Episode Transcript
Welcome to Evolution Impossible, a production of three ABN Australia television. Our host is Dr. Sven Ostring with special guest Dr.
John Ashton. And our panel hello, everyone, and welcome to evolution Impossible. I am Sven Ostring.
If this is the first time you've joined us, we are going an exciting journey of discovery to find out whether evolution, one of the biggest explanations for the origin of life, is really possible. I'm glad to be able to welcome Dr. John Ashton with us today.
Good to have you. We've got Melvin Sandelin as well. Thanks for joining us this time.
We've got Blair Lemke, great leader of young adults. And we've got Tim Turner as well. Thanks for joining us.
You know, when Isaac Newton looked back over his amazing career as a scientist, he said that he felt just like a boy playing on the seashore, finding pebbles and shells when a whole ocean lay before him. Every scientist is very willing to recognize that there is still a lot to be discovered in science. The same is true of Darwin.
The big thing that he knew very little about was actually very, very tiny. It's the living cell. And the big question we are going to address is how did life begin? And so, Blair, I just wanted to ask you, when you were back in your science classes at school, what did you learn about in terms of how life began? Yeah, this is taking me back, but, yeah, look, cells.
There was the big bang theory, the idea that life just spontaneously erupted or emerged from nothing, and then that kind of formulated into order. Quite a theory. What about you, Tim? What did you learn about how life began when you did science? Well, my experience was actually more of a let's see how much we can blow up.
And that was pre September 11, so I wasn't really paying much attention to how things came to be. So it was a bit of a big bang as well. I like bangs.
Yeah. Fantastic. Melbourne melvin, what did you learn about in science? Yeah, same thing.
I think it's something that most students will recognize, that it's just not even questioned. It's just everything started with nothing, and big bang give it billions of years and there's life and that's where we are. But what did they say? How did life itself begin? That's the question.
I think I haven't paid too much attention to it because they didn't really narrow in on it much because it was just something that was understood that life can come from no life. So all of a sudden there's a cell and it duplicates, and all of a sudden that duplicates and duplicates and more complex organisms can take shape. Yeah.
Well, thank you very much. This is, I guess, the general understanding, perhaps we could say. So, John, in terms of Darwin himself, how did he say life began? Life itself began.
Well, he didn't have an answer for that. And he said the first organism was something into which life was initially breathed. So it came about.
And it's very interesting, the comments that are being made, because that's exactly what the textbooks say, that there was the Big Bang and the Earth formed about four and a half billion years ago and cooled down, and some books say, and sometime thereafter life arose. There was some research done where they dated some Filament type fossils at about three and a half billion years. I think they might have been fossils actually found in Australia.
And they said, okay, so life must be a little bit older than that. And so they put a figure about 3000, 800 million years, but nobody knows how. They just say it happened because we're here.
Yes, it's one of the challenging problems of science because to date, there's no known mechanism of how nonliving chemicals could form a living organism. And the big issue is that the living cell, that first supposedly living cell, where did it come from? And that is something that Darwin didn't really understand himself. So back to you, Blair, just in terms of your understanding, what do you understand the living cell to be made of? What is it like on the inside? Yeah, look, I was taught that the cells were the basic building blocks of life back in high school and made up with the cell membrane.
And then inside you've got your nucleus, those mitochondrion, the cytoplasm, all these kind of little bits and pieces inside the cell that kind of make it operate and work and be able to function and yeah, I remember seeing those diagrams in the textbooks, had all the information in there. It's pretty amazing. And the interesting thing, Blair, is that, you know, even though you've gone on to other career pathways, you know more about the living cell than Darwin did.
So, John, tell us, describe for us what's inside this living cell, this tiny building block of life. Yes, well, one of the challenges that we have today has been we're continuing to understand the biochemistry in the cell. So when Darwin proposed his theory, DNA hadn't been discovered at that time.
So when was DNA discovered? In the early 1950s. It was really elucidated. Its structure was understood in the early 1950s.
So about 100 years after yes, nearly 100 years after Darwin. And of course, we now know that DNA encodes all the information required to build that functioning cell. So if we go back to if life has to form in the plant, so we have the plant forms, and it's supposed to be water and minerals and these sort of things, and maybe lightning strikes.
And some of us have heard about the Miler experiment where they put some basic gases together and soldered them with high electrical voltages and they produced a few nitrogen containing molecules. And this is very important because nitrogen is the central element in what we call amino acids, which are the building blocks of the code in the DNA code, the building blocks in proteins. And they're very functional in the cell.
And these are different to the long carbon chain polymer type compounds as well that involve carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. And also in living cell, of course, we've got other minerals. So somehow, in some sort of environment, all these chemicals have to come together and they have to arrange themselves.
Now, scientists have been doing experiments trying to form these long chain polymer molecules because to make the cell, to make the cell membrane and this sort of thing, we can't just have little molecules that are only made of a few hundred atoms. They've got to be made of thousands of atoms. They've got to be what we call these long chain biopolymers.
No, they're really, really long molecules. And so science have been looking at how can these form? How can we make these in the laboratories? And the experiments haven't been very successful. They've been made.
I want to make really till these short ones, but not the real long ones. But there's another problem. If we look at the basic structure of a cell, we're not just making one or two of these long molecules for it to exist.
We've actually got to make millions of identical long chain molecules have to form. And I think this is something that people miss. In this whole scenario of this first living organism formed, it requires lots of molecules, millions of molecules, of which millions have to be identical, but to different patterns.
So you got to have millions of this pattern, millions of that pattern, millions of that pattern, and then these somehow have to assemble into a viable structure all by themselves, which is a massive problem. So all those molecules that have to randomly form, millions of them have to randomly form identical. They then have to somehow associate and come together and say that somehow did happen.
We then have another major problem in that. How can the cell replicate it? Somehow there's got to be a plan or a blueprint, otherwise it's not going to replicate the same. And that, of course, is the DNA code.
So you've got this amazing situation that somehow this molecule has to form, and then another amazing molecule has to form. Writing a code just based on four amino acids that we symbolize with act and G, australian capital territory, is good. We remember them.
That represents a code that makes that molecule that is formed. So how can it know that? And even if we had that, even if we had that code miraculously formed, and that code, even for the simplest organism, I think they would say, would require at least 250 to 400 genes. And each of these genes are going to have thousands of base pairs in them, all code letters in them.
So we've got quite a massive amount of information when you multiply that all together, we're looking at over 400,000 pieces of code would be required. And that's in this language. But that's useless unless you have a code reader.
And the code reader is what we call the ribosome. And the structure of the ribosome is so complex that its structure was only elucidated in two nine 2009. So that's not that long ago and people got the number of scientists working on, got the Nobel Prize.
Now, this structure is composed of over 300,000 atoms arranged in a specific order. And it's a code reader that is specific to read that DNA code using those letters act and g. It's incredible.
And so the whole thing wouldn't work unless that code reads it. So you've got this amazing molecule also has to arise by chance to read that code. But there's more for the molecule.
For the first cell to replicate, the code to make another ribosome has to be there. So the code to make the code reading machine is already in the code, but it's useless unless there is a code reading machine already there. So I think even from this point we can see for the first living cell to form by itself under natural processes according to the laws of physics and chemistry that we know today is absolutely impossible.
So it's a real sort of chicken and egg kind of situation where you know which came first, the code or the code reader. And you're in a real kind of bind, would you say? That's correct. It's a massive problem.
It's even greater than that because even if you had all those together and I haven't even mentioned all the specific long large enzyme type molecules, so these are large combinations of amino acids, fats and sugars and so forth, that catalyze specific chemical reactions, right? They all have to be there. And in the simplest cell, there would be hundreds of those required, often using specialized minerals to be part of their structure. So they all have to come together as well, as well as all these big structures to make the membranes and so forth.
But even if we had all those, it'd still be dead. It wouldn't be alive. So even if all these things came together, it wouldn't be alive.
They'd just be chemicals. So how do you switch it on? How do you turn this living cell? Right? And this, again is the other more than multimillion dollar question. It's more than multi universe question, really, because what happens is to make that thing alive, you have to have a whole lot of chemical reactions in place, just out of balance by the right amount so that the metabolism or the end product of one biochemical reaction is produced at just the right level to produce the next biochemical reaction that produces the next products to produce just the right level for the next reaction, and so forth, through hundreds of reactions producing just the right amount of chemical for the very first reaction.
And so you have this cyclic complex of hundreds of biochemical reactions, all interconnected that all have to be out of balance by just the right amount simultaneously incredible. Which is absolutely impossible. And scientists recognize that it's impossible to do.
And yet changing just one little chemical reaction will kill the cell. So you're really starting to blow us away with your mind boggling description of the living cell. I'm just wondering if you guys had any questions for John today.
Blair, do you have any thoughts or comments on what John's been saying? Yeah, you kind of mentioned there the impossibility of, I guess, a living organism coming out of non living matter. And yet the scientific world, even though there's no mechanism to prove how this could happen or show how it could work, still assumes that it does happen. So I guess one question that I have is this is a huge assumption to make.
How are scientists comfortable with making such a large assumption, which, if is not true, completely undermines the theory of evolution? Well, that's exactly right. So there's a couple of explanations for this. And I noticed that some of my detractors say, well, hey, John, your book is on the theory of evolution.
Evolution doesn't attempt to account for how life Earth began. So they totally say, oh, well, that's not a fair question because that's outside evolution. But really it's chemical evolution.
And it's interesting that one of the first proponents well, not so much the first proponents of chemical evolution, but one of the first authors of a textbook attempting to explain chemical evolution was Dean Kenyan, who was professor of biology at San Francisco State University. I think he was focusing on chemical evolution, on chemical because this is the thing how do you get life that's right. How do you get life from non living chemicals? And how did he go? Well, it's quite fascinating that he became a young Earth creationist, and he certainly started as an evolutionist.
So we have powerful evidence there. Now, why is it not accepted now? It's very interesting. You've got scientists like, say, Sir Fred Hoyle, a famous astronomer who was very good at maths, and he recognized that it was absolutely impossible from a statistical point of view.
And so he and I think a mathematician friend of his from the University of Cardiff wrote a book, Evolution from Space. And so they said, well, the first life must have somehow come here from outer space. But it really doesn't change anything because we believe and we understand the same laws of chemistry and physics operate throughout the universe.
So it's impossible anywhere in the universe. Well, it seems to me that's just really kicking the can further out into the universe. That's what they're really doing.
Ask a question, Dreschen, because I met someone, a neurosurgeon, and I felt quite intimidated talking to this person because he was using all kinds of terms that I didn't understand. But I asked him the basic question because he's a firm believer in evolution. And I asked him that no one has ever observed life coming from non life.
And he brought out the same reason that you said that it's actually not part of the evolution model, but he still wanted to answer, and he said, yeah, there's been many calculations done on this topic, and actually, this is the most probable, mathematical probable solution that we have. Now, I read in your book, in the third chapter, you give some of the mathematics behind the theory and that they far surpass the commonly accepted view within science of what is possible, and they far exceed that number. Why is it that, then? Is there still this consensus amongst scientists that even though it's far beyond what they have said would be possible, that still no, it's possible enough.
How come that scientific numbers are clashing, but we don't hear about it? Sure. Well, I mean, I can't speak for how these guys actually think on the basis of that, but it's got to be people that deny. So Francis Collins, for example, that headed the chemist that headed up the human genome program in a debate that he had with Richard Dawkins, he you know, God has to have started life.
That's the only possible explanation we have. And it's quite clear that these other scientists, they still want to keep God out of it. And their argument probably goes along the lines, well, we're here, so life must have started, right, because they don't want to accept the possibility that there is a supernatural creator intelligence outside us.
And so they're clinging to the hope that one day we will somehow discover some miraculous thing there. Or again, if you go down the lines of Thomas Nagel first, thomas Nagel at the University of New York, a philosopher, atheist philosopher, he essentially says, well, maybe the cosmos itself has this power to self organize itself. But really what he's saying is he's not comfortable with God.
But really, all the evidence is pointing that there's something identical to God out there that he calls, like, some sort of mind in the cosmos. And so, really, when we get to these highly intelligent guys that are really deep thinkers, they recognize this, that actually there must be a God, but they don't want to call it God, right? They want to sort of bring it down to some other physical entity. Is that like the God particle that they're trying to discover, or is that off topic? No, these are all just sort of compliments.
A God particle really has nothing to do with God. But this is the whole idea that somehow we will find some mathematical, some quantum mechanical explanation that enabled these amazing codes to somehow rise in a meaningful way, because not only do we have the code and the code reader, it's got to match. So if I speak to you in Latvian or something, and I say the word Zivis.
No idea what you're talking about. That's right. But my best friend at school would understand that that meant fish.
So unless you're programmed with the code to understand the code, it's not going to work. And so the evidence is overwhelming that codes require an intelligent design. They can't arise by chance and to have a code reader machine that's just so complex in terms of its molecular structure alone.
And the other thing is, too, that these structures that are formed require chemical reactions that don't occur in nature by themselves. They only occur many of, like the synthesis of enzymes and this sort of thing. They only occur in the protected structure of a living cell, so they can't form in nature.
Nature will break them down. We've got ultraviolet light, we've got yes, and we've got water will dissolve these longer polymers and all that break them down, all these sort of things. So, again, when we look at the environmental scenario, it's all against it.
And scientists attempt to come up with sort of solutions like, well, maybe the molecules absorbed on the surface of a clay particle and they were sort of somehow unable to move around on the clay crystals and order themselves. But really, they're clutching at straws when they look at the probability, and they forget that, hang on, you don't need just one or two of these whole molecules. You need millions to come together to form these structures.
So, John, you've mentioned probability a few times, so can you just run through with us? How would you calculate the probability that, say, a protein molecule or DNA molecule? How do you calculate the probability that that could have arisen by chance, which would kind of give us a handle on the probabilities we're looking at here. How would you go about doing that calculation? Okay, well, it's probably a bit hard for me to do without having a whiteboard or something to explain. But let's say that we wanted to order, say, 100 amino acids in order, and these simple gene generally is about 1000 amino acids.
And so when you look at the probabilities of lining up 100 amino acids and there's about 20 types of amino acids, and do the calculations, you come up with a power about ten to the power 30, which is a massive number. And then you've got to order all the different numbers of amino acids. The fact that you can have 20 different types of amino acids, they could be all different combinations.
Imagine 20 letters in the alphabet. How many ways you can arrange it. It's huge number.
It's about ten to the power 130. Wow. So we're already up to ten to the power 160.
And then we've got the fact that all those proteins, then proteins can be made in either right or left handed versions. They must all be left handed versions. The right handed ones are poisonous and they're going to kill the organism.
For a start. The power of that, when you do, the calculation will come out about ten to the power one third, about ten to the power 30. And so when you add those up, you're already up to about ten to the power 190 thereabouts.
And yet impossibility is something greater than ten to the power 150. From a philosophical point of view, when we look at the chances of something happening in the university, in the universe, we say that anything with a chance less than one in ten to the 150 is defined as impossible, generally speaking, by mathematicians. So already just the forming a gene that was only 100 basis, 100 amino acids lined up is already in that area.
So when you have an organism, a simplest organism, requiring hundreds of these that are going to be longer, it just blows it right out, let alone the probability of forming something like a ribosome, which is extremely complex in its structure. So when we look at the maths, the maths, and it's straightforward maths, and we know that probability occurs because these reactions are random chemical reactions, so the laws of probability apply very strongly. Dr.
Ashton, I was wondering, with the mathematical improbabilities being about ten to the 150, and I'm not sure if it's correct or not, but is the current understanding of how many particles there are in the universe increasing, and will that increase to the point where the probability will even out? Okay, so this is a very interesting theory, of course. Is the universe continuing to expand? So is space and time expanding or space expanding? So this theory is based on assuming there is fourth dimension, which again, hasn't been ever measured, but let's assuming that it is expanding just in three dimensions. Is new matter being added? That's the thing.
If new matter isn't being added, then there's no more atoms being added to the material. So is new material actually being synthesized by energy? So energy and matter must be conserved together. So I suppose if you have energy being converted into more matter, then you'd say, yes, there are more particles because we're converting more energy into matter.
But so it's an energy matter balance that's maintained, but it's pretty big. The number is enormous, so mind blowingly enormous, really. And, you know, one of the things you mentioned in the book, John, is that the things which are being taught in the textbooks are an 80 year old kind of model, which seems quite dated, if I might say so.
Blair, did you have any other questions on those kind of topics? Yeah, I guess the fact that these scientists are operating off an 80 year old model, I guess, why are they doing that? Why aren't they open to seeing some of the more updated models and information that you've been sharing today? Well, I think there's a growing number of scientists now that are recognizing this and that are certainly coming out and saying, hence that website that I mentioned earlier, where over a thousand scientists now with qualifications in the biological fields, doctorates in the biological fields, have put their name down, saying we're now skeptical. Particularly if Darwin Siri can explain the origin, you'd expect that people would know scientists would be eager to discover this new information. Well, definitely.
I mean, one scientist, Dr. Eugene Kuhnan, who holds a leading research position, I think it was with the National Institute of Health anyway in the US. And he points know we've got major problems with the origin of life.
Like he says, you've got a big problem with the DNA code arising, then how do you explain the so, you know, he's one of the top biologists and geneticists in the world. So these top science are recognizing it, but it's not getting out to the students. So I think I may have read somewhere where one of the other guys in an editorial or somewhere on a blog commented, hey, Eugene, don't say these things we don't want our students to know.
And this is the thing that really gets to me. The students aren't being told we've got a major, major problem, that there's no possible explanation for a mechanical origin of life. Life is supernatural.
We are evidence of the existence of a supernatural god. You might have been really wanting to join us here as we've discussed this fascinating topic. Well, the good news is you can.
If you go to any online bookstore right around the world, you can order Dr. John Ashton's book Evolution Impossible. And you can read through the chapters.
You can be one step ahead of us. Isn't that amazing? But what an exciting journey to dive into the living cell. And it is fascinating to realize that the very thing that Darwin did not understand could not have arisen by chance or evolution.
It makes you stop and wonder, is evolution really possible? That's the question that we're looking at in this series, evolution Impossible. Join us next time as we explore an essential part of Darwin's theory mutations. We look forward to seeing you.
Thank you for joining us on Evolution Impossible, a production of Three ABN Australia television. If you have any comments or questions, send an email to radio at threeABN australia.org au or call us within Australia on 024-973-3456.
We'd love to hear from you.
