Beyond Evolution: Unraveling the Origins of Life with Stephen Meyer and James Tour

Peter Robinson: Two questions, how do higher forms of life evolve from lower forms of life? Charles Darwin answered that question, or at least thought he did. But the other question is one that Darwin never even attempted to answer. Where does life come from in the first place? Scientist and philosopher Stephen Meyer and chemist James Tour, Uncommon Knowledge now.

Peter Robinson: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson, we're filming today in Fiesole, Italy. Stephen Meyer earned his undergraduate degree at Whitworth College and his doctorate in the history of science at Cambridge. Now the director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, Doctor Meyer's books include Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, and The Return of the God Hypothesis.

James Tour received his undergraduate degree at Syracuse University and his doctorate in synthetic organic and organic metallic, I can't even say what this field is in synthetic organic and organometallic chemistry, from Purdue. Now a Professor at Rice University, Doctor Tour's areas of research include nanoelectronics, graphene electronics, silicon oxide electronics, and carbon research into what the rice website terms quote, environmentally friendly oil and gas extraction, close quote.

Doctor Tour has published more than 1000 peer reviewed research papers and holds several hundred patents. Steve and Jim, Darwin, a couple of quotations here. As I mentioned earlier, there are two pieces to Charles Darwin, and the second piece is evolution, his elaborate theory that random mutation and natural selection can lead to, or did lead to the creation or origin of many different species.

Now, that we won't go into it, agree with it, or disagree with it, it's an explanation, it's a body of thought, it's a kind of discipline. But the other piece, the first piece is this, Darwin simply assumes that life exists. His theory calls for evolving from something that's there in the first place.

Here he writes in a letter to a friend in 1871, if and what a big if, we could conceive in some warm little pond that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes. That's Darwin in 1871, more than two decades after he published on The Origin of Species, and he's still wondering how life might have originated.

Now, Richard Dawkins, contemporary Oxford zoologist quote, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. But of course, Darwin only made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist if you believe this is a question, but it's my surmise. You can only say that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist if you believe that prior question, where does life come from in the first place?

Is either trivially easy to answer, or in some basic way doesn't matter, is that correct?

James Tour: Or it has been solved, but neither of those three conditions have obtained. It's not trivially easy to solve, it hasn't been solved, and it is actually quite an important part of the whole naturalistic story that Darwin and modern Neo Darwinists have attempted to tell.

And you're right, there's a distinction between what's called chemical evolutionary theory, which attempts to explain the origin of the first life from simpler non-living chemicals, and biological evolutionary theory, which attempts to explain the origin of new forms of life from simpler, pre-existing forms of life. Darwin's theory was a form of biological evolution, an attempt to explain the origin of new forms from simpler forms.

But he presupposed, as he put it in The Origin, one or very few simple forms at the base of his famous tree of life and did not account for where that came from simpler prebiotic chemicals.

Peter Robinson: Before we continue, and I've got loads more to ask, obviously, why am I a layman coming to this a century and a half after Darwin publishes on the origin of his species, scratching my head and saying, fellows, this first question, where does life come from in the first place, that's a pretty big one.

How is it that a sort of interested layman can only suddenly realize you guys have this elaborate, what about this? Did science simply treat it as unimportant or so easy that they get to it sooner or later, the question of the origin of life.

James Tour: Nobody knows the origin of life, nobody has ever known the origin of life.

But people assume, very much like the Babylonians assumed, that it came out of a stinking pond. That's where they say their life came out of, and their gods came out of that same pond, and that's the primordial soup model. And that model persists today, you look in any textbook from elementary school to advanced college textbooks, and it will speak of the primordial soup model.

Life came out of that, that there were molecules that came together, and they formed higher order structures and that formed a cell and that led to life, that is a bunch of nonsense.

Peter Robinson: Okay, hold on, I remember those textbooks with flasks and tubes, so let's take a moment there.

First of all, you said something interesting, Darwin's warm little pond. Darwin is working in a great tradition here. The Babylonians had myths involving the primordial soup. So, let's take a moment here, the famous Miller Urey experiments of the 1950s, very simple. Two flasks, closed system with tubes, one flask has ammonia, methane, and a few other elements to simulate the primordial atmosphere.

Another flask has water to simulate the primordial ocean. And then electricity gets introduced to simulate lightning, and what do you know? Amino acids seem to settle out of this. And in early experiments, according to my reading, there were five amino acids, which could be described as central building blocks of life I'm told, in later experiments, they refined it, improved it a bit, and they got up to 22 amino acids.

And there it seems to have stopped, the scientists, that's close enough. We can extrapolate from what's going on there. Keep this up for a billion years and you'll end up with life, and James Tour says?

James Tour: It's garbage that doesn't work, yes, they made a number of amino acids.

They also made amino acids that are totally unnatural. And so, they had many amino acids. I think that there may have been a dozen or so of the amino acids, but it doesn't matter. All of them were achiral, which means they didn't have the handedness that one wants.

Organic molecules, aside from the very simplest of organic molecules, have two handedness. You either have a right-handed model or a left-handed model. Your right and your left hand are mirror images of one another. If you put your right hand up to a mirror, it will appear as your left hand.

The two are non-superimposable, that's why your right hand can't fit in a left-handed glove. Molecules are like that, organic molecules are like that as well. He made both of the images, you have to have one and not the other. So, there were other experiments that talked about resolving these, separating these.

But that's the easy part, that's actually quite easy. But what was presumed from that experiment, which was actually a very nice experiment, I'm not belittling that experiment at all, is that we would very soon figure out the way to life. That's what was assumed. And so, that was 75 years ago, so think about that.

Think of what has been done in the last 75 years, where you have this whole silicon era, which started in 1960. You have computers, you have space flight, you have landing on the moon, which was in the 1960s, a long time ago. You have all of this internet connectivity, the medical advances.

We still don't know how these things come together. You have to take the amino acids and polymerize them, hook them together, that's a big problem, nobody has solved that.

Peter Robinson: Jim, could I, may I read a little bit from a paper of yours, one of your thousand peer reviewed papers.

I don't understand a word of this, but I'm going to quote a little bit and ask you to help me understand it, quote, this is the title of the paper. Are present proposals on chemical evolutionary mechanisms accurately pointing toward first life. All right, you describe work that you have done in assembling what you call nano cars, tiny little vehicles.

Here's a quote, I'm quoting you in this paper. So, here's something to consider as we think about the problem of The Origin of Life. Designing nano cars, to which you've already devoted about a dozen intricate pages of how you design these tiny little vehicles. Designing nano cars is child's play in comparison to the complex molecular machinery and information processing systems at work in the synthesis of proteins, enzymes, DNA, RNA and polysaccharides.

Let alone their assembly into complex functional macroscopic systems, close quote. Is this layman correct in saying, as we have learned more about chemistry, as we have achieved the ability to manipulate chemistry more and more accurately. We have learned that the question of how life first began is far bigger and far more complicated and far more elusive than Darwin and Miller and Urey ever conceived.

James Tour: Yes, this happens all the time, we see this every time we try to make something, the goal post goes further away. It's not that the cell is evolving, it's that we understand more of the cell. So, we're here, we move a little bit closer to maybe solving this, but the cell, the target, has moved miles and miles further away because we're like, no, I have to make that to.

I have to solve this problem to, so when you just think a cell is a bunch of protoplasm, the targets not very hard. But then when you learn about the cell and the complexity of it, and you see that biochemistry is extraordinary, and there's so many layers to this that I never even thought about, because I didn't have the tools to see it 50 years ago, but now I see it.

And then you think about how those might be solved, how you might solve those, and then you see layers of other things you have to solve. So, though people may say we're getting closer, the target has moved much further away. So, I would never say that it will never be solved, as a scientist, I can't say that, but I just say that the solution is very far from today.

Peter Robinson: Okay.

Stephen Meyer: Can I interject some historical context? I did my PhD on Origin of Life Biology, and one of my Cambridge supervisors who also worked on the history of that field, had a well-known quotation. She said that behind the question of the origin of life is a deeper question.

And that is the question of what are we trying to explain the origin of? And in 1859, in the 1860s, 1870s, the scientists, the early evolutionary biologists, assumed that that question was going to be pretty simple and easy to understand. Thomas Henry,

Peter Robinson: And they assumed that why?

Stephen Meyer: They assumed it because they thought life was very simple. Thomas Henry Huxley, who was Darwin's famous bulldog, said that the cell was a simple, homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm. And they thought that life was essentially a kind of chemical. It was made of an essential substance called protoplasm, which was a kind of Jello or goo that could be produced by a few simple chemical reactions.

And our knowledge of what the simple cell is actually composed of, as Jim has just said, has advanced massively since then. Huxley had no idea, Darwin had no idea what we would discover. And now we know that inside living cells, we have at the very least, an information storage, transmission and processing system, which is part of a whole automated system for building proteins and protein machines.

These nano machines that Jim makes, as you correctly point out, as he puts it, child's play. He has these massive chemical recipes that are involved, multiple steps, interventions and manipulations to build the much simpler miniature machines that he can build. They're much simpler than the ones that are found inside cells.

And so, the problem has, as he puts it, it's receded off into the distance, because our knowledge of the complexity of life has meant that it's much, much harder to envision how that might have arisen by a series of undirected chemical processes.

Peter Robinson: Reading your work, Steve, if I understand it correctly, there's a big moment.

And funnily enough, the big moment happens at about the same time as the Urey Miller experiments. And that big moment is Watson and crick in 1953, and you get the double heel. They understand the structure of DNA and suddenly they can see how complicated DNA is. And every living cell, first of all, I wanna make sure I get this right, every living cell contains DNA, is this correct?

James Tour: DNA, RNA, proteins.

Peter Robinson: So, a few quotations that you present in your book, Signature in the cell, Bill Gates. DNA is like a computer program, biotechnologist Leroy Hood. DNA represents, quote, digital code. Richard Dawkins himself, the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer like, close quote.

Peter Robinson: So, doesn't this pose just a gigantic new problem? Again, let Stephen Jay Gould and Doc, whatever they wanna argue about evolution, we are concerned with this first box and it's still empty. And the first box is the first life. And not only is it empty, but tour comes along and says, you have no idea, the simplest forms of life require such complex chemistry.

And then Meyer comes along and says, well, wait a minute, fellas, what about Watson and Crick? Every cell contains DNA and you're not going to create a three billion item long strand of DNA with hitting ammonia with lightning no matter how many times you do the experiment. Is that not correct?

This empty box is now.

Stephen Meyer: A couple of things.

Peter Robinson: A source of awe, really?

Stephen Meyer: Exactly, we go back to the Miller Urey experiment, two big classes of problems. One is that they synthesize the amino acids using alleged prebiotic gases. They synthesize it based on gases in those flasks that don't simulate the actual atmosphere on the early earth.

But secondly, the amino acids that they produced and there was a mixture of other things that had to be eliminated for those amino acids to hook up in a way that would be life friendly. But they also didn't explain how they would hook up and how they would hook up in the precise sequence to actually form proteins.

So, it's the difference between letters and words that means something, you have a bag of scramble letters and you dumb them into the table. That does not give you a tripple word score in the game, okay? But the discovery is seminal but it's the beginning of a whole series of discoveries and what historians and biologists call molecular biological evolution.

In 1953, double helical structure of the DNA molecule, but then five years later Francis Creck who was a codebreaker in WWII realises that the subunits along the spine of the DNA molecule are functioning like alphabetic characters in the digital characters in a section of software Infact. George Gamal one of the great physicists of the time realized very quickly that the strings of a, c, g and t's along the spine of DNA could be represented as a digital bead string.

And so, what you have and what Creek realizes is how the sequence hypothesis is that DNA is contains information for the construction of the proteins and protein machines that are needed to keep cells alive. So, very much like your modern cad chem technology that is used in a bowing plant where an engineer will sit in a council, write some code, the code is then translated into another machine code that can direct the function of the manufacturing apparatus.

So, maybe the code from the engineer would ut the rivets on the airplane wing in just the right place. Or younger people are aware of this 3D printers where we have digital information directing the construction of three dimensional or other structures, that's what going in inside cells, it's not that there is code, it's just that the code is directing the production of 3D proteins and protein that are absolutely essential of what the cell does.

So, even the simpler cells contain DNA and DNA Experiments, there's a problem called interfering cross-reactions, where you get, yes, two or three, maybe four or five protein forming amino acids. But there's all kinds of other chemical compounds that are also synthesized in those same experiments, and they will quickly react with the things you want and form, in the case of the Miller Urey experiment, the sludge was called melanoidin.

And it's moving in a life-unfriendly direction. So, what the chemist has to do is effectively intervene to remove the byproducts that are unwanted, to allow only the things that are wanted to continue on in the simulation.

Peter Robinson: The chemist has to play God, which is cheating.

Stephen Meyer: Exactly, it's an intelligent intervention, and therefore not a simulation of an undirected chemical evolutionary process.

Peter Robinson: Lemme sum up, if I may, where I think I now understand things stand, and I'm gonna quote Jim one more time. This is a different article called Clueless on the Origin of Life, quoting you. Two thirds of a century since the Miller Urey experiment, origin of life research has not made any progress whatsoever, not made any progress whatsoever.

We've been to the moon, satellites in space, internet, but on the origins of life, zippo. We can even say that suggestions on how life might have formed really show how life probably did not form. Nothing even resembling a synthetic cellular structure has arisen from its independent components, let alone a living cell, not even close.

Are you both willing to stand with that as a good, tight summary statement?

Stephen Meyer: I am, but I have quite a small difference with Jim on this, perhaps, and that I think that is progress. I think that we've defined how difficult the problem is.

Peter Robinson: He's playing semantic games.

Stephen Meyer: It is a semantic game in a way. But it's an important point because, as I was just saying, that for the chemists to move the molecules in even a modestly life-friendly direction, they invariably, in their simulations, have to remove things they don't want, use purified reagents. They are inputting information into their system.

And therefore the logic of these simulation experiments run like this, we're gonna do an experiment under conditions that we think model what was on the prebiotic earth, and then we're gonna see what happens. Well, in order for the molecules to move in a life-friendly direction, invariably there has to be an intelligent input into the system to manipulate the chemical conditions to move them in that direction.

So, what's actually being simulated? Aren't they actually then simulating the need for intelligence to move from simple chemistry to more complex life-relevant chemistry? But even their intelligence is nonsense. Their intelligence shows that this doesn't work, they're so clueless on this thing, they say, okay, we'll do this, and it solves this problem.

No, you just introduced ten more problems, this is a bunch of nonsense, the whole area is a scam.

Peter Robinson: Glad you don't have any strong feelings about this, Jim. I believe I understand the dead end, could we go now to this question that DNA raises the question of information?

Stephen Meyer: Sure.

Peter Robinson: All right, this is Steve Meyer in your book, Signature in the Cell, quote, DNA sequences do not just possess information in the strictly mathematical sense, developed by the famed MIT scientist Claude Shannon in the late 1940s, instead, DNA sequences convey instructions. They perform functions, they possess specified information.

Okay, as far as I can tell, it's really important to understand this, but you're gonna have to help me do that.

Stephen Meyer: Sure.

Peter Robinson: So, we start with Shannon information, and as I understand it, Shannon is working on telecommunications. He's trying to come up with mathematical algorithms that let you convey lots of phone calls down a,

Stephen Meyer: Communication channel.

Peter Robinson: Communication channel, right? And he has this basic insight that the information an event conveys is inversely proportional to the event's probability. So, the sun comes up this morning, it tells us nothing new, that's a very probable event. The sun doesn't come up, and we know it is conveying information about some new event in the world, is that roughly, correct?

Stephen Meyer: Roughly, it might be.

Peter Robinson: You're not happy with that?

Stephen Meyer: Well, maybe coins or dice might be better-

Peter Robinson: Go ahead, go ahead.

Stephen Meyer: Ways of getting at it, the basic idea of Shannon information is that information is related to the reduction of uncertainty, that's the intuition.

So, if I flip a coin and it's got two sides, and it comes up heads, now I've reduced a certain quantifiable amount of uncertainty. It was either gonna be a head or a tail, and now it's a head. But if I roll a die, there are six possible outcomes, and so the amount of uncertainty reduced when it comes up three, rather than one, two, four, five or six, is greater than the amount of uncertainty reduced by flipping the coin.

And so, you can see that the information measures the amount of uncertainty reduced is related to the probability of the event taking place. The head has a one in two chance, the die, one side of the die, a one in six chance. So, there's more uncertainty with the more improbable event, more uncertainty reduced when the more improbable event occurs.

And so, what Shannon does, is he's able to quantify the amount of information carrying capacity in a string or bit string. But what he can't do, and which he was very explicit about saying, is that his mathematical measure of information carrying capacity doesn't tell you whether the string, the series of characters, is meaningful or functional or specified to perform a function in any way.

So, a very simple example that conveys the difference is you might think of if you type at random 20 characters on your typewriter keyboard and put that string out, and then right below it, you might write a line of poetry, time and tide wait for no man. Both strings have identical amounts of Shannon information because they're using the same alpha character symbol system, but one has a qualitative element that the other doesn't have.

They're both equally improbable, but one has a qualitative element, and that is that the arrangement of the characters is specific to perform a communication function. And that's the kind of information-

Peter Robinson: That we see-

Stephen Meyer: Well, it's the kind of information that invariably indicates a designing intelligence. If you see a line of poetry that's meaningful, you right away know there was a poet, but if you just see random characters like that, it might be that somebody arranged them for that in that way, but it also could be the product of monkeys at the keyboard.

So, early on in the 1950s, we have crick with his sequence hypothesis. He's working in the immediate wake of the Shannon information revolution, and he specifies that DNA does not have mere Shannon information. He says that the sequence of bases in DNA are sequenced specifically to perform a function.

And so, that you have an origin of life researcher named Alessia Orgel coined this term specified complexity. Complexity is a synonym for improbability, and so you have a specified improbable arrangement when you have that. That's what we mean in ordinary parlance by information, or in our careful writing on the origin of life problem, we define what needs to be explained as the origin not of Shannon information, but of specified information or specified complexity.

Something like time and tide wait for no man as opposed to the random characters of the monkey would type out. And crick was absolutely adamant early on that DNA doesn't have just Shannon information, it has specified information.

Peter Robinson: Now we come to the moment when the two of you become really controversial.

Up to this moment, pointing out that the Urim Miller experiments have gone nowhere, that we know less than nothing about where the origins of life might have come from less than nothing, as you put it. Actually, what we've done is demonstrate ways that life probably didn't form, that as I take it, you two are very irritating to the scientific community, but they can live with you.

Stephen Meyer: Well, even our friend Richard Dawkins acknowledges that no one knows how life evolved by undirected chemical evolutionary processes. So, you're right, this is actually not controversial. The critique is not controversial at all. Yeah, it's annoying, but not controversial.

Peter Robinson: So, here's the point where the two of you cross a line, and by the way, I feel an urge to grab you by the collars and save you from crossing over that line, but I'll get to that.

This is Steve in signature in the cell quote. The functionally specified information in the cell points to intelligent design, for which every one of our listeners is gonna say I know what they mean, they mean God. Intelligent design as the best explanation for the ultimate origin of biological information, why?

Experience shows that large amounts of such information, especially codes and languages, invariably originate from an intelligent source, I wanna repeat that. Experience shows our own lived experience as humans. When you see a line of poet, well, as Bill Clinton said, when you see a turtle on a fence post, you know it didn't get there by itself.

We recognize intelligence, invariably originate from an intelligent source, from a mind or personal agent. In other words, intelligent activity is the only known cause of the origin of functionally specified information, close quote. So, what Meyer is saying, now pay attention to this one, Jim, because this guy is just radioactive.

What Meyer is saying here is that when we see DNA, in the simplest cell we really have no choice. We have to suppose that there is some intelligent design behind it, are you gonna let him get away with that?

James Tour: No, I'm sympathetic to what he's saying because we have no other answer.

I mean, I don't normally go down that line to say that there's so many problems before you even get to thinking about this question of intelligent design and this information, but I talk about the information. We have no idea how to solve the information, but there's so many steps that you have to get through before you even get there.

You want DNA? DNA isn't gonna do anything unless it has lots of enzymes supporting it from around so that it can help to translate it to RNA. And RNA isn't gonna just start reacting with amino acids on its own, it needs all sorts of support enzymes. So, there's all these pieces that are missing.

You don't even get to take advantage of the information that's there because the chemistry doesn't let you, the chemistry just doesn't let you.

Stephen Meyer: Peter I've really appreciated Jim's work, because he's addressed not just the information problem, which has been the main focus of my work, but all the biomacromolecules that have to be prebiotically synthesized to make it possible to even begin to think about the origin of a cell.

You have to have the saccharides, the sugars, you have to have the lipids, you have to have the proteins, the enzymes, you have to have the DNA. There's all these different classes of molecules but I focused on the information question, and I think that is at some level the most fundamental question, because it's all about not just the presence of the constituent parts, it's about how they need to be arranged in order to perform biological functions.

James Tour: But see, even the DNA is a piece of this informational code. But everything in the cell is informational code. The saccharides, the way sugars are put together bears information. That's how cells tell one another apart. I mean, they bump into these other cells, they see what the saccharides are.

Stephen Meyer: Signaling molecules.

James Tour: Yeah, it's all based on this. All the amino acids, all the proteins, those all have information so that they know what molecule to build. Every piece of the cell is information. And so, to just focus on DNA being information, every piece of your cell is information.

How does this information get translated if you don't have fidelity in information transferred? We tried this years ago in my lab to try to make a starting molecule and have it make a duplex, a daughter molecule just like itself not using biological entities. And what happened was the fidelity killed us, meaning that it was only 70% pure so you have 30% still in there now, reproducing junk.

And before you know it just,

Stephen Meyer: Each generation that gets worse and worse and worse, because you're not,

James Tour: It's just a mess.

Peter Robinson: So boys, there are two ways you could argue I think, you could argue, and this is the, I'll give you the easy one. I'll give you the one that for the sake of your careers, you really follow this one.

If you take my advice,

Stephen Meyer: It's too late for me.

Peter Robinson: You're both in plenty of trouble but follow this one and the trouble will be at least moderate. You can say, wait a minute, even the simplest cell contains DNA. And then towards DNA, you don't know the half of it.

The saccharides, the cell is jammed, it's bristling with information. And the summary of that line of thinking is not only do we not know how the origin of life began, but the idea that the question is uninteresting or easy, or that the universe given enough time would have produced it in a random way that, ladies and gentlemen, given the state of knowledge today, that is preposterous and stop.

You could just stop there, but the two of you, no, you may not yet because.

Stephen Meyer: I want to explain why I didn't.

Peter Robinson: No, you'll get a chance, but the alternative is the two of you here, let me read a quotation because you keep going, you cross the line, Jim, even you.

I'm gonna quote you from your article one more time. Those who think scientists understand how prebiotic chemical mechanisms produce the first life are wholly misinformed. Nobody understands how this happened, you're good so far. It would be far more helpful to expose students to the massive gaps in our understanding, so far so good.

And a lot of people thinking, okay, good, Jim, just stop there, but you don't stop there, you go on. It would be far more helpful to expose students to the massive gaps in our understanding then they may find a firmer and possibly a radically different scientific theory, close quote.

And everybody says, there goes tours opening the door to God, you guys cross the line. It's not enough to say science should be much humbler about its claims because something that we thought we would get to for the last 150 years, not only have we not gotten to, it baffles us more than ever.

You guys go on to say, and what we see is evidence of intelligent design.

James Tour: I don't know how you can take what I just wrote and suggest that I was suggesting, God, why can't we just have a wholly new scientific theory, this whole,

Peter Robinson: Which would be?

James Tour: Which would be, I don't know yet.

Peter Robinson: Okay, that's fine.

James Tour: I don't know yet.

Peter Robinson: That won't satisfy Steve.

Stephen Meyer: He's not in quite as much trouble as I am.

Peter Robinson: Okay, so we have here at this table the eminent Jim Tour, thousands of papers and materials that I can't even begin to understand.

Brilliant man, says, it is enough to say we don't know, and Steve Meyer replies.

Stephen Meyer: There's a logic, a scientific logic, that points to the role of intelligence in the origin of life. There's a famous information scientist named Henry Kessler, who was one of the first information scientists to apply information theoretic concepts and informational concepts to the analysis of the molecular biology to DNA and RNA.

And he said that the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity. That's what we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning. In my PhD thesis, I studied the methods of historical scientific reasoning pioneered by, among others, Charles Darwin.

And the key idea there in historical science is that if we wanna explain an event in the remote past, we want to invoke, we want to explain it by reference to causes which are known to produce the effects in question. And I came across this principle first in one of Darwin's mentors, Charles Lyell, the great geologist, who said essentially that.

And I asked myself a question, the Lyell phrase was by reference to causes now in operation, that's what we wanna explain past events by reference to causes now in operation. And I asked myself a question, what is the cause now in operation for the construction of specified information or digital code?

And I could think of only one. And I ended up writing a 500-page book looking at all the different proposals that had been made for explaining the origin of that digital code. And all of them came up short, either theoretically, empirically, or both. But we do know of a cause that produces specified information, and that cause is intelligence, it's mind.

And so, using the Darwinian logic of the historical sciences, it's actually possible to affirm the intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of information. Whenever we see information and we trace it back to its ultimate source. Whether we're talking about computer code or information in a radio signal or hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book, we always come to a mind, not a material process.

And so, the discovery of information in a digital form and a specified form of information at the foundation of life, I argue, provides a powerful indicator of the activity of a designing mind in the origin of life. And that's using the standard historical scientific method of reasoning that Darwin himself used.

Peter Robinson: Okay, as far as I can tell, so you cross one line, but you do stop short of another line meaning you're not going to start talking about God and say that this proves the existence of the God of the Hebrew scriptures, or the God of the Baptists, or the God of the Presbyterian.

No, it's intelligence, and there's a long, long way from what we can say must have been involved in forming DNA. There's a huge distance from that to Hinduism, to any known religion, and so you're being within your own,

Stephen Meyer: In my work,

Peter Robinson: Within your own work, you're quite modest, you draw lines yourself, is that right?

Stephen Meyer: Well, in the book signature in the cell, I argued for the need for an intelligent agent of some kind to explain the origin of the first information necessary to produce the first life. I do think you can make further arguments that point not just to a mind of some kind, but to a sort of a generic theistic understanding of God.

But you have to bring the cosmology and the physics in the fine tuning and the origin of the universe. And so, I have a subsequent book that actually looks at the question, what is the identity of the designing intelligence?

Peter Robinson: And that is, The return of the God.

Stephen Meyer: Return of the God hypothesis. But in Signature in the Cell, I argue that a mind of some kind is required based on our uniform and repeated experience of what it takes to cause the origin of specified information.

Peter Robinson: Okay, Doctor Tour, are you down for any of this program?

Or do you wanna just say,

James Tour: Well, I wish you could see what I see, even if you just take a cell, very simple cell, and you ask scientists to look at this cell, life is going on. If you just put molecules, align them in that way, is it gonna run, is it gonna operate?

We don't even know what got this cell going, we don't know. So, if you ask a scientist, a cell just died, what is it we just lost, all the molecules are right there, and could you get it going again? We don't even know how to describe what life really is when it comes to even a simple cell, we don't even know that, that's how clueless we are.

I wish you could see this, because you don't understand the magnitude of the human deficiency in even understanding what life is in the simplest of organisms. And people will say, well, life was much simpler at the start of the evolutionary process. This has already been calculated, bioengineers have already figured out what is the minimal operation that you need?

What are the fewest components that you need to have a cell operating? And you take that and, okay, so let's say we make all of those components. By the way, none of those 15 components have been made, none of them. Now, if you could make them, now what would you do?

Peter Robinson: Under realistic prebiotic conditions.

James Tour: Yeah, even if you could make them in your current lab? I'll give them their own labs, make them, or just take them from a living cell, go to a living cell, use that as your supply chain, take it from the living cell.

Now what do you do? Just putting them in proximity, is this going to run? Nobody in their right mind would say yes, no scientist would say, it's not just putting them together. You don't know how to put them together, but even if you could, now how does it even start running?

We don't even know what we're going toward, which gets back to that philosophical experiment that his professor was talking about, what are we going toward in life? We don't even know what life is, molecules don't care about life, molecules are in, they don't move toward life. There's no propensity for a molecule to move toward life, it has no brain, it has no action that wants to bring it toward life, they don't know.

I don't know what you want me to do, I'm just here, what do I do? And then even if we could say I want you to move toward life, you'd be like, okay, just tell me which direction to go, I don't know.

Stephen Meyer: Jim has an amazing talk looking at some of the prebiotic experiments, and they're basically implementing complicated recipes.

They start with purified chemical reagents and then they combine them in just the right measures, right proportions under the right conditions and temperatures. And then they get a reaction, and then they pull out what they want and then they go get those same chemicals off the shelf in a more purified form and they take the next step and it's one step after another.

And at every step along the way there's this problem of what's called investigator interference. And if you go back and you relate this to the idea of an informational measure, if we think of information as excluding one option and electing another a bit of information, a head, not a tail.

At every step of the way, the investigator is excluding one option or excluding maybe a whole bunch of options and electing another. They're importing information to move the experiment in a modestly life friendly direction, they're nowhere near, as Jim is saying, actual life. But the logic of these simulation experiments actually supports intelligent design, because the idea is you're simulating what must have happened on the early earth to get life to go from simple chemistry towards more complex, life friendly chemistry.

Peter Robinson: Repeated intelligent intervention.

Stephen Meyer: There is a repeated intelligent intervention in every one of these simulation experiments. So, what's being simulated?

James Tour: Every one of those simulations you say it's intelligent, it's stupid. It's stupid because it doesn't get you there. They are doing things that, in their own mind, is intelligent, but it's stupid because it's not moving there.

Stephen Meyer: This is nowhere in my script, and maybe it's a dud of a question. But I'm going to ask you, because you are such a brilliant man, and you understand things at such a level of detail. If I take a petunia seed and it comes to me in the packet from Burpees, and all these seeds are little dead things.

And I put it in a pot, and I put some water on, now, I can predict, and you can predict, that we'll come back in two days and there will be a little shoot, and a week later, there will be a flower. But if I say, why, how did that happen?

Are you telling me that at the moment of life, the moment something passes from inertness to life, that remains a mystery to us today?

James Tour: Yes, it remains a mystery. What is the very even thing we're describing when we talk about life? I've had scientists, I used to do this demonstration from my own children.

So watch, I'm having scientists over tonight, watch what's gonna happen. I said, you have a cell, it just died, what is it you just lost? And then they start arguing with one another. There were two questions, I said, what is it you lost, and how would you get it going again?

They could never get to how we got it going again because they could never figure out what it is we just lost when the cell died, that's how mysterious life is. Now, that's not to say that we won't one day know, I can never say that, as a scientist, I can't say we will never know.

There's a whole lot of things we figured out, if you asked a man in 1700, will we ever be able to walk on the moon and come back? He'd be like, no, we don't even have space flight, I mean, how can I say? How can I say? I don't know what the future holds, but all I know is, it's not gonna happen tomorrow.

It's not gonna happen in ten years, with €40 million being thrown at this thing, that's more money down the drain. You're better off letting the taxpayers keep that money, because they're going in the wrong direction. We don't even know what we're going toward.

Stephen Meyer: This is where Jim and I differ just a little bit, because I think these origin of life experiments have actually revealed what is necessary to move chemistry in a life friendly direction, and that is intelligence.

They are providing evidential support for the intelligent design hypothesis because of the logic of the simulations.

Peter Robinson: Let me flip the question here, why is science as a profession so hostile to the notion of intelligent design? If I google on critiques of intelligent design, they just type in those words and wow, do I get hits.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, quote, the lack of scientific warrant for so called intelligent design theory makes it improper to include as a part of science education the American Society of Agronomy. I didn't know such a thing existed, but there's an American Society of Agronomy, quote, intelligent design has neither a substantial research space nor testable hypotheses as a scientific discipline.

The American Chemical Society, we urge education authorities to support curricula that affirm evolution as the only scientifically accepted explanation for the origin and diversity of species, close quote. Even though everybody knows evolution doesn't even attempt to answer the question.

James Tour: This is for the origin?

Peter Robinson: I'm quoting you, I got this off the web, who knows?

We urge education authorities to support curricula affirm evolution as the only scientifically accepted explanation for the origin and diversity of species.

James Tour: This is how stupid this is, scientists are like everybody else. We want to allay our fears, we don't want to look bad, we don't wanna spend 40 years doing things, and people say that was a bunch of nonsense.

We're just like everybody else, and they keep throwing this stuff out there, and then you oppose them, and they get all upset with you, and they don't want you in their little societies. And it's like Groucho Marx said, I don't wanna be part of a society that would have me.

Who wants to be part of this, this is really nonsense, what these people are putting forth, because you can't even define this thing. And that's what all the experiments are showing, we need something radically different. I don't know what that different is, but all I can tell you is everything that we are doing now is not getting us there.

Stephen Meyer: Okay, there's an historical background to this because science arises in the 17th century in a decidedly theistic milieu, and the design hypothesis was part of the practice of science, because scientists have,

Peter Robinson: Galileo, Kepler,

Stephen Meyer: Newton.

Peter Robinson: Galileo had his troubles with the church, he was a believer in God.

These early scientists were,

Stephen Meyer: Newton, Boyle, Kepler, they all made design arguments.

Peter Robinson: Right, right, right.

Stephen Meyer: Okay, and because there are two contexts of scientific inquiry, how do things function? I look at an automobile I can understand in terms of the laws of internal combustion. But I can't understand the origin of the automobile apart from Henry Ford.

I can understand the iPhone by reference to the electronic equations e equals ir, but I can't understand it apart from Steve Jobs. And so, the scientists beginning in the late 19th century wanted to say that the kind of explanations and descriptions we use to explain or describe the ongoing operation of nature.

And they would be properly materialistic processes that would be invoked, are also sufficient to explain the origin of things. And we have to limit ourselves to materialistic explanations for everything. But there's a fallacy,

Peter Robinson: It just doesn't work,

Stephen Meyer: It doesn't work, well it may work, but it hasn't turned out to work.

Because the problem is, if you're asking about the origin of life, there are two basic possibilities. It might be the result of unguided, undirected material processes, but it may be also the result of the activity of a mind. And if you decide in advance you're not going to consider the mind, the creative intelligence option, then you will necessarily elect a materialistic explanation.

And it may not be the best, because the evidence you have may be actually pointing to a different type of cause. And that's the argument for intelligent design, that when we see this specified information, this is an indication of the activity of intelligence. This is what we know from everything in our uniform and repeated experience, which is, properly speaking, the basis of all scientific reasoning.

Peter Robinson: If it is the goal of human beings to become smarter, to know more, not less, to become smarter, not stupider. To embrace options that seem reasonable and from which we can learn, rather than ruling them out and remaining willfully stupid, then intelligent design ought to be considered, is that the argument?

Stephen Meyer: Exactly, otherwise you have a sub rational form of historical biology. It would be like walking into.

Peter Robinson: Are you calling Jim Tour sub rational?

Stephen Meyer: No, no, he's not sub rational, he's doing great stuff. His work actually,

Peter Robinson: You're trying to get a rise out of Jim.

Stephen Meyer: Yeah, his work actually sets up the argument that I'm making.

Peter Robinson: Okay.

Stephen Meyer: But if there are two possible options and you decide you're not going to consider one, then,

Peter Robinson: What kind of work is that?

Stephen Meyer: It'd be like going into the British museum looking at the Rosetta Stone and saying, well, I'd like to say that a scribe had something to do with it.

But because I can't invoke creative intelligence as an explanation, I'm pretty much stuck with wind and erosion. But we know it wasn't wind and erosion, something else played a role.

James Tour: If I pick up this banner of intelligent design to which I'm really quite sympathetic. It's a way of trying to negate everything that I'm saying.

What I'm doing is I'm pointing out the obvious to everybody. There are so many scientists that don't work in the area of origin of life that agree with me. They see exactly what I see, this is not unique, this is not hard to see. Everybody sees what I see except these guys that are working in the field.

Stephen Meyer: He's performing a chemical accounting.

James Tour: Yes.

Stephen Meyer: On these experiments, yeah.

James Tour: Yes, if I start invoking intelligent design, this is a way to dismiss me.

Stephen Meyer: Won't be useful.

James Tour: Yes, it's not useful for what I'm trying to put forward.

Peter Robinson: Gentlemen, a couple of last questions here.

Shoot me down if you want to, but I'm gonna take a step away from science, from pure science. Here's Thomas Aquinas in The Summa around the year 1270, quote. Now, whatever lacks intelligence, whatever lacks intelligence cannot move toward an end unless it be directed by some being endowed with intelligence, as the arrow is directed by the Archer, close quote.

Meyer looks at DNA and says, the code implies a coder tour. Looks at these fantastically complex chemical processes required to produce even a nano vehicle of the kind you're working on and says, the assembly implies an assembler. And 750 years ago, Thomas Aquinas says, the arrow implies an Archer.

Our wing edging toward a point in which the teleological argument of Thomas Aquinas, the argument from design, the arrow implies an Archer, the creation implies a creator. Is that becoming intellectually respectable?

Stephen Meyer: It's being revived by discoveries in modern science. I attended a conference early in my career in which I heard one of the leading origin of life researchers of the 1970s and eighties, Dean Kenyon.

Repudiate his own theory of chemical evolution, understanding that it had not explained the origin of the information in DNA. His book was called biochemical predestination. He gave a talk at a conference, said, I can't accept my own work anymore. And he said instead, it's time for the philosophers to reopen the natural theological question, which is, does nature point to the reality of a designing mind?

And he then later embraced this new theory of intelligent design. And so, what I think the teleological argument is the classical design argument. And I think it's being resuscitated, revived by discoveries in biology, such as the ones we've been talking about, discoveries in physics, such as the fine tuning that the physicists are talking about.

So, I think the teleological argument is absolutely back on the table and its modern science that has put it there.

Peter Robinson: Jim.

James Tour: I think that certainly scientists are seeing this, but they're not speaking up. They're not speaking up because they're afraid to, but they are seeing the barriers that are there and there is no solution.

The only ones that are not speaking up are the ones that are making their living from this thing. But nobody wants to speak up and gets get this abuse. My hope is that as young people come into this, these organizations will begin to change. That's my hope, that people will begin to be more open minded here.

Peter Robinson: Okay, there was a major article in nature just a month or so ago, Jim, right, by two authors that are leading researcher origin of life researchers, Johanna Xavier and Nick Lane. And they, Joanna had previously actually commended both Jim and me for raising these serious problems. And then she went on with Nick to write an article in nature saying, hey, we can't keep sweeping this stuff under the rug.

And so, I think there is a shift starting. There are a lot of origin of life researchers are pretty terrified of Jim tour because he knows the chemistry as well or better than they do. And he's performing this chemical accounting and saying these experiments are nothing plausible. They're not getting results that are plausible, they're not consistent with what we know about what would have been happening on the early earth, we need another approach.

Last question, I'm going to step even further from science now. It just seems to me that the question is one of aptness or appropriateness. What is the correct human response to life? So, I'm gonna ask a question and see if you think it's an appropriate response. That's the first question, the second question is whether it's useful in scientific thinking in any way.

So, the two choices would be the first choice, which we've already ruled out, which is 19th century, and, well, we have here this empty box, but it's going to be filled with Jello. The origin of life isn't terribly important or interesting, we'll get to it sooner or later.

We know so much more now about the complexities of life and so much less about how it might have begun that an old verse came to mind. And here it is, I'm gonna hit you with something from the late bronze age, this is from proverbs. There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yeah, four which I know not.

The way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent upon a rock. The way of a ship in the midst of the sea and the way of a man with a maid if we could hold ourselves in wakefulness if we were truly woke, we would fall to our knees every day at the sheer mystery of life.

James Tour: Yeah, I agree, life is utterly amazing. This is why I wrote an article that started out that the life that we see here around us, we can't explain. It should be like every other planet we've been to, it should be barren. And we have this ubiquitous life everywhere you turn over a rock, it's teeming with life.

There's life, and then you put it under a microscope. There's life, there's all of this life, and we can't even explain it. We can't even define what it is, and it's utterly amazing, really utterly amazing.

Peter Robinson: Steve?

Stephen Meyer: I think that our familiarity with life, we see it all around us, has made us, inures us to what's awesome about it.

And one of the great things about molecular biology is that in opening up just the interior of the cell, just one, you see these amazing processes going on. I remember when I was first taking molecular and cell biology and other students in the class would, with no particular ideological axe to grind in the discussion, would just say, keep saying, no way, no way.

How does that happen? We have a little animation, our website, called journey inside the cell, that just shows the process by which this digital bit string is threaded through the ribosome. The transfer RNA's come, and in a very mechanical way, the information directs this process of the building of the protein.

And I've had a friend, an engineer, a longtime friend of my father's, an engineer, who had an epiphany just seeing that animation and thought, there must be a God, there must be a God.

Peter Robinson: Steve Meyer, James Tour, thank you.

James Tour: Thank you.

Peter Robinson: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover institution and Fox Nation today, from Fiesole, Italy, I'm Peter Robinson.