ladies and gentlemen

perfect I have you so welltrained

Introduction

welcome to the Cambridge round table on science and religion where where tonight the subject is science of the origin of life now you know we're we are dedicated to mixing science and religion because they are the two most difficult things to mix and that's why we do it um and uh yet uh the speakers will only be speaking from science they won't be speaking from uh religion they won't be speaking from speculation they'll be speaking what they think is a hardcore really serious science trying to discover how it is that life originated so when you write me my reviews tell me whether or not when I ask you in your reviews whether or not the the the the speakers achieve that uh situation I'd like to know uh there's two rules at the round table one is oh actually I got I I I listened to um Eric Schmidt who was the chief executive of Google and he has rules for that company when he was running it maybe you know that he always says there's two and then he Chang ches the two that they are okay but but the one I heard was uh the rule is well clothes are necessary okay so I think you guys already did that now the second rule he said is our rule is to have the most creative informed ready to go people we want them to have fun so that's why a round table is designed to have fun that's one of our rules is you must have fun if you're not having fun I want to hear about it I want to hear about your complaints and comments uh but the other rule we have is and you'll learn this in time uh only one person speaks at the table at a time CU if even more than one does the room becomes just ridiculously loud and you can't hear anybody at anybody's table so we need you to cooperate don't talk to your neighbor just talk into the table like s of lean into it let us know that you're ready for next you know for the next comment uh and and table facilitators are at your table what's their main job is to basically make sure that if you talk too much they let you know and if you don't talk enough they let you know otherwise they're not there to answer all the questions and solve all your dilemas and tell you where to get dry cleaning they're not there for that they're they're there for uh just managing the conversation to make sure everybody feels comfortable that doing that um I'm going to borrow uh two illustrations from one of our panelists whose name is Peter craft Peter is uh shall we say the Chrome Dome at the back table right there uh he's a philosophy professor at Boston college and uh here's a book that he wrote that I find really interesting the book is called uh Socrates meets Jesus so what happens is Socrates is revived and he ends up at havit University can you guess where that really is it's Harvard okay so so what he does is uh Socrates uh hears about Jesus here's something about him but he says I got to really get to know who this is so he asks people at havit University about Jesus and as you know not everybody at hav knows really who Jesus is there's there's personal views there's professional views there's all kinds of things in between so what Socrates ends up doing is trying to meet as many people as he can many different people as he can and by the end of the book something happens and I don't want to give it away but here's here's why Peter wrote the book I think it's a parable of telling you don't let anybody else tell you what to think and do your own thinking but ask questions if you don't ask questions you'll never come up with new ideas to to bat around so that's what a round table is for a round table is for don't let anybody tell you what to think you've got to ask questions of your neighbor you've got to ask questions of of other people who from other professions other uh other disciplines how they see things it's going to help you see things cuz just if if if if if Socrates uh woke up one day to the 12 disciples he'd get 12 different stories about who Jesus is wouldn't he I mean he'd get 15 different stories about who Jesus is so so uh nobody El nobody can especially nail a topic very well none of us can I mean look at look at the $10 words that both uh Jim Cronin and Lee uh cron I'm sorry that Jim tour and Lee Cronin use in their papers we supposed to understand what they wrote you know but we but we have to ask questions we have to consider the evidence we have to make up our own mind don't let somebody from havit uh tell you how to think okay now the other illustration that I can give you that as to why we do roundtables the way we do and by the way since we've been on the map um since 2002 we started in amoris then we came to Cambridge then we stayed in Cambridge ever since but since then we've added 18 other sites around the country and these 18 well all together 20 sites around the country all do what we do they all try to collect 75% of the audience should be faculty um maybe 25% is as somebody else a spouse a friend a grad student that sort of thing um and uh the the the the key thing is we want to we we believe that when we're exchanging information exchanging it personto person is how we best absorb something new or even how we um let's say settle on something old and uh and because I'm a minister I'm allowed to give you an illustration from the Bible because that's what I do right okay so there's the Gospel of John this is what I got from Peter one day uh Gospel of John what's the first words out of Jesus's mouth in the Gospel of John because there's a couple of chapters where he doesn't speak it's when uh John the Baptist points his own disciples to Jesus and says you need talk to that man so they they approach Jesus and what is what is the first words out of his mouth he says what do you want isn't that a great question because really besides what you know and how you feel the other thing that matters is what do you want that's what's going to drive you and what you're what you're interested in so how do the discip how do these these few guys answer they answer where are you staying and why did they say that because they want to know the whole person behind who they were pointed to they want to know not just you know answers to really tricky and interesting questions they don't want to know like what do we do about the Romans what do we do about the the tax collectors they wanted to know the person so the best way that we're going to get to know new information and absorb it is not only get to know yourself but get to know the other people that where the information comes from because it's colored by uh information is colored by how we see it so um it's it's important that you want to know that because because that brings up the question of the the what do you want you're going to have to actually want to know something as opposed to ah you know that's just trivial information so that's why a round table exists so that we can have more personal encounters with information because information by itself like you can go to lecture and hear it and forget about it but you come to a round table and you talk about it you're never going to forget about it I bet so I'm going to go this is where I give just very brief introductions we have two featured guest speakers they are sitting way in the back by the time they make it well one of them makes it first I'll have finished his introduction so Jim tour why don't you start coming up Jim tour is um a Rice University chemistry professor and he is going to share with us where he sh what he shares in a lot of other venues and it's an examination of the chemistry involved in the OR life please welcome Jim

Dr. James Tour’s Opening Statements

tour well thank you for the invitation and uh we're just going to go through this let me give you a few definitions abiogenesis is the origin of life from non-living matter to construct any convincing theory of abiogenesis we must take into account the condition of the earth about 4 billion years ago not my definition this is from uh Mariam Webster prebiotically relevant means that we are restricted to materials and procedures and conditions that might have been available on an early Earth nobody was present when life first began so so we really will we'll never really know the answer to this but that's not what we're seeking what we are seeking is an experimentally verifiable hypothesis as to how life might have originated textbook characteristics of life are responsiveness to the environment growth and change ability to reproduce have a metabolism and breathe maintain homeostasis being made of cells passing on traits to offspring homeostasis is a steady internal physical and chemical condition Professor Cronin who's here today agrees with me he said I'd like to ask you all a question which is what is the most basic unit of matter that can undergo darwinian Evolution that you know of and I suppose it won't much of a surprised to see that it's a cell he further said so what are the requirements of our living system we need genetic code we need mating we need metabolism we need adaptation we need homeostasis so Lee and I are in agreement here I am not speaking of a god of the gaps I think that we will one day find out uh uh how life began but I don't think we are anywhere close nowhere close and how can I say this it's because as we track the complexity of a cell and how close we are being able to reproduce this build a cell uh uh even mimicking what's here what happens is every year the cell gets further away from us because its complexity increases with time not that it has evolved but that we realize more about the cell and its complexity so it moves way out here every year and we might move an nanometer closer and it's moving at a much further rate that's how you can track that we're nowhere close to solving this chemistry is the language of living systems we are not built out of silicon we are not built out of transistors we're not built out of carbon carbon Composite Materials we are built out of molecules it is very hard to build out of molecules there is a reason why that we don't we don't build our robots out of molecules because we don't know how to do it there's a reason why we use cameras that have lenses uh uh that are that are made out of glass and silicon rather than than chemicals because it's very hard to do this this even though we have ubiquitous examples around us in one another you you have to have the polysaccharides polypeptides polynucleotides and lipids these are the four classes of compounds and you have to have the monomers that make them up that's the the language of living systems but molecules don't care about life molecules have never been known to move toward life ever they don't do that unless there's a biological entity like a person pushing them along to try to do this and still even then we've not hit it there are three basic approaches to discussing origin of life in my opinion this is my opinion we force reaction chemistry toward life and it's not working professors echin Moser Sac Benner southernland chrishna Murthy and many others including the older work of Professor Cronin have been trying to do this or you avoid reaction chemistry because they realize it's not moving toward life and more re this seems to me to be more recent work of Professor Cronin but he'll speak for himself in a moment I suggest that we do not yet sufficiently understand reaction chemistry to see its projection toward life there are enormous scientific Mysteries yet to unfold they may be a 100 years 200 years away but we still have much more to learn about reaction chemistry before we can start seeing molecules move toward life Professor cronin's older work he tried to make aigal peptides by some Prebiotic like root it was a bunch of garbage there was nonsense there and and uh uh same thing with saccharides because this is hard you tried to make these sugars we made billions of compounds it's very hard to do this you try to push molecules toward life they don't want to go they don't know to move toward life they have no brain they don't want to evolve toward life there's no impetus to do this professor cronin's newer approach to describing the origin of life he avoids the use of chemical structures and chemical reactions the language he avoids the language of chemistry that is because to date Prebiotic reaction chemistry fights against the path that moves toward life and I think he's seeing it and I think Professor Cronin is more and more coming around to my position and we'll see that Professor Cronin now speaks of the general primordial soup model saying it's a good model with no rationale for what makes it good and what chemistry is involved I don't know if you know the primordial soup model where you have a pond and in that pond there some molecules lightning strikes molecules form higher order structures those form a cell and those cells now form higher order structures and you get creatures living in the pond and then those creatures evolve and they come out of the pond that's the primordial souit model you know where that came from you think that came from Mil Yuri no you think that came from Darwin no that came from the Babylonians and out of that pond where life came from came their gods as well you want to take those it's nonsense he'll speak about bubbles he'll speak about salad dressing Le cron said the most important thing he does in his lab is salad dressing he talk about flipping coins playing cards Royal flushes the birth of stars and planets anything but specifics about reaction chemistry cuz reaction chemistry is really hard to push in this direction Direction has the public been misled on the origin of Life claims well onethird of the public and this is 80% of this public had a college education some level of college education uh uh college degree onethird of the general public thinks that scientists have made made frogs in their lab just by putting molecules together and built frogs 2third of the general public think that Mo that scientists have made bacteria in their lab a bacterium both of those are false in case you didn't know well because there's mixed messaging from origin of Life researchers Jack Sac who many of you know Professor Sac he said in 2014 told a search for Life Gathering of 50 on Saturday afternoon in New York that he expected to make life in the lab in 3 to 5 years and more likely within 3 years that was in 2014 how's it going Jack I mean it's it's a rough thing it's hard to do it he never succeeded uh uh dear COV again another har professor said that he thinks it'll take 5 years and not three that was in 2014 Professor Sac then said in the University of Chicago in 2021 he said we've not made the RNA he he he said this what's in italics here but it's basically he's not even made the RNA yet in a prebiotically relevant manner it hydes too rapidly that's the bottom line that's the truth why does he tell the experts this and the general public something else Steve Benner former har professor and now director of foundation for Applied molecular Evolution said to a YouTuber in 2021 I suppose most of them many of the big paradoxes in origin of Life have been solved yet uh in a professional meeting in 2019 he said chemistry is actually hard to get to work the molecules precipitate the molecules hydroly the molecules decompose and so it's very much a constraint that you have to deal with it's one goddamn problem after another that's the truth Professor Cronin in a TED Talk in 2011 said what I'm going to try to do in the next 15 minutes or so is tell you about an idea of how we're going to make matter come alive after the talk Chris Anderson said just a quick question on timeline when uh you believe you're going to be successful in this when Lee Cronin hopefully within the next two years that was in 2011 so so we're about 10 years overdue and maybe Lee is going to tell us about this life today uh is it any wonder that the public has been misled on the current state of origin of Life proposal who per chance might have misled them what's the real state of the origin of Life research here's the underlying theme of what you're going to see Prebiotic chemistry as we know it does not move toward life nobody has shown the method to make these ananti pure molecules you need carbohydrates amino acids nucleotides lipids these four classes of compounds nobody has ever made these compounds with the the absolute stereochemical Purity that's needed using Prebiotic chemistry never been done nobody has ever shown that the mixtures found in meteorites or Interstellar space could be useful for synthesis because you might have 1% of the mixture being the compound you want and 99% other things for those of you who are synthetic chemistry you can't do chemistry like that without enzymes it doesn't work even even John southernland a big origin of Life researcher says the yeah these meteorites don't deliver anything that that uh is useful because you need more constrain chemistry nobody has solved the mass transfer problem this is a big problem how much material do you need to go from a all the way to Z the cell how much material you go through a synthesis you run out of material you got to go back and make more starting material you've been going along now 400 million years making stuff now you've run out of material well go back and make more in the beginning uh I can't go back because I never kept a laboratory notebook I'm just a dumb early Earth how do you go back how do you do this nobody knows how to solve this problem nobody has shown the Prebiotic route to polymerization you can't hook the the the the uh sugars together to to make carbohydrates you can't make polypeptides because of the side chain problem and you can't make the polynucleic acids because of the 25 linkage and the branching problem nobody's made the polymeric systems that compose us in a prebio prebio Prebiotic roote the carbohydrate just think of it six six glucose molecules six glucose Mo molecules how can you hook them together a AA a AA for example no you can hook them together in over one trillion ways because there's all these different tentacles of how they can hook up over one trillion ways to hook up just six glucose molecules they have open form closed form they have the anomeric system and so we don't know how to do this you get the wrong polymeric structure the cell will never get a chance to live every disease has a carbohydrate problem associated with it nobody has solved the polymer stability problem when dealing with the single molecules time is Enemy Number One and Martin Noak helped me calculate this on the back of a of a menu about a year ago and uh uh so so if you have a mole of RNA it has a halflife sa of 100 days which is pretty gracious to give it that's 2400 hours in room at in water at room temperature what if you have one RNA that just happened to form just happen to be form to be just right how long would you have to use that that's 2400 divided by 600 because it's 600 M that's 4 hours you have 4 hours so if if the right molecule happen to form and to polymerize you'd have to have very pure monomer or else you could never get a 600 and now all of a sudden all the excess materials have to come out and you have to get all 20 Amo acids diffuse in from where we don't know it's an early Earth it's a puddle someplace all the and and they have to diffuse in in in high Purity you have 4 hours you can't even do that in a laboratory how's that happen on an early Earth nobody knows when you're dealing with one molecule stability is a huge problem you say peptide lasts longer you it'll last 13 days if you have a 200 M peptide and nobody saw solve the problem with this this this functional group side chain this kills off all polymerizations of of uh amino acids to make polypeptides nobody solved that nobody has solved the code problem what's the genetic code how do you come up with the code for life you have to have prescribed code to orient all these mus nobody knows where that comes from Lee will agree he's talked about this what's the code where's that come from nobody is shown that you can deal with with a a low and antomic excess molecules and that somehow Evolution they purified no because we know from a new phenomenon that's only about 20 or 25 years old kyol induced spin SEL activity this is one of those Mysteries that pops up only been known for 20 25 years we used to think enzymes are all hand and glove it's steric effects that that dominate this that's only half the story the other half is that every chyal environment acts as a spin valve and selects the spin and that's why in nature you can have two hydroxy radicals can come together to form hydrogen peroxide or they can go to form ox oxygen plus two protons because they're going down a chyal environment we never knew this there's many other Mysteries that we're going to have to solve before we can get this thing solved nobody's explained the requisite protein folding you've heard about protein folding how does a protein fold properly without other proteins working on them that that are these folder proteins acting on them just even a 100 residue protein has 10 of the 95 possible confirmations if you're over 10 to 40th there's not enough time in the universe anymore so that's the 11th 1.0 lethal 2.0 is a problem where you have What's called the interactomes this is the non-covalent just the association interactions between molecules and a cell information travels down that through electrostatic potentials the estimate for a single yeast cell of just the protein protein interactions not protein DNA not protein RNA just protein protein is 10 to the 79 billion this is a crazy crazy big number totally inaccessible in a Million universes it's inaccessible all of that information goes from one cell to another when it divides and divides and divides and that information has passed down how do you come up with that we don't know nobody has ever made any of the higher order structures needed for the simplest cell that say oh cells were really simple back then really simple how simple were they well biophysicists have calculated this of the minimal complexity you could have in a in an initial cell you had to have DNA replication repair restriction a basic transcription machine and all of these things and the cell wouldn't be able to make its own any of its amino acids you need 20 amino acids coming exogenously you know how many of these origin of Life researchers have made in a Prebiotic fashion zero none nobody's ever made any of them how close could we be nobody's ever come close to synthesizing or even suggesting how to synthesize the simplest of cell in a modern laboratory let alone in a puddle you can't do it in your modern lab so how did it happen in 100 million years which is from the cooling of of the earth after the late heavy bombardment to where we see life or even if you you can take any chemist any biologist anybody and say okay we just deconstructed a cell we have a bottle of each one of the components of the cell here's the polymer so you already have the code can you put this thing back together in the cell for me please h no you can't nobody knows how to do this and you Peg them down and you say can you do this they won't answer you they won't answer you and remember no answer is an answer in itself I put for 10 researchers these 10 re researchers Lee Cronin being one of them I said could you could you just solve these five I put before you just five just make a poly peptide not even a poly peptide make a dipeptide just to hook two peptides together make DK a 90% yield in Prebiotic fashion make a polynucleotide make a polysaccharide just two glucoses hooked together with the right chemistry for me what's the origin of specified information and could you assemble a cell you answer any one of those five I will shut up for the rest of my life concerning origin of life and the problem with it I'll leave you guys alone I sent it to them I said you got 60 days to solve this just solve one of them and I was shut up none of them sent me anything except Lee and I'll show you what he sent me Steve Benner said oh I could solve that in an hour I said why don't you come to Harvard you and every one of these guys was invited here to this event to speak none of them took it except Lee Cronin Steve Benner said no no I don't have time for that I said Lee I will fly to your Institute in Florida you come and tell me he said ah my health and my time won't permit it I'm flying you uh so Lee Cronin wrote to me he says hi Jim I don't agree with the questions the emergence of Life Goes Way Beyond these narrow questions I don't agree with the questions well you you you just had a paper I showed on peptide synthesis you just had a paper on sugars how could how could questions one and three be irrelevant I mean you have papers on that and then and then uh then he addresses questions four and five information and sell so he goes on Lex fridman's uh podcast and I want you want you to listen to this because Lee sent out a tweet that says origin of Life research is a scam Lee our next speaker sent this out and here's what he says when Lex asks him about this he says the scam is if we just make RNA we've got this let's now make another molecule and another molecule how many molecules are going to be enough I mean Lee is sounding like me I mean he's complaining about this origin of Life research and go back to Craig Venter when he said I've invented life not quite he faximile a genome from an entity and made it in the lab but he didn't make a cell he had to go back and take an existing cell that had a causal chain all the way back to Luca which is the which the first Universal common ancestor cell I I I think Lee has been born again he's just talking just like me I mean the all these problems but it's remarkable that he could not make a cell from scratch and even today synthetic biologists cannot make a cell from scratch because there's some contingent information embodied outside the Genome of the cell so there's lots of layers to the scam so Lee and I are in in coming in great agreement Lee came up with a paper he just published this is one of this is one distributed to you in the journal Nature assembly Theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution and it got a lot of press groundbreaking news Theory of Everything unites physics and evolution assembly Theory bridging physics and biology to decode Evolution and complexity wow well then other articles are now coming out this one written by by uh um evolutionary biologist a new Theory linking Evolution and physics has scientists baffled but is it solving a problem that doesn't exist one person wrote uh and after multiple reads I still have absolutely no idea what this paper is doing another wrote I read the paper and I feel more confused I think reading that paper has made me forget my own name Professor Cronin has said that Jim tour clearly quote clearly doesn't understand information I confess I'm not an informatician but Hector zenil is so Hector zenil is at both Oxford in the Allen Turing Institute and at Cambridge and he wrote the eight fallacies of assembly Theory just a few quotes these authors only a few months ago announced that they had achieved the Breakthrough of making time physical using assembly Theory a claim that nobody could understand now they claim the same Theory can explain selection and evolution unifying biology and physics and explains all of Life Assembly theory is a weaker version of one of the simplest algorithms known in computer science Huffman's coding scheme and counts for repetitions in strings of data a form of trivial version of Shannon entropy though unlike assembly Theory Huffman actually counts correctly the senior authors of assembly Theory claim that they are persuading NASA to incorporate their algorithm in its program to detect a in life if it cannot pass the basic tests on Earth or on paper with their Theory indicating beer be ER as the greatest life form on Earth it makes little sense to deploy it elsewhere Professor Lee Cronin he's abandoning in my view I don't understand the information but I do understand chemistry he draws this picture there's no idea of how these molecules hook together the free energy is positive on these couplings by 8 to 15 K per mole and how do you deal with side chain reactivity you see these lines I don't understand the chemistry now he abandons chemistry he shows these little stick figures is this a carbon oxygen Bond carbon nit what's the chemistry there's chemistry behind this you can't abandon chemistry so I predict that LE Cronin a synthetic chemist will not discuss anything tonight about chemical reactions leading to Life's origin I predict Le Cronin will remain silent on polypeptides polynucleotides polysaccharides these three key polymers that build us and cell assembly resorting to calling those narrow questions are not worth even addressing most importantly will you the audience leave tonight understanding anything more about life's origin based on what Professor Cronin says and so I'm just wrapping this up here stop the overambitious projections regarding the state of the field don't abandon the basic chemical reactions and concede that we are not yet sufficiently understanding chemical reactions to project them toward life there's enormous more that we have to to understand to close on a congenial note I agree with Professor Cronin I agree with Professor Cronin origin of Life research is a scam thank you okay excuse me excuse me I I just I just wish Jim told us what he really thought uh our next speaker has the giant bullseye on his back Lee um it's it's the cost of going second that's I'm sorry this is the way it is well Lee Cronin is a professor of chemistry from the University of Glasgow who's in town for chemistry thing and Lee we really welcome you please let's have a hand for Lee Cronin just give me a second to get hooked up so thanks for the ation the Dr. Lee Cronin’s Opening Statements organization and um thanks for setting out your stool Jim I think what I'm going to try and do um is is actually making give a talk that's explainable to our audience okay so I didn't come here to kind of make radical um uh kind of claims and and think about this in some kind of uh kind of uh argumentative way but let me address a couple of things the paper being garbage is kind of without without actually digging in explaining is probably a garbage statement to make and we shouldn't do that in science we should probably say well perhaps this is lacking this does that mean I can go early all right that that reminds me to put my clock on so thank you for that because I don't want Dave dragging me off and so what I'm going to talk about is and I I am I will take Jim's challenge that you are going to understand what I'm talking about that's the point and the point is to have a civil discourse I thought I was going to have this one turned on because I don't want to talk into this one so can you turn this one on please is that okay thumbs up or thumbs down otherwise I'll stand there great and so I really want to make sure that we understand what the problem is right I am a chemist I also do computer science in my spare time a little bit of Robotics want to be physicist IST want to be math mathematician but on my table there are a couple that might keep me straight so what I'm going to talk to you about tonight is how life got assembled or why we think that the only way that life could come into being as it were naturally is through a process of assembly I remind you the heliocentric view of the universe that Galileo kind of had built popularized a instrument that helped us look in the universe new way and I want you to think about how we need to think about things differently and Jim's right we we mustn't think about what happened as a historical experiment take our sun this is our sun imagine you could look up in the sky and you could only see our son and no other star you would obsess where did it come from why was that mass why did that flame do this why did it do that why did it blink but really we need to understand not the origin of our sum but how stars form in the universe and how indeed if you look up in the sky and if you're lucky enough you'll see them dying and you'll see them being born so one of the things I am really trying to do is step away from this historical argument because I want to make progress in my lifetime yes I admit two years is little bit too quick but Elon Musk has been pro pro um promising self-driving cars for ages now and some of you might drive Teslas okay so we will make progress and yes we are not perfect in science we do make claims that that that need revising but the thing to think about is do we exactly say how the Sun got its mass its precise composition got started or do we ask how do stars form what is their temperature what is their color what their Luminosity how they die now let's tackle the next argument all the problems that Jim talks about yes we can solve polypeptide formation yes we've got a board here we can go up and we can talk about the chemistry but we need to talk about constraints now Jim in the panel debate I will predict will talk about how what a great chemist he is and use the kind of humiliating way that chemists can occasionally say did you not remember that I'm going to tell you how I can profess better than you I'm not going to do that I'm going to tell you clearly what the problems are and bring you along with me and if you can agree their problems and we can solve together then we'll make progress together I don't think origin of life is a scam that was a joke if you can listen to the podcast and it's not just a joke it was meant to prompt people to say hey origin of life has made fantastic progress shac in RNA Benner in looking at complex systems POA suland all these people but I think they're thinking quite in a in a very particular way and there's a broader picture that was what I was meaning and it's really important that we have a wide church when we're pre Paradigm if you go back to the time of electricity when the volters and the ampers were having an argument when Edison and Tesla were're trying to work out what the best way to distribute our electricity it was not a clean progress it was lots of argument but I'm trying to keep my voice low I guess your eardrums have already been R rattled a little bit but where did the watch come from where did the cell come from how do we explain these phenomena there's so many problems I think we're looking at it all wrong what we can see look around you look at your glasses on the table look at the cup look at the knife and fork these objects did not spring out randomly they were fabricated they were fabricated by human Engineers who evolved on planet Earth everything you look around you is a is a product of evolution and selection there is no magic printing press right if you go all the way back to if you know if we if our reality God forbid got destroyed in some way and we had to recreate the Silicon the Silicon Fabricators would we go back to the Stone Age no but we would have to recreate the machine that made the machine that made the machine that made the machine that is not a problem it is an opportunity and one of the other things I should say is I'm a I'm an amateur Jim says I'm a bad chemist I'm an amateur philosopher because I want to learn how I think and I really think the problems are a sign of where we can make progress and I've come here today not to argue with the with Jim and to make grand stand but just say hey there's some really problems we should try and solve them cuz from new problems CH come new ideas and new progress so we really need to think about this carefully the telescope and the microscope I mean the telescope is a good example the microscope was horrifying when when they were looking at these little creatures and what was going on and it was scary right and yes we can be scared but we are moving into a transition here and there is this great perceptual filter that when new technologies of perception emerge merge they allow us to see more of reality now assembly theory is just the first step now okay Jim you put up some you know you picked a handful of complaints about the paper but the paper's one of the most engaged it was only published on the 4th of October had 2.3 million interactions on Twitter had had a couple hundred thousand downloads has provoked discussion and the thing is it could be quite wrong but maybe it's less wrong than some other approaches that is science I'm not coming here telling you that we've solved the problem I'm coming here saying we need to look at the problem in a new way to make progress and I think that's an important thing to say so let me give you one of the first things I'm trying to say it looks like evolved objects are bigger in time than in Space the thing is when you see the glass you know that that glass had a lineage of glass blowers going all the way back and it went back to humanity being immersed so when when Jim was saying well I've just made this think about time no I'm just saying things took time why I think it's not relevant to look at the origin of life is I want to accept that chemistry and I am a chemist chemistry does not take billions of years to produce a life form Evolution takes a long time but the reaction chemistry seems faster so there's a quandry here so I figure that in my lab maybe it's not two years maybe it's not 5 years but we should be create the conditions where we start to selection and evolution before biology and all I'm trying to say to you today is if we weren't invented by some well if we're not in Elon mus simulation I he would be nicer to me than this right I mean okay you guys be nice but I would if we're not in Elon mous simulation and we're not some other fictitious creation then there is another process that's going on and we are pretty good at coming up with with fundamental new explanations when we find problems so problems are something we should embrace not shout at relentlessly to say Everyone's an idiot we need to think well a problem how do we solve this what's the best thing we can do this is important there is a problem of what it exists and of course I think I have some ideas but I think there's all these people working in origin of life in chemistry in good faith who are working really hard and making progress they're making progress in a relatively narrow confine because they want to ask what is what is the chemistry required to make RNA how do we get to Pure sugars how do we get to chirality that all the hobby horses Jim has talked about and the answer is constraints those constraints come from the cell ask yourself how many constraints do you need to make something happen this is what we're going to talk about for the next 12 minutes there is a problem of what it can exist right I would argue there isn't just the existence of satellite if you went to a alien world in you found Tik Tok you might found a new intelligence I'm not sure how intelligent because I'm not sure how good Tik Tok is but here's the thing that I first really big kind of point I want to make is that although space is Big combinatorial Space is bigger and the reason why I think life might have emerged in chemistry is that the first time the universe was able to make combinatorial things was in chemistry could we do it in the part in the fundamental particles that give matter no there's 25 particles you don't have much to play with can you make life on the sun it's pretty hot all the memories are gone so it seems that chemistry and kind of contingency that we would say are pro required for evolution some dependence on the history can be nicely start to kind of um born out now when I came into this field as a chemist I just said hey are there molecules that I can detect in my lab that I know have come from bi a biological lineage made by humans made by made by cells made by bacteria um without any other information and I developed with my team a new approach to Counting those bonds Jim talked to the graphs in the nature paper saying these are you know this is just nonsensical they're graphs mathematical objects they're not schema I didn't say in the in the legend they were they were reaction diagrams that's a massive misquote and a disservice writing a paper in nature requires that you interact not just with the chemists but all the other really smart people want to understand what you've done as well as the generalists so dressing it up in this kind of hierarchy of you don't know what you're talking about and intimidating you into not thinking it's not the way I do science and I suggest we should not do that here we should ask ourselves what are the questions so space is Big it's pretty big commentor space and chemistry is bigger what did the physicists do did they shout at each other well they do actually a bit but they did something they did something super cool they basically said well we're going to basically search for the origin of the universe in the lab we're going to build a atom smasher we're going to look at the fundamental particles and I think that's Atlas I think it's Atlas yeah yeah and we we found the higs one of the most amazing things we could have done now think about this few years ago using Lio we detected gravity waves those waves were produced about 2 billion years ago so for us to detect those I think those I think they were black holes that collided that event we had to have an origin of life like you know human culture and intelligence blah blah blah technology IBM probably build a det detector that then detects something that went like a couple of billion years ago that's just amazing that we were able to use our technology to delve back in time that far so can we do something in chemistry does that require a shift in our Paradigm that isn't shouting about where is that circumstantial who did it you know it was you know it was Professor X in the garden with a chyal peptide that spontaneously emerged Maybe not maybe let's ask the question in a little bit more of a falsifiable way so this is what we're trying to do and I make you know I I don't um I'm not ashamed of not knowing the answer why would I be here tell you know if I didn't know the answer um it's a very important thing that we have to try and figure out so what we wanted to try and do is say can we search for the mechanism of selection outside of biology in the lab so the second big thing I want to say today that Jim says I'm going to confuse you no I'm going to say hey either the watch made it self randomly God some other designer or this watch was made by one process and one process alone so selection and evolution the watch maker was evolved were they not yeah good right the watch maker learned to make watches in stage different sophistication of watches going all the way back the lineage of watches the sual you with me we can go back so the watch didn't just appear it required information in our culture teaching people mathematics how to make me how to how to machine metal how to basic calibrate there was a longitude prize in UK UK we need to make sure our boats go around the world and come back we don't care about whether God made the watch we just want to come back from the East Indian Trading Company with our tea thank you very much okay we want to understand it was a technology technological driver so what we want to try and do is make a planet simulator you know I and I W wandered into the field relatively innocently and I like making provocative statements to get people to think not to get people to shout at me until their horse but that's okay that's fine each to their own so but before we do that we're like life is what this is one of the best memes from that nature paper like so there's like this guy showing it to to Donald Trump going you know H evolutionary biologist what right now and this paper was quite interesting because it did cause questions people did get angry but don't worry Jim it wasn't just Hector evolutionary biologists were unhappy um physicists were a little bit unhappy Prebiotic chemists were unhappy um computational comput computation unhappy but then when the creationist got unhappy and said wasn't creationist enough I was like my job is done take a day off um and that was probably a little bit of a low joke but it was like I needed I needed some laughs so what is what are we trying to do with with this paper what does assembly Theory actually do so assembly Theory tries to tell you explain how selection is the driving force that produces Proto Evolution outside of biology selection is the force that produces the star well who what well if you think about it how does our star form you have hydrogen this hydrogen collapses under Gravity increases increases increases and you get detonation now explosion sustainable star so that was the that were the kind of the forces that produces fusion in our universe right magic a few hundred years ago in fact the first reason so biologists need to teach physicists a few things right if you go back to Darwin and the Origin of Species he realized that actually he needed more time than was allowed for evolution and Kelvin at the time Kelvin was a Glasgow University Professor calculated the lifetime of the sun it's about I don't know 6 to 8,000 years he was like but then he realized he had so he just dismissed the evolution it's like nah but actually what he should have said is oh gosh when I estimated the life time I made the Sun out of coal out of coal clearly more time was needed and there's this entirely new energy source we had no idea about this is when problems don't match up this is what gets me excited as a scientist because I can see the discovery is about to come so let me try and teach you assembly theory in a non- patronizing non shy normal way of saying let's have a look so assembly theory is actually very simple it's about the possible formation of objects um assembly pathway start with a basic set of building blocks and allow joining reuse it's about like you give a child and say right start here let's just take Abracadabra I'm going to give you the letter A B C D and R please make Abracadabra on a graph a graph by using the letters one at a you going one at a time and you can reuse any memory on the graph so you go a b r a so you make Abra and when you go on you're like you've got Abra on that graph you've made it you somehow a memory of Abra and then you go down and you make Abra C and you're like oh I've made the Abra before I don't need to spell it out again I just add it on so it's not compression like Hoffman encoding it is actually built okay uh from understanding you have an object at a beginning and you do things and events happen and there is a memory trapped on that line and that is assembly Theory it's not hard okay and you can do that again with graphs that look like molecules these are not reactions they're graphs you can do it with blocks now I'll introduce the assembly equation you'll have to read the paper the paper is actually I'm very proud of the paper it was a great team effort we tried our best to make it legible you will be a to spell your know your name at the end if you read it it's not that I trust you you know it will be fine the assembly equation is this quantity called assembly is actually you can calculate to tell the amount of memory that basically has gone into or amount of selection that's gone into making a thing it has three things I should tell you about it is the complexity of the object and it is this this is the next simple thing if you take an object cut it up with a pair of scissors in your head you can cut it up to basically um minimize the ReUse on a graph Abracadabra just imagine that put it on a graph you then count how many copies of of the object you have and the larger the number of copies and thear L assembly index the more you sure it came from Evolution that's the basic premise now the other thing so Jim was saying oh it's not not correct we can actually measure it this is when I was like oh we can physically measure it without any mathematics we can go and do molecular spectroscopy we can do thing called infrared shine light on it and count the number of bands we can do Mass spectroscopy cut it up into blocks and we do NMR three independent techniques we're able to measure assembly index so apparently we can't find life and NASA doesn't like it well well we took a load of samples including dipeptides foros MRI eoli we took gleno I like that whiskey a lot near my house arbag beer yeast taxo um we took these samples and even samples at Nasa double blinded they didn't tell it's from life or not and basically we cut them up in a mass spectromet and counted the number of parts that's all we did blind samples and what we found is that basically everything that's from life has more than 15 parts so we found a way of detecting life on Earth at least and it started to play with this thesis so we now start to have a detection process for life so this means that we can start with a problem and then come up with a theory an experiment and then get an explanation this is what we need to do in science it may not be the right explanation and yes I'm trying to put myself out there for criticism because we are not going to make progress concrete concrete um experiments and concrete questions that get concrete criticism can get better or be killed that is the process of Science and that's one of the reasons I'm here to be killed well no hopefully not die but you know start a new Theory after the old one yes we're building robots in a lab we're building robots in a lab yes I'm a chemistry professor and I'm building technology that will not only make new robots make new drugs and we are making a chemical search engine for assembly and yes it's not just with the molecules we should be not molecul right it is about salad dressing as well because the way that life is formed through embodied objects that survive in the environment I think Life Starts macroscopically objects are survive persist in time and then go out the other way I need to finish right now this is if this is your Lego guide to assembly Theory it's pretty simple and I thank you very much for your time and uh pleasure to be here all right no food fights at the table okay uh we'll we'll now be served dinner and uh your facilitator is going to be helping you maybe to help you make introductions to each other try to be as brief as possible otherwise you'll spend the whole time just introducing yourself to each other which maybe you know is okay but um uh and then remember the rule one person speaks at a time at the table otherwise this whole room will suffer under you know too much stress not that it hasn't had a little stress to begin with um and then let me let me forecast for you where what's happening um you'll have dinner for until about 30 and then around 30 this Podium will be pulled away six chairs will be up here for a panel and the panel is meant for um let's put it this way we normally have round tables six to a table uh I'm sorry six persons to a table and uh that's what our Norm is when we're in this room we have to go with a an actual Round Table can you imagine that um so what would it be like if your table of six had everybody read ahead of time had everybody studied this subject matter and maybe two experts were involved so Lee and Jim and four other people will be up here uh having a discussion about things and it's it's sort of a chance for you to say huh if I want to come back and be at a round table and and see it go that well which I predict it will go that well then you'll have a taste of what that means but in meantime with all the really hard questions that everybody would love to ask and answer um sorry that you can't do that here but their email addresses are available for you to uh ask them tough questions so let me just stop talking and it's time for dinner enjoy oh oh that's e Dinner and Discussion Evolution right I mean that's that's really what I've known since uh I was born in 1960 and uh only because somebody introduced the idea to me that what if um what if evolution has his PL or or challenges it never occurred to me that it would so it it is just something that I picked up in college and and began to consider stuff and a particular book maybe Lee you know this book uh mystery of life's origin reassessing current theories by Thaxton Bradley and Olsen was the first book that really said to me what what chemistry the issues are in chemistry which was really a jolting little piece of information so I've just carried an interest in it all along that's why that's why we're here tonight because I have an interest it I'm Peter C I'm a philosopher and I'm not a philosopher of science although I'm fascinated with science I think my default philosophical position is always common sense not that it's infallible but if you can't translate it into Common Sense language there's something confusing about it so my favorite something conf something that's needlessly confusing uh my favorite philosopher is Socrates Aristotle uh Confucius both of whom are very common sensical uh and William James founder of pragmatism translate this into something that makes a difference to your life and experience that's my the questions I like to ask well we know who you guys are yeah so uh would anybody like to uh I I want really want you to know this is just like a dinner conversation just among polite people so you should just take your turn be ready for the next one whatever else it means it means you don't have to ask every question that you know of Le or Jim it means you can comment on what Larry said instead or what Mark said or what Melissa said so uh that's the end of the rules okay who would like to begin the conversation you know there was something you said and I I wasn't sure cuz I don't hear well um when you were introducing yourself about uh somebody else saying that what Lee does is Trivial yes in in um in my world that's sort of uh the biggest put down like something is Trivial it's it's almost like uh you know when a profess when a student asks a professor a question and the professor doesn't know the answer they'll just say that's trivial and then it makes the student feel like it could or you know the answer what it's a put down way it's it's an awful put down so I'm I'm wondering how you why you started with that I'm wondering whe as as a journalist as a journalist I'm I'm interested in why you started with that yeah yeah I'm I'm curious why people are debating just like what Lee uh talked you know uh in the podium that so many criticism on his papers and evolutionary biologists they they think that you know Natural Selections is all there is like what Lee has published is actually rediscovering natural selection itself like even like even before it was the existence of the living molecules of everything and probably maybe they they see life you know the complexities of lives are so enormous and I don't know Lee like I would like to ask you about metabolisms you say that this is there is assembly Theory and you say that it it is simple from simple building blocks until it reaches complexities but within biology itself there's a metabolism right some could be simple like mean for example it's CH4 it's like it's simple if you I don't know the assembly what's your question my question is like what is your take on biological metabolisms like it involves so let me answer that so because you're layering in so assembly Theory as it was built was built as a life detection um um metric okay and what you need to do is get rid of false positives I'm breathing out CO2 right now that's by genic CO2 but it's too simple to know the difference between CO2 from a volcano and CO2 from me however what does life uniquely do that nothing else does and that creates very complex objects in abundance be it taole cell phones culture so that's a first starting point now the metabolism is not the view here the constraints on the metabolism are super uh complicated as Jim would put out they don't just emerge there's a lot of information in there assembly Theory explains how you can count that when the biologists talk about is Trivial the biologists have a category error they say that um they don't understand complexity outside of biology because they assume that biology is a solved problem the origin of life however a lot that I would agree with Jim the only thing I agree with I think in a way but is a it's an unsolved problem it's not an insurmountable problem and we need to understand the physical process as it g arrived that complexification so the framing you've got I think are loaded the assembly equation is super simple it says go and find an object that is complex by a very rigorous definition that's simple um and and find EX instances where complex objects are made in abundance without biology and that's what we set out doing and no one has yet managed to do it only objects have come from biology so that is something very profound number one number two um you can measure the amount of assembly now I'm talking for too long so I'll say one sentence more and then stop imagine you have a box where you have one eoli cell and you have some food and all the food is a low complexity just simple carbohydrate not very complex and the eoli eats that food and the what you if you look at da DT the assembly rate of change of assembly does this so and then all the food is gone the UK coli stop metabolizing but suddenly all that simple stuff has made complicated so the assembly in that box has gone up so assembly is something different to entropy where entropy tells you about the about disorder and so this is why we know we're on to something quite interesting and we're using that in the laboratory to search for selection where we have a a round bottom flask where we have all the mess that we were talking about rather than constraining adding in we say okay how does selection occur in inorganic chemistry to give constraints in molecular networks that start to become complicated does assembly then refute Universal entropy I mean I think entropy Universal entropy is about you philos philosophical speaking well physics you require two things for entropy you either have the aeric hypothesis or you have the counterfactuals like a parallel universe right um we kind of say it doesn't refute it it just explains ultimately that the second law is a natural conse consquence of what the universe is doing to the in selection so we've kind of gone the wrong way around there are a series of errors that we made going back to Newton but I mean that's way out of my pay grade like I'm just like can I make a measurement device to look for the emergence of selection in a chemical reaction where we haven't put any information in is assembly identical with selection then so I would I don't know if it's identical with but it is a great proxy for and we are what the difference between the two well because so there so um selection darwinian selection as you were pointing out is not just about increasing complexification it's about Fitness in the niche and I would say that um Fitness in the niche doesn't just get more complicated sometimes you get more simple you building redundancies you can take things out right and our cultures do this all the time our economic system does this all the time and we're just at the beginning I don't yet understand ramifications but assembly Theory can be applied to cultural Theory sociological Theory and also language with m the emergence of language using assembly Theory to understand what is the historical path that languages IM uh emerged and then the entropy argument you can use to explain what would happen if there wasn't any selection you just had disspation well if complexity and Consciousness evolve in parallel ways if usually the more of one the more of the other complexity and sorry Consciousness and complexity well that's a different that's a big leap no no no I think complexity I yeah Consciousness was going is an emergent phenomena from in the same way that selection is an emergent phenomena when you have chemical bonds no chemical bonds that's why the chemist is really Central to this Enigma which is kind of a way where I would like we have to chemical bonds give us the heterogeneity in the universe for the first time okay I'm glad I'm glad you disagree with that because most people don't I think they think that Consciousness is the most complex thing in the universe well I mean I don't I don't think it's a it's a category error to measure the complexity of a Consciousness the complexity of a brain but by assembly Theory no brains are absolutely identical morphologically have some identic I think it's I'm really as an experimentalist I need to measure things um and and and falsify if I can't measure and falsify I'm talking garbage as Jim would say right I have to be able to do those experiments M so at the end of the day I'm really happy to be open because if I'm wrong I'm mean get a lot of feedback very quickly about how to correct it you have a lot of people out there with magical arguments that are too complicated for the average individual to understand including me it seems it seems to me that my taste of this roast beef is much simpler than the roast beef itself it has no parts I mean I that's two different categories you know it is I haven't tried the roast beef yet so I can't comment but truce wrote for pages and pages and pages about the taste of something so it can't be that simple I think you could probably write roast beef questions about it are not simple oh just a description of the taste I'm not sure taste is simple in Christian Jewish and Muslim theology God is absolutely simple but the questions about him are unanswerably complex so I have a question for Jim since the round table on science and religion I want to understand what the stakes are for you in your argument because you were pretty animated right and so let let me if you entertain a um a hypothetical right let's suppose you go forward 3 or 400 years you have a time machine and you meet Lee's great great great however many great grandchild who's also working on on uh the uh emergence of life and that that person tells you that actually you were totally correct that Looking Back Now looking back you know the ideas we had about like the chemistry of the uh of the emergence of life now while like hopelessly simplistic you needed all kinds of new ideas and but they also show you their machine where they can like you know at one end like they pour in whatever some sugar or whatever some whatever simple things you meant to pour in and at the other end you know the day lady you get cells and they can like take you through through and they you know they can describe the the whole process for you it's like entirely convincing that it could have emerged like this on on on Earth do you feel do you feel Vindicated or do you feel like uncomfortable because of your religious views oh I I feel so so I I didn't inject any religious convictions in my talk that's true okay but nevertheless you have some oh I absolutely do but I just wanted to put that out there but no I feel totally Vindicated I feel totally Vindicated because I think that there's phenomena that so the the molecules in my mind are fighting against moving toward life and you really push them push them you use all sorts of Ingenuity in Lee's lab he has all these robots adding in certain orders and certain times and certain chemicals and you keep pushing them toward it and it's so hard to have them move toward life so just recently just in the last couple of days diar here at Harvard has used kyal induced spin selectivity to help him to get crystallization to to enhance chirality in some crystals this is using this new phenomenon you see that hey maybe there is a route to really enhance chirality through a new phenomenon that wasn't even around when I was in school so I think there's many new things that we're going to have to learn before we're going to be able to solve this problem because many smart people have pushed into pushed and pushed on this and it doesn't seem to have advanced not only we're we're further back because the cell is progressing further away from us at a faster rate so if somebody can duplicate life that's great just like when when uh when Watson and Crick published the the the the genome the the way a genome stores information that doesn't make God Less in my eyes that makes them all the more magnanimous that's f just to be clear at the beginning you said at the very beginning of your talk you said that you think we will figure it out yes but it was a very brief statement so just to be clear so you do believe like in the end there's a naturalistic explanation for the emergence of Life yeah I think that we're going to see just just like we we I'm using the analogy of the genetic code where we're going to go oh Lord that's how you did it that's how you did it that's how information is stored in in in the cell you know prior to that if you were if you were 200 years ago say you were in in 1750 and you asked somebody about genetic code for them to have said oh well we've pretty got pretty much gotten this figured out you know if parents are tall the kids going to be tall if they're short the kids going to be short that does a disservice to it to make it to trivialize it in that manner and and uh but we didn't have the tools to really do this we we we we got crystallography and we we able to begin to see these things so I don't think we even have the tools to do this well yeah that's my answer okay well then if molecules don't move towards life by themselves yes and life somehow evolve from molecules then the missing X Factor must be either natural or Supernatural it must be either the environment or a Creator could you speak up a little bit what could you speak up a little bit Yeah if as Jim said uh molecules do not spontaneously and by themselves elves move towards cells then since we know that cells came after molecules some other Force than the molecules themselves must have moved them now that Force must be external to molecules and it must be either outside of molecules in the environment or it must be some Force outside the universe right I mean I must correct us we don't know that everything on Earth is pretty much touched by biology in some way we don't know that every planet in the sky around it doesn't life doesn't emerge eventually I think we're taking a very parochial View and I think that we've that I think there are some missing some quite fundamental missing um scientific phenomena that we're jutting up against and I think the the and it's quite interesting you can see back in the history of science where this has happened again and again and again I I'm really Jim I don't really know what your agenda is it's a bit weird if youve because on the one hand you're so angry and aggressive against just the process of normal science right it's like you're saying oh this is garbage and that's an idiot and that's a lose they don't know anything that's the process of science right we come up with models we refute them in a civil way I think we make more progress by doing in a civil way and then we go oh I don't know why who your audience is I came here tonight hoping you weren't going to get up there and shout and and and and misquote and I'm and I refused to get in that conversation I came here in good faith what I would say is there's something super interesting what's going on and the reason why I came here tonight wasn't to address your ludicrous claims um was more to say hey let's let's get let's let's put our best foot forward for new scientists out there people are skeptical people want to learn more and find where the new interesting problems are in science because um the framing is a bit wrong we knew there was lightning we knew that we could capture electricity we knew static electricity we didn't know anything about it same when we came to the antibio Revolution and and there is a lot of cultural artifacts we have to deal with but so I'm kind of puzzled um but you had a question which maybe but I just like put it out there because what I want to do with the panel interview I'm only going to take part in the panel interview if we actually really put away our our you know our our kind of let's let's just make statements for claims and actually ask well what is interesting what what do you find confusing um what where are the new problems because we'll build a Community right in physics we got a lot of particle physicists together they had to work together because it's so expensive to do those experiments right um but anyway I'll will stop there but I just think there is a a more nuanced we should criticize absolutely your right to say no I don't accept that that's that doesn't pass my test scientifically but if you do it in a way that doesn't make people scared to engage why do you think n of those people engaged with you they didn't engage engaged with you because you were it sounded looked like a ranting of a person that when we're not wanting to have a discussion and so and I know you a little bit I know some of the chemistry you do it's great so I came here to kind of de de amplify that and have a more nuanced conversation I think I think we want to know I'm kind of interested in what you're doing in your lab toward this problem and why why you think these people who I many of whom I know are scam artists because I I'm pretty sure they're not yeah and I I think they're real scientists and very good scientists I I don't know about Lee but I don't know him but I'm interested in what you want to happen so I don't think that anybody is setting out to scam anybody I I I don't think that anybody's out to scam intentionally scamming people I think that what happens is when you say that we'll have life in the lab in 3 years when we have life in the lab of 5 years that's a disservice to the field when on the other side you get into a professional meeting and you say I can't even make the RNA and there's a long distance between the RNA and life it you're a scientist right you know that I may say I'm going to find the top cork in 10 years and it took me 27 I mean it doesn't mean that I'm lying or scamming or it's not a disservice so it's also not a disservice in nanotchnology gym where you've made claims about what you're going to do in your lab and you haven't done those you know you have produced patterns arguably they've gone somewhere but you haven't done the things you said you were going to do does that make you working bad faith yeah so so you're make you're making all good points Lee what I think is that you're coming around like when the in the interview that I read from Lex fridman and and you know I read a long paragraph and you said even more that I think is really quite accurate when you start saying okay I make a molecule I make another molecule I make another molecule and then what we just keep making molecules this is exactly what I have been saying from the people from the groups that are doing these synthetic things that I was just say science is about disagreement I'm not saying all the original Life Community are in agreement they they are disagreeing but that is the process of science you're kind of trying to say that something else I think that's relatively inaccurate it's it's fine to in fact we only make progress by disagreeing right I would say some people when they're doing they have a certain set of um um things they do they are putting in constraints I want to understand where the constraints come from that doesn't mean what they're doing is wrong it just means I have a different Viewpoint okay so I don't mind saying that as a as a Layman who's not a scientist um it's helpful when I hear Jim describe how we didn't know that we needed to know something that we found out just recently in other words we didn't we a lot of things we don't know about how to detect how life would have begun that the gold post is actually farther than we thought I think that's a phrase I don't mind repeating I I think when we discover that the gold post is really farther a lot farther than we thought I thinkative to the to the general public as opposed to as opposed to I I know it's just just a second um as opposed to we're getting closer it seems like we're getting farther away it is so much farther away than we thought go ahead din yeah so I think the clue is I'm having a hard time hearing you yeah so I think the clue is Jim's statement that says like the public is being misled and what do you think about that I mean like what is at stake about the communications of the origins of life because I got complaints as well from scientists that so many hype about about the origin of life and it seems like every research coming out it is the answers of the origins of life and it seems that you have problem with that and what is at stake so so I G I gave you these statistics of the general public how grossly wrong they are so we as a community have put forward something that is grossly incorrect information that is grossly incorrect that is starting in textbooks from the elementary school level and the primordial soup model is taught not just into college but into advanced college classes that model so things things are not nearly as as things are not nearly as as as comfortable as you might think and so so I think we do a disservice to students if we start saying that that uh uh this is how life came about with there's no no indication that life has come about this way you've written there are textbooks on molecular transistors that you have built and conject they never worked so should we take those ideas out of the textbook science is about putting out models that then get replaced with better models after we look at the fundamental problems so we have better explanations no one has said the primordial uh model is the way it happened that it's it is well grounded there are many things in textbooks molecular Electronics nanotechnology that have not come to pass Melissa Melissa's obviously no no no I'm just I was just want to say you frustrated here here dig was a Dave I'm conscious there's a question here as well you had one minutes what would you put in the high school textbook he want ask on this top I actually been long enough so now I have two questions but the first one has to do with um the the introduction of this notion of selection and selective processes into physics and chemistry um I just finished reading about Hawkings last um uh theoretical work and it's interesting that he and his collaborators concluded that the best model they could come up with that looked like it was going in the right direction which is called uh topown Quantum cosmology essentially recognizes that there are selective processes that that diagram that you you showed there is not just random stuff but at any given moment in time um there are forces that select for certain outcomes certain directions as opposed to others which means that in a sense biology physics in chemistry cosmology is importing this notion of selection I didn't have time to put it in 20 minutes but everything you see is a product of selection so there's four possible universes there's a Comal Universe where just everything is just right just a mess everything The Big Numbers you talk about come there is the physics Universe where you apply the laws of quantum mechanics and whatever maybe spring Theory there stick with quantum mechanics and you have building blocks there's no contingency this is like the block Universe where everything is accessible simultaneously why computationalists like it and and eternalists like it then there is when when you have contingency in the universe where when you actually allow memories to be basically embedded and then there's What You observe and all I'm pointing out is we do not observe a comtal universe we do not observe a commentor universe with physics we observe contingency because we don't see commentor explosions everything on planet Earth that's been through biology is a product of selection this glass me the silverware and it's and its selection it requires the following things random events happen and the thing doesn't persist in time it is erased it dies anything that Pro that can exist in time has to be copied in some way whether it's a meme or a piece of RNA or the photographs on your Thum drive to keep them in play that is something very critical that we're not seeing that goes through chemistry and and actually the um um thermodynamics actually favors this because everybody talks about equal uh um equilibrium thermodynamics that's the theory we're all taught and not about pran's work and non-equilibrium thermodynamics which says simply that if you have enough species to start with chemical species you're sufficiently far from equilibrium which describes pretty much all of the universe that we we know and you continue to import free energy like this planet or then it is inevitable y that ever more complicated regimes evolve I me and this is mathematics it's it's it's it's been proven and it's been verified at the simple chemical level with with various kinds of reactions that simply do that set up that experiment so that to me says like life is inevitable just wait long enough because we started that's what fre and my paper did explicitly the thermodynamics of it you know favors metastable States not the stability that you guys are looking for but metastable states that have a differing um uh lifetime know and and this is key it's all selection well nothing lasts ultimately and the same is true for any individual life or for life itself and it goes way back before the cell ever became you know so life started way back I I can't I I don't know I don't know how you can argue for this the both of you but I don't also don't know how I can argue against it I asked pet I asked Peter can you blow a hole in this please I just the idea that there's going to be expected lack of chaos that things are going to get more complex you take the local view of non equilibrium or you take the global view that says the universe is either one let me no I can different ANS in just two minutes it's like the invention of zero once you see it you can never let it go so existence is something that's really special objects that exist in time are not random because they have a they have two lifetimes so when an object is produced it can either just Decay back over a certain Lifetime right and it's just gone or it has some causal consequence in the future which allows itself to be replicated could be a molecule or some other and it keeps going in time so that's not an either or because because dying is a causal consequence so so but it has no causal consequence in the future because the information is dissipated back this is super important it's super subtle how can anything make a difference let me finish the this is really this works in the laboratory it works mathematically it works in prene models let me say again you have some noise just say some noise and that noise can somehow so you have this environment the environment is killing the noise so there are three things here the environment noise and a thing this thing the object persists for some time it has several options it could Decay back into a noise and therefore have no consequence it's just noise again low complexity or it can go above the threshold and act on the resource the noise and pump that noise into more stuff and as it keeps going but you know what happens in the end and this is how the first molecules and first molecular networks um um complexified in a gigantic mess because the mess wasn't a mess the mess was moving towards existence because the mess that Jim talks about he doesn't look at over a long enough time scale and this is all necessary and deterministic there's no contingency so um the contingency emerges with selection in the environment yeah right not before simultaneous kind clear threshold yeah and in existence is the proof that's right you know it's you can see it all the time you've got it we embod in a sense and this was one of Hawkings arguments we meaning the universe around us embodies the entire history of what left led up to that it's the part that survived that's right the rest the random stuff the thing that dissipated isn't there wait until we do an experiment that shows it right that's what I'm excited about because now we understand right and again another reason I came take it in good faith big problems let's come up with Big Ideas have them open everyone can poke at them um and then we do something new and our ideas shift right and you know what's the worst that can happen it's all well I mean I wouldn't call it garbage that's nonsense not quite correct not the best whatever you want to say um but we move those experiments further you know I don't know what's going on here but I I did a I I I read a lot of David Deutsch who I think is really at the right interface here a lot about what Galileo did and I'm no Galileo but I do think that there is a there are segment in society that that want to cause the god of the gaps and I'm sorry Jim I actually think you're just trying there's a God in the Gap so I've looked at it very clearly you say on one hand I accept it's going to be solved and on the other hand you so vociferously make arguments about hey I hate the way science works when you do that yourself in your own science be at nanotransistors new conductors new catalysts so you kind of move the goalposts and I disagree that it's the problem is getting bigger and the goalposts are moving in the past that's not what's happening that is Jim is very very nicely paying a slight of hand here by saying this and this and this missing the key shift that has to happen in the discipline but the other thing about science and technology is quite frankly we have a long history of predicting things as being closer than they are um you know uh uh Fusion electric production has been just around the corner 10 years from now for the last 50 years and so the fact that that's that that's the case that nothing like you want to see to be convincing hasn't has happened in the last 70 years is like no cause for concern I mean how long did it take us to figure out the structure of the atom and then to discover that we were wrong well I would say more than that I mean just the length of time during which like our civilization has had the idea that you could deduce things through radical thought is only a few hundred years it's actually shocking we've managed to get as far as we have I yeah yeah so what would happen what what holes would be blown what serious holes would be blown in this theory if we discovered a couple hundred years from now with space probes that life existed only on this planet only only on this planet how could we discover that there is no way you can't discover a negative true you can't discover where the open I think one thing one thing one thing I'll say quickly and just quickly I think is really interesting is that Earth is the biggest place in the universe commentor that we know of cuz we can imagine and make things now it might be that life is so special um when it it nucleates we there's lots of life elsewhere but so different commentor we'll have no way of telling it from the background I'm hoping assembly Theory will help us get there but this is non-trivial the fact that we don't see the great perceptual the great the the great filter is a perceptual filter not a physical filter well here's a very stupid question sometimes stupid questions are the best ones uh if life exists almost everywhere and intelligent life eventually evolves in many places in the universe why haven't we been contacted yet what I just said because of combinator it's going to be so different you're not going to even know in so far away yeah I mean it's like we wouldn't recognize life for or maybe it only persists over you're talking not just about life you're talking about technologically advanced life right right maybe that persists only over very small time scales or wouldest it right um maybe in fact we've already encountered evidence but we don't know it because um you know things from outer space Interstellar space have been striking the Earth and and a lot of that has never been studied so who knows so may I ask a question of both Jim and Lee you know what might because if you save it for the panel which we're about to have so um we can why don't we um are you okay to make the move really Randy it's great that you have a question that it would be great why you start I I would normally give this job to Peter but but I'm going to give it to you any whatever you get to start and Peter goes after you okay and then Melissa all right let's move move to the chairs okay there's the six of us that are moving and three of you staying okay okay and don't don't manipulate your microphone for gentlemen I just blew up my microphone ladies and gentlemen all Panel Discussion right now I know we have a high ambition for this panel to prove itself to be the best table for the next 30 minutes that's a high ambition we've already been talking about some things maybe we killed off some uh uh dead dead ends that we didn't really want to go to but we might return to some of the ones that were more interesting um uh we're we're one two three of us uh who get to ask oh essentially we're the Layman asking the experts about things but in in fact we can comment ourselves too okay so I'm sorry we're not taking your questions but again you could always reach these these people by email so to begin we said that we would let Randy Isaac uh address both Lee and Jim with a question that he had thank you Dave and thank you for the chance to ask a question and glad to see everyone here and I'm particularly grateful for JN for Lee for being here and to discuss this topic the question I would like to ask is is the following uh this is a round table on science and religion as you told us yeah and rather appropriately uh you pointed out and both Chim and Lee pointed out that religion was not involved in the work scientific work it was science only which is great however I think the vast majority of of our society and most of you perhaps are interested in the implications of uh scientific study of the origin of Life what are the implications on religion and so I would like to ask both of you Jim and Lee to comment on your personal opinion on what do you think are the implications of origin of Life research on religion I can go first if you want go ahead I so I think it goes broader than religion it's not it's about culture and I'd like to expand it to say we humanity is interested in what we are what life is we want to know if we're alone in the universe we want to know if there are aliens um we want to know what's the future of life on Earth so I think um it's not just about the religious implications about the implications for humans as thinking beings understanding the place of life and how special or common we are in the universe so I can't I'm not an expert from thinking about religious point of view but I do detect when I talk to people there's a strong wish to understand have meaning understand the future of our culture and going forward we have all this technology human RAC is by some degree doing brilliantly by others degrees doing badly so I think I like to discuss this idea about what will happen if we do we are successful in the laboratory in creating artificial life or alien life and if we might actually come up with a key to unlocking the detection elsewhere what will that do look at all the um the kind of uh excitement with the UFO files coming out of the Pentagon look at all the discussions that people have this this yearning for more kind of understanding about what life is is and I don't think I think it goes beyond religion I think religion is a great way to express that yearning but I don't think it's confined so I would say that I I thought a lot personally philosophically that we can it's not just about having a a a defined religion allows you to ask this question I think it opens up a bigger narrative and which is one of the reasons why I wanted to take part in this because I don't think we should be you know separated from it thank you okay well for me I mean my faith in Jesus Christ means more than me than anything I love him so much and from what I understand of the Scriptures it is clear that all things have been created by Him and for him you don't have to know him in this sense to do science many great scientists have have no faith in the Lord at all but what it does is it gives you a greater appreciation I think that the scientist has when they behold these things that other people have never really seen or been able to ponder before in all the generations that have gone before us uh to think that these interactions are occurring and so for me if when when someday we figure this out how life can come about I think it makes it makes the Lord all the more magnanimous in my eyes because it's oh this is how you did it this is how it could be done and uh uh I just don't think we're near that today and I don't know that we'll discover this in my lifetime but for me it's an excitement and and I i' I've had these occasions before in my life when I when I see things I remember we were working on something that we called the synthetic brain and DARPA asked us to call it something else this was years before they had their synthetic brain processed because they thought it would be bad press but we were taking molecules randomly in a in a box essentially on a on a chip and programming it to do something useful without knowing the molecular order and I remember my son was about 3 or 4 years old he came running to me and I thought how did you put that in that brain I'm trying to make an anate an orgate a half adder or something something simple and there's all this complexity in biological brains and so it it makes it all the more exciting for me to to look at a biological construct and to say how was this put together and so it's exciting for me if I can if if if I can see this happen and we don't really work per se on on origin of my life in my lab I mean I I certainly look at it and critique it but uh I am longing for the answer this whole thing of kyol induc spin selectivity I saw from Rah namon one of the the discoverers of this about 20 years ago when I was visiting him in Israel and now to see that that what it's beginning to opening open up and this is why I said there's going to be many more phenomena that I think we're going to have to discover it's it's quite I think it's quite wrong for us to think that we understand reaction chemistry and we've got to you know it's got to fit within this reaction chemistry that we understand molecules are going to have to somehow move toward life in much easier ways than we're observing them doing in order to to have this thing happen and uh um I'm looking forward to the phenomena because every time I see something new I walk out I remember walking out of Ron Nan's office saying wow Lord you are amazing for this material so I I think it it's it's great for for Faith to see all the things that God is discovered just because I can look at a leaf on a tree out there and know that there's a magnesium atam sitting in a porin and I know light funnels into that thing and you eject an electron and get photosynthesis and the poor guy on the street who doesn't know the science can't get that appreciation it gives me an enhanced view of of of the glory of of the creation of God may I have a follow-up question here Jim actually really have to move on to you you say on your website other people that you do not agree with the intelligent design conclusion yet your work is widely used by The Discovery Institute and many other creationist organiz organizations as a as support for the view that the failure to have a naturalistic origin of life helps to support the idea of a Creator could you comment on that yeah well I absolutely believe in a creator for sure and I say that on my website and and in six days God created the heavens and the earth and the Sea and all that is in them I don't know what the length of the day is if if we can qu quantify it based on on our perspective today but but uh so I certainly believe in creation and I I'm very explicit on why I don't don't uh support the the intelligent design directly I say I'm sympathetic to it it's just that I don't have a tool to assess design now I know people are now trying to come up with measures of design I don't have a spectroscopic tool I don't have a mass spec tool I don't have an analytical tool so I hold my colleagues to the same thing that I want to hold myself to show me the data and so if I can't generate data that says yes this is the signature of an intelligent design I am not going to support that in the sense that yes this has been intelligent design designed because I don't have a metric for it I say I'm sympathetic to it but I don't have this metric that's why I I I don't I don't Embrace intelligent design although I'm sympathetic toward it but you allow all of your work to be used as evidence it's not a matter of allowing I mean how can I stop it I mean people take my videos you've given permission even if I say no no you you oh permission to be published that as part of the evidence oh if people take my written material and publish it in their papers I can't restrict them it's published so I can't say no no no no you can't publish I have no that's that's up to them so it's I've never given permission and I've never denied permission we're going to pause for the sake of the audience I failed to introduce other people besides Jim and Lee so Randy Isaac was had a career leading up to being vice president of research for IBM before he retired and took over asa3 org look that up and Melissa Franklin is a physicist at Harvard and Peter CRA is a philosophy Professor from Boston College so would one of you like to follow up uh with some questions I'd like to ask Jim a question which is not directly relevant to the material tonight about chemistry uh lee uh sort of criticize you for saying you really want a god of the gaps and I I think you don't so my question is suppose that we had we discovered some very natural explanation of what was previously thought to be a miracle uh which is possible uh in the book of Exodus it's described in one chapter as a miracle God rolled the Red Sea apart and in another chapter it's described by a natural explanation the wind blew the the thing apart uh how do you distinguish what's miraculous and Supernatural versus what's what's natural uh you know uh um I wish I were a better philosopher that so that I could talk about this intelligently um certainly the miraculous is something that that doesn't normally occur that doesn't mean that that but certainly we we have many things that could occur that don't happen routinely so distinguishing this not a miracle I'm sorry you don't normally care none of us is each of us is an exception we're we're we're not clones so how can you use the frequency of occurrence as a distinction between the natural no that that's a good point I mean the problem is I'm talking with a philosopher and you guys can just dance around me I there there there's no way I can really compete Peter oh I was going to say the same thing to you the comment I'm making here is like in science you use the problem to then set up uh to generate new theories that might explain that problem and do experiments what Jim keeps doing is just say there's a problem right and I'm and I think if you're just saying a problem and then saying rather magnanimously lat and say well you know I think it's going to be solved I think there's something odd going on there it's really important if we're doing science in a in a in the way that I I think is going to be productive problems are really interesting problems we shouldn't be finding problems and shouting each other say there's a problem that this doesn't work you know Fusion it's impossible because no one stabilized the plasma you're all idiots you're all liars you made it all up no they just haven't worked out how to stabilize the plasma yet how does how does that impact on religion were you asking about the God in the gaps argument about problems right so all I'm saying is saying that they're a problem and then without coming up with a a way of tackling that problem leaves it there as something that some someone could assume as a God in the Gap argument and I find that to be unhelpful M so the God is in the Gap no there are gaps in the theory there's a God in there is that the no it's like presenting problems without any any without actually finding those people who who actually working on those problems I think it's a great disservice that Jim says all these problems all these origin life chemists are actually working on the problems in good faith okay I have a question is that okay it's okay with you Jim you're now head of n NSF and you have five $50 billion do to spend in the next 10 years on origins of life and you get to decide who gets the money what what do you want to happen because I I didn't I know what you don't want to happen but I don't know what you do want and someone was talking about wanting something I think that was you yeah okay so so let me and and I don't want to have any argu I don't want to hear anything about what people yeah I don't I I don't want you to say as an answer and this is not fair because I'm I don't want you to say I don't want those guys who are doing bad science I want you to say what you do want what positive could happen with that $50 billion so I would not make that decision myself I think it would be wrong to make that decision I I think that that we would have to to convene people from the community and outside the community to make that assessment I would never designate and and use that I mean and this is this is actually more realistic than you might imagine I mean this is a fictitious thing that you've put before me but certainly in my own University people have have said you know if Jim tour goes into this institute what's he going to say with the people in evolutionary biology well I would never make that decision for my colleagues myself I would I would put it before the community but what I would say is that what have people been trying for many years that have not worked uh lee lee has said repeatedly that I just keep saying no that doesn't work that doesn't work no what I have said repeatedly is there are things that don't work that repeatedly they've made one small molecule after another sorry I really want to hear and I'm sorry for interrupting you but I have ADD so I think it's okay I I have a card that I carry normally I I show to people but I want to hear something positive like if you were in charge you would build an amazing laboratory and these are the kind of this is the way you would move forward that's what I want to hear about well well you already know what you want to hear what all right you just you just said it I mean no no I'm asking you for your ideas I'm sorry so so I would say that that we we have to approach this differently I don't know the full approach $5 billion is a lot of money $50 billion over 10 years is a lot of money I mean origin of life is a is is a you know it's a boutique community in in the in the sense of of where research goes so even 50 million would be a big thrust for that program but uh um what I'm what I would say is okay here's a new phenomenon you have kyl induc spin SEL activity dimar ceso just came out with a paper where that has really enhanced crystallization so you have a new phenomenon that is really pushing in in showing how how uh um chirality may come forth in small molecules that is a big Advance let's push that let's expand upon that and see how that might turn into homity of longchain molecules into polymers and so now you've got these longchain polymers uh but I don't think that we know enough there's there's not enough scientific evidence now to give us a basis upon which to really build a firm hold to solve this problem I think I mean some people say that it's right around the corner and they think that that's beneficial to say that it's right around the corner and I say it's not wait a minute let me finish I say it's not beneficial to be saying this all the time it's not beneficial to the community because if you keep telling young people we've got this thing solved they don't want to go into it it's a problem if we say we've cured cancer we don't we don't have to deal with this anymore who's going to go into it so that's that's something else that I would say we we shouldn't be projecting that what do the people who give you the $50 billion want to happen to it Ian you don't you don't give somebody $50 billion and say do with it what you want right so so so these These are ultimately taxpayers and I'm not sure taxpayers ever have much to say about what happens to their tax money guess it you know I mean how often do we really get to to you know I guess all we can do is elect represent atives that we think represent us in light of the fact that almost all the money goes into the stem courses and not the humanities I doubt that the answer to that question is we want to do pure science and just satisfy our curiosity about how life originated well let me if I may answer the question right I have some so I think actually there is a really interesting intersection with the humanities right because Humanities were produced by selection right our culture is produced by selection in a different way in a very similar way so what would I radically disim well forgive me for a second let me explain and you may have your mind changed or you may decide you're not so I'm going to put forward a testable hypothesis first of all what would we do with the money I I think it's right you can have peer review but let's say I have 50 billion for a day um I don't think origin of life is quite a boutique area I think there's a lot of good synthetic chemist who are doing things at the edge of cancer looking at complexity and really trying and also in the in in uh gene therapy but there's overlap so I think one of the things we want to do is break out of our culture sorry out of our discipline only um um silos origin of life if we call it is not going to be solved by a chemist or a computer scientist or a biologist but it is going to require us to actually look at what is it that is the difference between so I would always my fun thing is like physics is kind of low memory so if you if you if you got a short memory memory ADHD you can do theic it's just a few equations in the way you've got it on your teach then if you're like well I've got the periodic table I'll do that a bit I've got that nailed then there's biology and suddenly all hell breaks loose because you go from biology to intelligence and abstraction and yes you do get philosophers no origin of life no biology right no biolog no no biologist no philosopher no philosophy so we are connected all the way back but the kind of causality changes radically once you get people you get choice that is something that we is is materialistic and it's really interesting choice is not materialistic it has a materialistic basis I'm I think so I'm I'm a materialist and I think that the brain everything that goes on in your brain can be explained materialistically and I think it's interesting that we have so let me just finish the last part about what we do with the money so you need to break down these silos and it starts it starts at school because chemistry and biology are producing radically new disciplines for inventing vaccines and producing Composites and making materials that compute so we really need to challenge that in a new way and by breaking down these boundaries we're going to develop new technologies and it isn't going to be a boutique oh we're just going to make wouldn't it be great if I can invent an inorganic life form that could fix CO2 right and use sunlight and put that CO2 in a way that it's I don't know fix it into diamonds it's not going to be metabolized and take all the CO2 out of the atmosphere right wouldn't it be great if we could understand how to form planets in our solar system by building new minimal the only way you're going to get to nanotechnology that is um the JY thinks about ironically or not ironically is by making evolutionary system that can self-regulate and self-repair the we are at the precipice of so much new science and new technology it's really exciting it's not Niche we it is about asking the question and bringing those new disciplines together and that nature paper you could see the Collision of all the disciplines I knew something interesting was going on because everyone's like what do you arguing about words and no one's disputing the science no one's disputing the fact we can measure assembly so the answer to the question what's the 50 billion dollars for is not science but technology not not not no I would say we would establish a new set of disciplines I would I mean I have my hobby Hall what I'd love to do right but that's just what would you spend the money on I would basically look at I would build new Earth simulators look at the interactions of geology and and organic chemistry that hasn't been done before for what purpose for looking at selection and looking how on planet Earth how pre Prebiotic chemistry the Prebiotic soup interacts with our Earthbound geology and how the geology the commentatory explosion in Mineral space interacts with commentor explosion in chemical space and generates biology is that to satisfy your curiosity or is that to improve other people's lives by technology I built the computer which has just born a $50 million company um because I wanted to solve origin of life and I built a new technology a programming language for chemistry that's allowing us to discover new drugs and make new materials I didn't say I'm want to do this technology Blue Sky science gives rise to new technology the laser wasn't invented because someone wanted to uh had this to give simple answer to my question is science worth while for its own sake even even if there's no technology absolutely and it is but it is incumbent upon us if a taxpayer spends money and I take money training people and I think Jim's the same he's got a large number of patents and things that come out is incumbent upon us to say wow we've invented this Tech we we've done this science which seems like it's got application as a technology and we should do everything we can to make that Circle go around and I love to answer ask questions I would like you to give me money to answer those questions in return I make sure that we do something for society okay we're going to have one more more question from either Melissa or Randy and then uh lee you'll follow with a two-minute final word and then Jim will final with a two-minute final word actually before you guys do it I'll have a final word then you guys will do it so three final words three final words so Randy or Melissa Franklin would the would either of you have a one last question you want me to ask a question you go ahead I really liked your question you were pretty tough I'm going to have about softball is that okay yeah yeah yeah I don't know Well everybody's so angry I just wanted to be how did you like the roast be no no I'm not going to do that soft butall I'm kind of interested in uh maybe this is way off topic but I'm sure you guys can bring it back on topic um I was really interested in both of your uh talks about how you talk about time and how time comes into this idea of um origins of life and we have this like very simple idea there was nothing and then there's something and then it took someone said well it takes a really short amount of time to things actually happen and but actually is that should we be thinking in a more complex way about time I mean chemical reactions take a lot longer than thoughts or maybe shorter I'm not sure which I'm not a chemist but there's a sense there's a sense in which chemical reactions take time selection takes time thoughts take time how could we actually be more interesting about this and less angry by thinking if we you can agree about how time comes into origins of life and so that's a question for both where don't you go firstly no I've talked a lot so I I mean the numbers that I put out there are interesting in the sense that we don't have enough time in the universe to do many things that are needed I mean just for a protein to fold we don't have enough time in the universe but when you say that I didn't understand what you meant you mean what that okay life can't happen randomly is that what you mean no I said it took it takes beyond the universe time for it yeah for a protein to fold yeah and because of that we have all these folded proteins that would have to occur before you could ever get life so life can't exist in our universe of a certain of time so there was some other influence upon them what what is that influence that is a phenomenon that we're not familiar familiar with or it's something that we're familiar with but we don't recognize that it can happen but we but you don't think that's God that's not one of the possib fundamentally all things have been created by Him and for him so yes it is God but God often puts this in a material istic sense and allows some some something within our universe to act upon it you know so so again 200 300 years ago they attributed oh that's God and now we know well that's you know that's DNA structure that allows that so it it doesn't negate God I mean these two are not exclusionary and and uh uh then you have on the other side of it you have molecular decomposition because any molecule you make the things go bad and if you make one molecule I'm telling you we you don't think about one molecule you really don't every time you swallow water you take one swallow of water you're swallowing 10 of the 23rd molecules of water this a huge huge number when you deal with one molecule and one molecule stability I thought a lot about this because of our molecular Electronics program because you have one molecule acting as a switching device and uh these things don't hang around very long so you if you have one molecule that happens to be right that's coated well for something that thing doesn't stick around for more than hours or maybe days depending on that molecule and that's it so now you have boom you have this very short time so that's really interesting this is exactly where I wanted to get to I think you're very interested in time your arguments are a lot about time you need to find something that makes the time smaller so that is selection and so Jim has set up the argument really nicely so I I will talk to to so I think the protein folding in is is a a category error and it's a bit like if we take that table here in front of us and just photograph that table and it's and you know thanks for the staff and doing putting everything out right it's been disorganized a bit some people had something to drink and I say right what's the probability that table can just form without the ACT people of eating and drinking and being laid out and the glasses being fabricated of course it's greater than the lifetime of the universe but yet that table is there now now what happened Harvard have it habit but there's a really important Point here that proteins do not fold in isolation and when Jim put talks about reactions the reactions when they're decomposition selection promotes um molecules that can exist for a long enough time because you have decomposition no decomposition no death no death no life no Evolution so you for evolution to occur you need selection and death and so what happens when you get back to the time I really like your time question because with the con conventional physics doesn't really recognize time as a thing other than just a you know a coordinate but what if time is a little bit different right in the block Universe right let you ask me the question so love the answer so I think the the universe before life got going was basically Timeless physics doing its thing something happened as yeah this is really important there's a some new mathematicians new area of mathematics new area of physics we're looking at how time starts unravel our notion of time and that as soon as chemistry could start recording remembering the past by Bonds in that commentarial space then suddenly the real a selection clock was started and that's how this all happens so you have this progress in time yes you can burn the molecules away and you go back to atoms and dust you have to start again but it's super interesting that what we see in the laboratory and what I predict we will see at sometime in the future is that we will see evidence for selection I got to interrupt here call yourself a materialist and yet you say that uh uh molecules have memory so that's I did I did not say that I said the so the process that gives rise to the memories it's selected by their existence so you it's it's complicated chemistry to go into but I'll give you a couple of examples now just so there's it's you have networks of interaction so molecule a reacts it's not going to make any difference how it works it's what it what it is it is material it is material and it's super important to understand it's not magic okay so let me just one second you have reactions that can propagate in time and they can cause that their they can have the molecules can self-replicate and these replic these replicators contemplate themselves and they can they can make Roman archers right the Roman Arch you needed to have a wooden arch template and it's arches on arches on arches and the way we get to proteins is not this big commentarial Space by scaffolding and you start really simple and then that produces a more complex artifact that survives in time and builds these Archers look at our society we're building archers in language in energy and technology and arguably one of the most complex things that we we take for granted the M3 processor designed by Apple made at in Taiwan I think is one of the most complex artifacts if you found an M3 on the moon you would either have to say God just put it there cuz why not or the somehow just magic or somehow Humanity got there and left their Mac on the moon The Little Prince there is that as well I think I should should no no no you it was it was to get just one from the two I know but I just want we're out of time we're out of time no you're not out of time because I just want to say that one thing is it's time people do think about single molecules a lot okay and physicists do not think simply about time that's that's not true just because I know you're very you're very you're very worried about people saying things that aren't true okay maybe what we're going to do now for just a minute I'm going to say uh uh funding like mules are not self-replicating and so um uh if you're wondering why we haven't had more round tabls lately it's because uh we need to find matching funds so Templeton will say oh you raised a million from them we'll give you a million here oh you raised a million from that we'll give you another million so that's the process that we're in as opposed to uh just lazy and didn't feel like doing this we really don't we want to do this you know all right don't we want to do this for the camera yeah yeah yeah okay you're going to get an email tomorrow sometime asking you to review the Roundtable please write something and return it to me U now this is the very last part here first Lee will have a minute to give a final word and then Jim will have a minute to give a final word and we're done you said it was two minutes I like you take two to one if I told you two you'd take 20 so okay go ahead leave first all right first of all I'd like to Dr. Lee Cronin’s Closing Remarks thank everybody for listening to us today and thanks to Jim for kind of and dve David for kind of bringing this together I think the the the way the reason I came here wasn't to defend origin of life or Prebiotic chemistry far from it is to basically say that the we have to point out the problems we have and these problems are not catastroph Ric failure they are evidence of success that science is progressing there are new ideas coming assembly Theory may be fantastic it may not be but if we're not bold and we don't actually make out come up with new ideas that can be demonstrably built upon destroyed and made better we are not going to be doing science and I think very strongly that we need to be we need to have critical discourse about what does this mean what can we measure and what can we refute and how we can bring people across and go across this divide in science I want to develop new ways of doing science I want to go across I'm not just a chemist I like robotics I like I want to learn some Physics if you're more interesting in that that's great maybe some mathematics as well so it's incumbent upon us to basically bring all the energy from Humanity who wants to be involved in not exclude them by being overcritical and basically saying haha You' failed you're a joker clueless ridiculous don't exist rather than well well done that's a good idea didn't stand didn't stand up to scrutiny here here's what how you failed here's how you might do better this is the only way I know how to make progress in life and I'm hoping i'll exist again tomorrow and can fail again and I will fail slightly differently but it's really important in science and in our culture and in the humanities when we're trying to make when we're trying to think about where does meaning emerge where does purpose emerge is that we do have this debate at this boundary science and religion for me are like this there two circles that really really should never be twisted but they almost touch and I don't like it when religion uses science as an argument to attack and vice versa I think we can coexist and we can learn something from each other because you know what we are exploring we are exploring our Collective humanity and we are curious and we want to basically have a better future and have a bit of fun along the way take it home Jim so I I apologize if I Dr. James Tour’s Closing Remarks came across is angry I really do I mean I am passionate about everything I'm passionate with my grandchildren ask me a question and I'm just so I wasn't angry at all so if you thought I was angry I wasn't angry at all I'm not angry at Lee in fact uh I'm happy that he came I worked very hard to get you to come here and uh uh I'm glad that you came and I'm not angry at anybody I don't I don't think that scientists that work in origin of Life are disingenuous I don't think you know many people have asked me oh are they doing this I me Christians ask me are they doing this because you know they want to somehow exclude God I don't know any scientists that wake up in the morning and think how can I exclude God today through my work how can I prove that he doesn't exist that that's to me I don't think that that I don't know any scientists that do that they they may not think about God but that's fine for them so I don't think think that they're intentionally doing anything wrong I do think it is wrong in an area to say that we've got this thing solved when we don't have it solved when experiment after experiment it's becoming harder and harder for us and so and I and I have seen changes in the publications of my colleagues when they're writing their papers on uh when they talk about the origin of Life they're a lot more measured now in their claims and in what they say I'm sure that you would agree that is a good thing if you tell young people that we've got this thing solved it hurts the field because who wants to go into it and uh and and so I'm not upset with anybody I'm not angry I am passionate and and uh I apologize if I hurt anybody's feelings apologize to you Lee if I hurt your feelings about this but uh um uh you know I I'm not sure how I can cetain this but but but but uh feel sorry for my wife I mean think of what the poor lady's got to go through but I I've been married 42 years and and uh and and you know we're together and we're happy and we we we're in the same home we have four kids together so it it couldn't be all bad and it could good good night