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The video today will talk about the primordial soup and what's the lay person's understanding. Okay, let me again stress why I'm doing these, and I'll be past this in a moment. So if you're just joining us for the first time, now you know why I'm doing this series on abiogenesis. Uh, Dave Farina posted a video entitled "Elucidating the Agenda of James Tour: A Defense of Abiogenesis." You can see the description box below for that link. After that, after watching that video, I was confused about almost every slide and statement that Dave Farina presented. There were numerous gross scientific inaccuracies in his claims, in my opinion, and I think in every slide. Since others might be confused, I will use the Farina video with timestamps as the launch point for this series of lectures. So you'll see a little timestamp, so it might say like 6.25, that means it's six minutes and 25 seconds in that video. In that Farina video, uh, I'm, that's where I'm getting that quote from. I'm thankful to Dave Farina in his attempts to teach the layperson about scientific topics on his YouTube channel, "Professor Dave Explains." That's a commendable endeavor. I'm all for people trying to take scientific concepts and reduce them so that the layperson can understand. I therefore seek no contest with Dave Farina, only clarity. I'm not against Dave. I, I wish him well. I wish him well on his, on his lessons, on his teachings. I just, just wanted to have clarity on this topic. Other synthetic chemists can comment and point out where I'm correct or incorrect. I particularly invite a critique from my synthetic chemist colleagues and students studying synthetic chemistry and those studying origin of life. If disputing, please reference a literature article so that I can read and learn. I want to learn from you, and I'm going to say things that are wrong. I'm going to make little misstatements, and everything you want to point those out, that's fine. If I say something grossly in error, then correct me for my misunderstanding, and I'll apologize right now. It was totally unintentional. I don't want to misrepresent anything, but I, I will be open to correction because I want to learn. I mean, that's what I do. I'm an educator, and I want to learn.
All right, primordial soup. What's the lay person's understanding? Is it, is it Darwin soup developed 3.7 billion years ago, natural selection, organic compounds, hydrocarbons, biomolecules with amino acids? Is this, is this what they think? Well, at five minutes in the cited video, I have argued that many people embrace a primordial soup model where life arose from some lightning strikes on a pond that generated molecules that assembled into cells and then morphed into slithering creatures that emerged from the pond. And I think that many people today still have that view, and that view is taught, certainly throughout high school, that that view is taught.
So at 6.06, some people suggest that I have a quote, "dishonest talking point," unquote. To begin, let's check out more of what Dr. Tour has to say. "When one looks at a typical textbook, one will see some prehistoric pond and molecules, and those molecules coming together and forming a cell, and those cells coming together, and some slithering creature coming out of this pond. That is fallacious. There is no truth in that." This is one version of a talking point Jim brings up a lot. He hates how in some textbooks you see a primordial soup of molecules, some lightning, and then all of a sudden a cell is there, and then maybe a lizard crawling onto land or something like that. To call this a complete view of abiogenesis and evolution would be absurd, but absolutely no one proposes this. This is something that a lot of creationists do. They refer to what is very obviously a textbook meant for middle school students and pretend it represents the pinnacle of scientific thought on the matter. Sixth graders have zero capacity to understand biochemistry, so their textbook doesn't have any biochemistry in it. A college-level textbook will not look like this. So this is a dishonest talking point. They suggest that there is no embracing or teaching of the primordial soup beyond the sixth grade.
Well, let me point something out. Justin Brierly, Lee Cronin, and Dennis Noble met on the "Unbelievable?" podcast by Justin Brierly. And let's have a little word about Justin Brierly to see, see where, where he went to school. Justin Brierly studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford University, which got to be one of the best schools in the world. Oxford's a great place. Smart guy. On his program was Professor Dennis Noble. He's a British biologist who held a Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 2004 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and co-director of the Comp of Computational Physiology. Smart man. Also joining them was Lee Cronin, and he's the Regius Chair of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, UK. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is a prime researcher in origin of life research. So you have these three smart people right there in that podcast. Let's see what was said in that podcast.
Here's the conversation in that Brierly podcast, which is linked below. "This is in the Unbelievable podcast that's done by Justin Brierly. Sketch out the big picture here because, uh, a lot of people assume, okay, maybe they learned this in GCSE biology or something, but, you know, okay, so there was some kind of primordial soup billions of years ago on the surface of Earth, chemicals swimming around, maybe bolts of lightning going off, uh, and somehow something happened and poof, you've got your first sort of very simple cell or something, uh, swimming around in the ocean. Okay, that's, that's the my GCSE vague recollection of what might have been explained as how life got here. What's, um, is that view essentially correct or fundamentally wrong? What's the big problem that people have? Why they haven't up till now, at least, been able to give a sort of naturalistic scientific explanation for for how all those right bits got together to create life?" So that was Justin's, uh, Justin's comment, and he was asking that of Lee Cronin, who is an origin of life researcher, one of the top, well-known ones. And here's what Lee said: "So we're really important. So you're not wrong. Your GCSE chemistry is not, is not too bad at all." Whoa. "You're not wrong. You're not wrong. Your GCSE chemistry is not too bad at all." So you see here is a man who learns something in high school, and it's being underscored as not being too bad at all. That model: few lightning strikes and all of a sudden, poof, a cell forms, and that's how life began. And Lee said, "Not too bad at all." And that's why the world is confused. And Dennis Noble, who was sitting right there, made not a single comment to clarify the situation. Didn't say anything, just let it go. And this is why people are so confused.
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Okay, well, how confused are they? There was a recent survey regarding the primordial soup concept. The survey was drafted and conducted by John Narcom, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Arkansas Tech University, as part of a study entitled "Quote, I Thought We Could Do That: Pop Culture, Clickbait, and the Academy's Influence on Perceptions of Scientific Accomplishment," unquote. The question was asked: "Do you believe the following is true or false? Scientists researching the origin of life have created complex life forms from scratch, that is, in laboratory experiments that approximate Earth's early atmosphere. Scientists have mixed chemicals believed to exist before the first life forms to successfully create complex life forms such as frogs. Do you believe that that is true or false?" Well, 41 percent of the people said true, 58 percent of the people said false. Total 715 people. All right, so, so 41 percent of the people that responded to this survey thought that by mixing simple chemicals in a laboratory that were presumed to be available on early life, people have made frogs. Let me enlighten you. Even with all the best chemicals, not just prebiotic type chemicals, nobody has ever made a frog. But 41 percent of the people thought that was true. If the participants that completed the survey in less than 45 seconds were disqualified, they didn't, they, they're not in this. And, but that, that, even if you were to include them, the results were within one percent of what they are now.
Okay, then the second question: "Scientists researching the origin of life have created simple life forms from scratch, that is, in laboratory experiments that approximate Earth's early atmosphere. Scientists have mixed chemicals believed to exist before the first life forms to successfully create simple life forms such as bacteria." 72 percent of the people thought that was true. Let me enlighten you. Nowhere close. Nowhere close. If that were true, whoever did that would have gotten the Nobel Prize. There would have been Nobel Prizes granted to that very, very quickly. Nobody's ever come close to that. 72 percent of the people thought that that was true. 27 people, 27 thought false. Total 715. Okay, who are these people? Well, the age ranges are listed there, but the average age was 38. So in their right mind. Sex, about half male, half female. Highest level of education, interestingly, 80 percent of them hold college degrees, either from an associate's degree all the way up to doctoral degrees. All right, so, so there is real misconception. It is taught in high schools. That is what people are still taught. It may even be taught beyond that, and that is the conception, the misconception of many people. So it was not my imagination to have said what I said.
Summary: The primordial soup model continues to be upheld and taught, even in high schools, and I'll bet it's even taught in the classrooms in some universities. Professor Lee Cronin, a leader in origin of life research, suggests that the primordial soup model is "not too bad at all." Professor Noble does not stop to correct the situation. So the general public is terribly confused upon origin of life claims and so-called synthetic life claims. There's real confusion among the public, and hopefully, after this series of videos, things will clear up a lot. If this has been a help to you, you can subscribe to the next video, and we'll take you into that. The next video is going to be on the hype that's put forth by origin of life researchers themselves, not just the press, but origin of life researchers themselves, which I think that hype hurts the whole field because it puts expectations on people that they think we're just around the corner cracking this problem and solving it. And this is, this is infected right up into the academy. But anyway, that'll be the next one. Hope you join us.
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