(44:35):
If you just put molecules,align them in that way,
is it gonna run, is it gonna operate?
We don't even know what gotthis cell going, we don't know.
So, if you ask a scientist,a cell just died, what is it we just lost,
all the molecules are right there,and could you get it going again?
(44:58):
We don't even know how to describe whatlife really is when it comes to even
a simple cell, we don't even know that,that's how clueless we are.
I wish you could see this, becauseyou don't understand the magnitude of
the human deficiency in even understandingwhat life is in the simplest of organisms.
(45:19):
And people will say, well,
life was much simpler at the startof the evolutionary process.
This has already been calculated,
bioengineers have already figured out whatis the minimal operation that you need?
What are the fewest components thatyou need to have a cell operating?
And you take that and, okay, solet's say we make all of those components.
(45:40):
By the way, none of those 15 componentshave been made, none of them.
Now, if you could make them,now what would you do?
Under realistic prebiotic conditions.
>> James Tour (45:48):
Yeah, even if you could make them in your current lab?
I'll give them their own labs, make them,or just take them from a living cell, go
to a living cell, use that as your supplychain, take it from the living cell.
Now what do you do?
Just putting them in proximity,is this going to run?
Nobody in their right mind would say yes,no scientist would say,
(46:10):
it's not just putting them together.
You don't know how to put them together,but even if you could,
now how does it even start running?
We don't even know whatwe're going toward,
which gets back to that philosophicalexperiment that his professor was
talking about,what are we going toward in life?
We don't even know what life is,molecules don't care about life,
molecules are in,they don't move toward life.
(46:32):
There's no propensity for a moleculeto move toward life, it has no brain,
it has no action that wants to bringit toward life, they don't know.
I don't know what you want me to do,I'm just here, what do I do?
And then even if we could say I want youto move toward life, you'd be like, okay,
just tell me which direction to go,I don't know.
>> Stephen Meyer (46:51):
Jim has an amazing talk looking at some of the prebiotic
experiments, and they're basicallyimplementing complicated recipes.
They start with purifiedchemical reagents and
then they combine them injust the right measures,
right proportions under the rightconditions and temperatures.
And then they get a reaction, andthen they pull out what they want and
(47:14):
then they go get those same chemicals offthe shelf in a more purified form and
they take the next step andit's one step after another.
And at every step along the way there'sthis problem of what's called investigator
interference.
And if you go back and you relate thisto the idea of an informational measure,
if we think of informationas excluding one option and
electing another a bit of information,a head, not a tail.
(47:35):
At every step of the way, the investigatoris excluding one option or
excluding maybe a whole bunchof options and electing another.
They're importing information to movethe experiment in a modestly life friendly
direction, they're nowhere near,as Jim is saying, actual life.
But the logic of these simulationexperiments actually supports intelligent
design, because the idea is you'resimulating what must have happened on
(47:58):
the early earth to get life to go fromsimple chemistry towards more complex,
life friendly chemistry.
>> Peter Robinson (48:03):
Repeated intelligent intervention.
>> Stephen Meyer (48:06):
There is a repeated intelligent intervention in every one of
these simulation experiments.
So, what's being simulated?
>> James Tour (48:11):
Every one of those simulations you say it's intelligent,
it's stupid.
It's stupid because itdoesn't get you there.
They are doing things that,in their own mind, is intelligent, but
it's stupid because it's not moving there.
>> Stephen Meyer (48:25):
This is nowhere in my script, and
maybe it's a dud of a question.
But I'm going to ask you,because you are such a brilliant man, and
you understand things atsuch a level of detail.
If I take a petunia seed andit comes to me in the packet from Burpees,
and all these seedsare little dead things.
(48:49):
And I put it in a pot, and I put somewater on, now, I can predict, and
you can predict,that we'll come back in two days and
there will be a little shoot, anda week later, there will be a flower.
But if I say, why, how did that happen?
Are you telling me thatat the moment of life,
(49:10):
the moment something passesfrom inertness to life,
that remains a mystery to us today?
>> James Tour (49:19):
Yes, it remains a mystery.
What is the very even thing we'redescribing when we talk about life?
I've had scientists, I used to do thisdemonstration from my own children.
So watch, I'm having scientists overtonight, watch what's gonna happen.
I said, you have a cell, it just died,what is it you just lost?
And then they startarguing with one another.
(49:39):
There were two questions,I said, what is it you lost, and
how would you get it going again?
They could never get to how we got itgoing again because they could never
figure out what it is we justlost when the cell died,
that's how mysterious life is.
Now, that's not to say thatwe won't one day know,
I can never say that, as a scientist,I can't say we will never know.
(50:00):
There's a whole lot of things we figuredout, if you asked a man in 1700,
will we ever be able to walkon the moon and come back?
He'd be like, no, we don't even havespace flight, I mean, how can I say?
How can I say?
I don't know what the future holds,but all I know is,
it's not gonna happen tomorrow.
It's not gonna happen in ten years, with€40 million being thrown at this thing,
(50:21):
that's more money down the drain.
You're better off lettingthe taxpayers keep that money,
because they're goingin the wrong direction.
We don't even know whatwe're going toward.
>> Stephen Meyer (50:30):
This is where Jim and I differ just a little bit, because I think
these origin of life experiments haveactually revealed what is necessary to
move chemistry in a life friendlydirection, and that is intelligence.
They are providing evidential support for
the intelligent design hypothesisbecause of the logic of the simulations.
>> Peter Robinson (50:51):
Let me flip the question here, why is science as
a profession so hostile tothe notion of intelligent design?
If I google on critiquesof intelligent design,
they just type in those words andwow, do I get hits.
The American Association forthe Advancement of Science, quote,
(51:12):
the lack of scientific warrant for so
called intelligent designtheory makes it improper to
include as a part of science educationthe American Society of Agronomy.
I didn't know such a thing existed, butthere's an American Society of Agronomy,
quote, intelligent design has neithera substantial research space nor
testable hypotheses asa scientific discipline.
The American Chemical Society, we urgeeducation authorities to support curricula
(51:36):
that affirm evolution as the onlyscientifically accepted explanation for
the origin anddiversity of species, close quote.
Even though everybody knowsevolution doesn't even attempt
to answer the question.
>> James Tour (51:47):
This is for the origin?
>> Peter Robinson (51:49):
I'm quoting you, I got this off the web, who knows?
We urge education authorities to supportcurricula affirm evolution as the only
scientifically accepted explanation forthe origin and diversity of species.
>> James Tour (52:03):
This is how stupid this is, scientists are like everybody else.
We want to allay our fears, we don't wantto look bad, we don't wanna spend 40
years doing things, andpeople say that was a bunch of nonsense.
We're just like everybody else, andthey keep throwing this stuff out there,
and then you oppose them, andthey get all upset with you,
and they don't want you intheir little societies.
(52:26):
And it's like Groucho Marx said,
I don't wanna be part ofa society that would have me.
Who wants to be part of this,this is really nonsense,
what these people are putting forth,because you can't even define this thing.
And that's what allthe experiments are showing,
we need something radically different.
I don't know what that different is, but
(52:47):
all I can tell you is everything that weare doing now is not getting us there.
>> Stephen Meyer (52:51):
Okay, there's an historical background to this because
science arises in the 17th centuryin a decidedly theistic milieu,
and the design hypothesis waspart of the practice of science,
because scientists have,>> Peter Robinson: Galileo, Kepler,
Newton.
>> Peter Robinson (53:10):
Galileo had his troubles with the church,
he was a believer in God.
These early scientists were,>> Stephen Meyer: Newton, Boyle, Kepler,
they all made design arguments.
Right, right, right. >> Stephen Meyer
because there are two contextsof scientific inquiry,
how do things function?
I look at an automobile I canunderstand in terms of the laws of
internal combustion.
But I can't understand the origin ofthe automobile apart from Henry Ford.
(53:32):
I can understand the iPhone by referenceto the electronic equations e equals ir,
but I can't understand itapart from Steve Jobs.
And so, the scientists beginningin the late 19th century wanted to
say that the kind of explanations anddescriptions we use to explain or
(53:53):
describe the ongoing operation of nature.
And they would be properly materialisticprocesses that would be invoked,
are also sufficient toexplain the origin of things.
And we have to limit ourselves tomaterialistic explanations for everything.
But there's a fallacy,>> Peter Robinson: It just doesn't work,
>> Stephen Meyer (54:10):
It doesn't work,
well it may work, butit hasn't turned out to work.
Because the problem is,if you're asking about the origin of life,
there are two basic possibilities.
It might be the result of unguided,undirected material processes,
but it may be also the resultof the activity of a mind.
And if you decide in advance you'renot going to consider the mind,
(54:30):
the creative intelligence option,
then you will necessarily electa materialistic explanation.
And it may not be the best, because theevidence you have may be actually pointing
to a different type of cause.
And that's the argument for intelligentdesign, that when we see this specified
information, this is an indicationof the activity of intelligence.
This is what we know from everythingin our uniform and repeated experience,
(54:51):
which is, properly speaking,the basis of all scientific reasoning.
>> Peter Robinson (54:54):
If it is the goal of human beings to become smarter,
to know more, not less,to become smarter, not stupider.
To embrace options that seemreasonable and from which we can learn,
rather than ruling them out andremaining willfully stupid,
then intelligent design ought to beconsidered, is that the argument?
>> Stephen Meyer (55:14):
Exactly,
otherwise you have a sub rationalform of historical biology.
It would be like walking into.
>> Peter Robinson (55:20):
Are you calling Jim Tour sub rational?
>> Stephen Meyer (55:22):
No, no, he's not sub rational, he's doing great stuff.
His work actually,>> Peter Robinson: You're trying to
get a rise out of Jim.
Yeah, his work actually sets up the argument that I'm making.
>> Peter Robinson (55:30):
Okay. >> Stephen Meyer
possible options and you decide you'renot going to consider one, then,
What kind of work
is that?
>> Stephen Meyer (55:37):
It'd be like going into the British museum looking at
the Rosetta Stone and saying, well,
I'd like to say that a scribehad something to do with it.
But because I can't invoke creativeintelligence as an explanation,
I'm pretty much stuck with wind anderosion.
But we know it wasn't wind anderosion, something else played a role.
>> James Tour (55:55):
If I pick up this banner of intelligent design to
which I'm really quite sympathetic.
It's a way of trying to negateeverything that I'm saying.
What I'm doing is I'm pointingout the obvious to everybody.
There are so
many scientists that don't work in thearea of origin of life that agree with me.
(56:19):
They see exactly what I see, this isnot unique, this is not hard to see.
Everybody sees what I see except theseguys that are working in the field.
>> Stephen Meyer (56:28):
He's performing a chemical accounting.
>> James Tour (56:30):
Yes. >> Stephen Meyer
experiments, yeah.
Yes, if I start invoking intelligent design,
this is a way to dismiss me.
>> Stephen Meyer (56:35):
Won't be useful.
>> James Tour (56:36):
Yes, it's not useful for what I'm trying to put forward.
>> Peter Robinson (56:40):
Gentlemen, a couple of last questions here.
Shoot me down if you want to,
but I'm gonna take a step awayfrom science, from pure science.
Here's Thomas Aquinas in The Summaaround the year 1270, quote.
Now, whatever lacks intelligence,
whatever lacks intelligencecannot move toward an end unless
(57:03):
it be directed by some beingendowed with intelligence,
as the arrow is directed by the Archer,close quote.
Meyer looks at DNA and says,the code implies a coder tour.
Looks at these fantasticallycomplex chemical processes required
(57:24):
to produce even a nano vehicle ofthe kind you're working on and
says, the assembly implies an assembler.
And 750 years ago, Thomas Aquinas says,the arrow implies an Archer.
Our wing edging toward a pointin which the teleological
argument of Thomas Aquinas,the argument from design,
(57:49):
the arrow implies an Archer,the creation implies a creator.
Is that becomingintellectually respectable?
>> Stephen Meyer (57:58):
It's being revived by discoveries in modern science.
I attended a conference early in my careerin which I heard one of the leading
origin of life researchers ofthe 1970s and eighties, Dean Kenyon.
Repudiate his own theoryof chemical evolution,
understanding that it had not explainedthe origin of the information in DNA.
(58:20):
His book was calledbiochemical predestination.
He gave a talk at a conference, said,I can't accept my own work anymore.
And he said instead, it's time for
the philosophers to reopenthe natural theological question,
which is, does nature point tothe reality of a designing mind?
And he then later embraced thisnew theory of intelligent design.
(58:44):
And so, what I think the teleologicalargument is the classical design argument.
And I think it's being resuscitated,revived by discoveries in biology,
such as the ones we've been talking about,discoveries in physics,
such as the fine tuning thatthe physicists are talking about.
So, I think the teleological argumentis absolutely back on the table and
its modern science that has put it there.
>> Peter Robinson (59:06):
Jim. >> James Tour
scientists are seeing this,but they're not speaking up.
They're not speaking upbecause they're afraid to, but
they are seeing the barriers thatare there and there is no solution.
The only ones that are not speaking up arethe ones that are making their living from
this thing.
(59:26):
But nobody wants to speak up andgets get this abuse.
My hope is that as youngpeople come into this,
these organizations will begin to change.
That's my hope, that people willbegin to be more open minded here.
Okay, there was a major article in nature just a month or so ago,
Jim, right, by two authors thatare leading researcher origin of life
(59:50):
researchers, Johanna Xavier and Nick Lane.
And they, Joanna had previouslyactually commended both Jim and
me for raising these serious problems.
And then she went on with Nick to writean article in nature saying, hey,
we can't keep sweepingthis stuff under the rug.
And so, I think there is a shift starting.
There are a lot of origin of liferesearchers are pretty terrified of Jim
(01:00:12):
tour because he knows the chemistryas well or better than they do.
And he's performing thischemical accounting and
saying these experimentsare nothing plausible.
They're not getting results thatare plausible, they're not consistent with
what we know about what would havebeen happening on the early earth,
we need another approach.
Last question, I'm going to stepeven further from science now.
(01:00:38):
It just seems to me that the questionis one of aptness or appropriateness.
What is the correcthuman response to life?
So, I'm gonna ask a question and see ifyou think it's an appropriate response.
That's the first question,
the second question is whether it'suseful in scientific thinking in any way.
(01:01:02):
So, the two choices wouldbe the first choice,
which we've already ruled out,which is 19th century,
and, well, we have here this empty box,but it's going to be filled with Jello.
The origin of life isn't terriblyimportant or interesting,
we'll get to it sooner or later.
We know so much more now aboutthe complexities of life and
(01:01:25):
so much less about how it might havebegun that an old verse came to mind.
And here it is, I'm gonna hit you withsomething from the late bronze age,
this is from proverbs.
There be three things whichare too wonderful for me,
yeah, four which I know not.
(01:01:46):
The way of an eagle in the air,the way of a serpent upon a rock.
The way of a ship inthe midst of the sea and
the way of a man witha maid if we could hold
ourselves in wakefulnessif we were truly woke,
we would fall to our knees everyday at the sheer mystery of life.
>> James Tour (01:02:11):
Yeah, I agree, life is utterly amazing.
This is why I wrote an articlethat started out that
the life that we see here around us,we can't explain.
It should be like every other planetwe've been to, it should be barren.
And we have this ubiquitous lifeeverywhere you turn over a rock,
(01:02:35):
it's teeming with life.
There's life, andthen you put it under a microscope.
There's life, there's all of this life,and we can't even explain it.
We can't even define what it is, and it'sutterly amazing, really utterly amazing.
>> Peter Robinson (01:02:51):
Steve?
>> Stephen Meyer (01:02:51):
I think that our familiarity with life,
we see it all around us, has made us,inures us to what's awesome about it.
And one of the great things aboutmolecular biology is that in opening up
just the interior of the cell, just one,you see these amazing processes going on.
I remember when I was first takingmolecular and cell biology and
(01:03:12):
other students in the class would, withno particular ideological axe to grind in
the discussion, would just say,keep saying, no way, no way.
How does that happen?
We have a little animation, our website,called journey inside the cell,
that just shows the process by which thisdigital bit string is threaded through
the ribosome.
The transfer RNA's come, andin a very mechanical way,
(01:03:35):
the information directs this processof the building of the protein.
And I've had a friend, an engineer,a longtime friend of my father's,
an engineer, who had an epiphany justseeing that animation and thought,
there must be a God, there must be a God.
>> Peter Robinson (01:03:50):
Steve Meyer, James Tour, thank you.
>> James Tour (01:03:52):
Thank you.
>> Peter Robinson (01:03:53):
For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover institution and
Fox Nation today, from Fiesole,Italy, I'm Peter Robinson.
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