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okay i've got some good news
and some bad news
bad news is
everything is trying to kill you those
french fries you just ate probably
clogging your arteries right now dead
spiders they want you dead the sun wants
you dead too lego's on the floor
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instant death
the good news is most things are
actually sort of bad at killing you
son bam sunscreen french fries bam eat
some leaves legos bam shoes spooders
also shoes
but
no matter how many shoes you have in
leaves you eat eventually you will die
we all know that when a living thing
dies nature takes its course an
irreversible one-way path of decay
begins
the bits that the thing was made of its
complex molecules they start to degrade
and become disorganized and smelly this
natural process is unavoidable and we
have all observed it
surprisingly some really smart people
from charles darwin to scientists today
believe that the opposite process has
occurred they say a long time ago purely
natural processes somehow created and
arranged molecules required for the
first ever living organism from a
primordial soup and that led to life as
we know it today
maybe you've seen this contraption
before it's like in every biology
textbook decades ago these two
scientists stanley miller and harold
urie made this experiment to try and
test if life can come from non-life
abiogenesis
sometimes called chemical evolution
textbooks count the miller yuri
experiment and others like it as
evidence of this
the pictures painted that with a few
tweaks and enough time they're just a
hop jumping a skip away
from creating life
they contend that under the right
conditions getting the building blocks
of life is easy enough and from there
life would flow naturally but is this
really the case let's take a look more
closely
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simpler chemicals have indeed been
transformed into some of the building
blocks of life in the lab that much is
true but how impressive is it
well about as impressive as water
turning into ice
when the situation is right water
freezes
pretty cool
likewise these building blocks form
spontaneously as well when the situation
is right the important questions are how
do these lab experiments compare to
reality and
how close to these building blocks get
us to life in other words if we had the
building blocks will life flow naturally
as the biology textbooks seem to
indicate
one dirty little secret of these origin
of life experiments is that they don't
actually start with plausible natural
conditions
these experimenters i don't want to say
cheated let's say they um
they cheated they sort of just cheated
these scientists begin with pure
industrial strength ingredients these
are never found in nature like that in
such extreme concentrations and purity
certainly not all in the same location
billions of dollars worth of precise
machinery created and operated by
thousands of very intelligent people in
labs all around the world over the
course of many decades is what gets us
to the point where these experiments can
even begin
another dirty little secret of these
origin of life experiments lies in the
presentation of their results
even cheating like they did what exactly
do they end up with
the vast majority of what they make is
actually toxic garbage
for example in this paper over 99 of
what they make is not only unwanted but
effectively destroys the building blocks
ability to form more complex molecules
the very process that makes these
building blocks also critically stops
them dead in their tracks
a little detail your biology textbook
may have left out
the third cheat is something called
relay synthesis they buy industrial
strength ingredients to start with make
mostly garbage out but may produce trace
amounts of something they wanted like in
this experiment they yielded
0.011 percent of the nucleobase adenine
then they declare success these
chemicals can technically be turned into
adenine even though it is unavailable to
actually do anything because it's
surrounded by garbage or consumed by
side reactions and would quickly degrade
but whatever details details
for the next experiment rather than
starting with what the previous
experiment actually produced this
mixture of garbage instead they now feel
justified in purchasing pure adenine
from a laboratory supply shop to further
cheat at the next step toward life and
this sort of thing happens over and over
again completely detached from reality
but you admit they are using natural
ingredients though so what's the big
deal just be clear the experiments are
trying to show that these building
blocks can form in natural environmental
conditions
so yes these conditions are natural only
in the same sense that your cell phone
is also made in natural conditions with
natural ingredients the metal in your
cell phone is basically just some melted
down rocks the battery's more simple
elements lithium and cobalt the glass
screen computer chips and circuitry just
fancy melted sand the apps and pictures
on your phone simply arrangements of
electrons another completely natural
phenomenon
every element of your smartphone can be
broken down into naturally occurring
components
just in concentrations impurities and
arrangements never found in nature very
similar to these lab experiments
but you know
i've never seen a cell phone happen in
nature not even one of those old crummy
ones you can only play snake on
how natural things are arranged in their
concentrations is key
if i made a cell phone in a lab using
ingredients created in factories
am i really simulating a natural process
or am i using intelligence to direct and
create
now scientists do acknowledge that
starting with these industrial strength
chemicals is problematic
but they often express this in coded
terms laden with jargon to make it sound
less
awful
take this recent paper talking about
their use of unnaturally high
concentrations of ammonia they say
this may limit the geographical areas
where such chemistries may occur an
aspect that needs further investigation
translation
nowhere on earth could they ever expect
to find the circumstances they contrived
to reach the conclusions they wanted
yeah but given enough time or enough
planets in the universe surely anything
could happen what if we had billions of
years
some problems are not solvable by time
when people assume that lots of time is
abiogenesis best friend it seems
reasonable
but it's exactly wrong they're not bffs
at best they're frenemies yes time gives
more opportunities for things to happen
but what's overlooked is that it also
gives more opportunities for time to
decay and destroy the trace amounts of
biotic material that may have been
created
some of these molecules are very fragile
their half-lives can span from merely
decades not millennia all the way down
to just days or even minutes
the origin of life is not like a very
long journey by foot where if you could
just make a little bit of progress just
one single step
given enough time you could make it any
distance
this is a problem of a different
category it's more akin to attempting to
walk to the moon time won't help that
sort of problem
why not
well to give you a rough idea of how
large the chasm is these experiments
have produced small molecules like this
and this is just some of what they need
for even a very simple
single celled organism thousands of
chemical ingredients must be present in
the same place at the same time the
correct concentrations chirality with no
ability to tolerate anywhere near the
level of impurity found in undirected
chemical processes or in the lab
living organisms handle this by making
most of the chemicals they need for
themselves on-site and on-demand but of
course that wouldn't be possible before
they existed
the chasm between the starting point and
the simplest possible life form is so
large that abiogenesis is hopelessly and
forever off limits to the mechanisms in
question it's not that there isn't
enough time it's nonsensical like asking
how heavy is blue
it's simply the wrong question and it
betrays an ignorance of the scope of the
problems involved
in spite of the observable data and our
own experience showing us that left to
its own devices life only goes one way
toward decay and degradation some still
have faith that it could have gone the
other way in the distant past with the
origin of life
so when you see statements like life
arose by a chemical evolution
that sounds scientific
but that claim is more akin to alchemy
or a horoscope than to science lots of
narrative and hope but little actual
evidence and so they rely on imagination
and people's scientific ignorance to be
persuasive
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make sure you subscribe to get notified
when the next video is released it's
going to be a doozy
in the meantime if you'd like to delve
more deeply into questions on the origin
of life check out the stairway to life
by dr tannen stadler for more
comprehensive review of the state of
origin of life science or for a much
more technical review see the mystery of
life's origin
thanks for watching
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you