Transcription
Let's talk a little bit about Abioenesis. I mean, tell tell us what that is because I imagine there's some people here who who aren't familiar with that, but that to me is just outrageously compelling.
Yeah, there are three big big discoveries that I address in the book. The origin of the universe itself, it's fin the origin of its finely tuned structure. You're talking about those four laws of physics that were set from the very beginning. And those parameters were set against all odds within very narrow tolerances to make life possible. And that's the the fine-tuning problem. We come back to that. And then the third is this question of getting life from non-life or abiogenesis.
And this is this was the field of my my PhD dissertation. I did it on origin of life biology. And it was clear by the late 80s when I was working that the field had come to a place of complete impass. In fact, my one of my Cambridge supervisors said every everybody when when she she said when we go to these origin of life society meetings every our she said our field is becoming dominated by by by quacks. She said because everybody in the field knows that everybody else's idea won't work but they won't admit it about their own. And so it's the the big question is how do you get from brute chemistry in a prebiotic soup or a a favorable o ocean environment or a hydrothermal vent or whatever to a living cell with all the intricacies that we now observe including the digital code that's stored in the DNA that directs the construction of the proteins and the protein machines that are needed to keep cells alive. The more complex, the more we've learned about the complexity of life, the harder it is to explain by reference to simil simple chemistry. And that gap between code or between chemistry and code in our experience is only bridged by one and only one type of cause and that's programmers, intelligent agents. So the discovery I think of digital code at the foundation of life is a powerful indicator of the activity of designing intelligence in the history of life in the origin of life. And that's I I in the book argue that as an inference to the best explanation, but I was having a a conversation with a colleague today saying on that on that topic, we stand in no risk of contradiction because there is no better explanation being offered by those who are formulating chemical evolutionary theories of a biogenesis. The field is in a complete disarray.
Well, ju just to break it down again because I don't know uh what people here know or don't know, but I mean I I dealt with this in in my book, so I can at least understand this. It's not like I I say I know nothing and explain it to me. But but break it down for folks here. Talk about Miller Yuri and you know what people were thinking let's say 70 years ago. If we go back 70 years and somebody says, I believe in science and I think science can tell us how the universe through random processes produced life. So where were we in 1952 and how complex did we think the simplest life was? I mean if we go back just to give them the benefit of the doubt of why they believed that this could just happen randomly.
Yeah, there there's a huge historical irony here because in 1953 Watson and Crick elucidate the double helical structure of the DNA molecule. In the same year, Miller Yuri are able to synthesize a couple of the protein forming amino acids and the one discovery the two thing at the time people think oh science is making this great progress even on these these deep and fundamental questions about the origin of life. But what Watson and Crick discovered and what was discovered subsequent to their first discovery made the made theories of the chemical evolutionary origin of life increasingly implausible. Implausible in the extreme. What Miller and Yuri were able to do was build what are called two little building blocks of proteins. Proteins are the large molecules in cells that form intricate three-dimensional shapes. And in virtue of those three-dimensional shapes, they're able to perform all kinds of interesting jobs, all the most important jobs in the cell. You can kind of think of of proteins like the tools in your toolbox. There's a hammer, a wrench, a saw, and each one has a different function based on its its its form. And the proteins catalyze reactions in the cell at rates much faster than would ever occur. They're called the enzyme proteins. They're also proteins that that will build the parts of miniature machines. So we have these little rotary engines that you may have seen about that Michael Beehe has made famous or little turbines or little walking robotic motor proteins. There's all kinds of intricate nanotechnology in the cell and that's all made of proteins.
Although they didn't know about that in 1952.
They didn't know about any of this when Miller Yuri did their famous experiment and they said, "Whoa, we got amino acids. We're on our way." They didn't know a lot of the stuff that you were just talking about. So it was very easy for them to say, "Well, we'll we'll figure out how to how to get to life. We're we're not that far."
Absolutely. And one of the things my my one of my uh dissertation supervisors told me was that the more comp the more we know about the nature of life, the harder it becomes to explain its origin. And so if we learn more and more about the complexity of life and the inner workings of the cell, so first Watson Crick elucidate the DNA, that's pretty interesting. But then in 1957, Crick has this amazing brainstorm. It's called the sequence hypothesis. And he proposes that the chemicals along the interior of the helix, he got this helical modu molecule. And it's the outside is made of what's called a sugar phosphate backbone.
We all knew that.
Tell us something we don't know. Steve, come on. Sugar phosphate backbone. And on the inside, the business end, there are little bases called nucleotide bases that are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or digital characters like the zeros and ones in a section of machine code. So what Crick realizes is that DNA is performing a function in virtue of its information carrying CA capability that there's literally chemicals that are functioning like digital characters conveying information from building those proteins I was talking about a minute ago. The pro the the the big toolboxes that do all the job in the cell. So an analogy that's pretty apt would be like uh the technology that we know about for manufacturing computer uh CAD CAM computer assisted design and manufacturing up in the se in Seattle where we live the Boeing plant you'll have an engineer sitting at a console write some code goes down a line a wire it's translated into a machine code that can be read at a manufacturing center that might be used to put rivets on an airplane wing. You have something very like that going on inside the cell where you've got digital information directing the construction of these proteins.
But but you're telling me that protein machines figured this out in 57.
He figures this out.
See, this is I'm I'm surprised by that because I I just think that that's I can understand if we figured that out more recently, but the idea that a few years after the Miller Yuri experiment, they see this. What do they do at that point? What did they do? What do you do with that kind of information?
It was for him it was a hypothesis. He interesting thing about Crick's background is absolutely fascinating. He wasn't a biologist. He was he was he was doing a PhD in physics when he teamed up with Watson in 52-53 and he had been a codereaker in World War II. So he had a deep in intuitive understanding of what it took to transmit and store and even encode information. And so he realized fairly early on that DNA had all the features that were necessary for it to function as an encryption se system, a a way of tr storing and transmitting information. And so this was a hypothesis in 57. Then there was a flurry of activity in French labs in in labs in the UK on the US side and now historians of science call this period the the molecular biological revolution. And by about 1965 they had sorted out that Crick was in fact right. That's what what he thought DNA was doing was what it was doing. It was it was directing the construction of these fascinating protein large protein molecules that do all the important jobs in the cell. And then by that time you already start to get real tension in the field of origin of life biology. What seemed an easy problem to solve in 1953. Well, we got the amino acids. What could be simpler? Well, you have to get all the amino acids. There's not just two or three of them. There's 20 protein forming amino acids. But you also got to get them to link up in the right way. And then you have to get them sequenced in the right way as well so they fold into the right three-dimensional shapes so that they can do jobs. And that's all got to be embedded in a larger information storage and processing system to actually produce what we now know as the simple cell.
Okay. So why when you understand how outrageously complex it is and and it sounds like that happened way before I thought it did. I mean it's happening in the 50s and then in the mid60s they know this. How could they possibly have continued thinking that random processes delivered this complexity? How how do you you know tell yourself that when when it's in front of you?
I I think this is where the story of this is where worldview inter intersects. I think coming out of the 19th century many leading scientists in all fields were default scientific materialists. They believed that matter and energy were the things from which everything else came. This is why Einstein was so initially resistant to the big bang theory, by the way, is that his own his own theory of general relativity was implying that that gravity couldn't be the only force in the universe. According to to Einstein, gravity curves space. And if the only force in the universe is gravity, drawing all the other matter together, you get one big lump of space and one infinitely tight curve curvature of space around it. And and there would be no room to put anything. We'd live in a giant black hole. But we don't live in a universe like that. So Einstein posited there must be an expansion force that's operating in opposition, an anti-gravity, what he called his cosmological constant. But that implied a dynamic universe moving outward from a beginning, which to him smacked to the doctrine of creation. And so he fiddled with his equations to try to s to
actually this is a good thing. This is something I actually do talk about wherever I go because I find it so funny. What we're really talking about here is worldview, right? We're talking about the idea that there's all this evidence, but but people on either side have have decided things that are immovable. And so the the the materialists have they they just know that there's no God and we can't talk about that. We can't even think about that. So we'll just we'll just skip that and we'll just figure out what we need to figure out. But we know it's not that.