 Hey, hello everybody, welcome to Modern Day Debate. Today, we are discussing abiogenesis, and we got two guys who are rare and ready to have that discussion. I love both of these guys. I know them both well. And I think that you guys are in for a real treat. It is my utmost pleasure to be here moderating, although I don't think I'm going to have to do too much. I think these guys are probably going to manage. The whip, Erica. I think we're good, RJ. I trust you. It's your internet I'm worried about, but I think we're doing pretty well right now. So the format for today, it's pretty simple. It's very conducive to a good conversation. We've got five to 10 minute openers. I'll give them each a warning at eight minutes just so they know where they're at. An hour of open discussion, and then question and answer from you guys. You're going to want to tag at Modern Day Debate with your questions. And praise is going to be kind of collecting those as we go. Drown us in questions. They want to hear the wall. They want to hear them all. So it's going to be super exciting. RJ is going to be starting us off. So RJ, I've got the timer ready. Whenever you're ready, just head on to it. Yeah, I isolate that there are three big areas that we want to deal with. One is the deep time issue, which is the ballpark involved. The other are who are the players on the field and how are we determining that? And three, the outcomes that need to result on it. So what we're looking at is bump, bump, bump, last universal common ancestor, Luca. And where does that fit in and what's going on before that? So for all we know about for benchmarks is we know blurry bacterial like thing is popping up in the fossil record by 3.8 billion years ago. Then there's a bunch of more circumstantial iffy stuff that relates to various chemical balancing measurements and all sorts. It indicates it looks like lifey things are doing something in the period all the way back to like 4 billion years. And then we hit the lay brick wall of the late heavy bombardment that is forming the earth. And I think that the general consensus is that everybody in the biogenesis field is saying, all of that incoming has got to slow down before you can do whatever it is that's happening with the origin of life. So if we're talking about 4.1 billion years or so for the bombardment dropping off and then poof 4 billion, we've got stuff going on. And then roughly a quarter of a billion years later which is a long time, we can definitely see something going on in the bacterial front of the fossil record. What is happening in all of that? One of the uncertain things is is that blurry bacteria shit, a Luca organism or some rival bacterial lineage that has since died out was Luca before that stuff. Was it a bit after? We can't tell. There's no way we can't do the genes in all of that. So those are the outer barrier that any theory of the origin of life whether God coming down Zot or purely mechanistic or whatever has to get those benchmarks. They have to fit that in with that timeframe because that's the thing we going on. Now the players, all of this has happened in my lifetime so where we start out with the gas stuff. Let's take a nice open styled atmosphere and hit it with some lightning bolts and Zot, we get amino acids and gunk and okay. And is a critter crawling out? No, no one was really expecting that. But now we're, and we refine the atmospheres we give them better and better we get more gunk that way so more than so on. And then starting in the 70s and 80s you started having a lot of people going maybe we need a training wheel. Let's look at how chemicals are interacting with clay substrates, particularly Montmoraleite. And so a lot of that stuff is going on and what's going on to where things can form layers and chemicals can come in which looks suspiciously like forming lipid layers and all this kind of stuff that's going on. Then after that, the next thing is ooh, chemicals from hydrothermal vents, isn't it neat? So is life originating like in the bottom of the ocean? Is it hydrothermal vents that are occurring up above? What's the heck's going on there? But it's dumping phosphorus and sulfites and the oodles of stop plus. Let's not forget amino acids, formaldehyde is forming in asteroids in interstellar space. All of this stuff so you can still get a reining in of material from asteroids coming down now that the weight heavy bombardment is fading out. Then the next player that's come in and this is literally only like in the last five years or so where it's really starting to get into the consciousness is wait a minute, we figured out how the moon was formed. The moon occurred from an impactor event. It's going away. The earth is spinning really fast to begin with much faster than now and the moon is really close to begin with. So there are super duper tides. So even though, and they're going in and out, in and out, in and out, you've got these wet dry cycles and the idea that there could be prebiotic material that's occurring in a little pool that dries out and condenses and then water comes back in really quick because of these damn tides. So there's an awful lot of new work that's being done by a bunch of different researchers relating to stuff up in Iceland and various vents where they're actually looking at what's going on. Those are the four main players. And the question is, are we missing some players? Are there other things that we don't know about? Because the one big giant question mark is the life of Luca, is there more to it than that? Were there other forms of life that were running before Luca takes over and nudges them all out as the best kid on the block, which gets down to our outcome issue of where we need to deal with metabolism. I'm a metabolism first guy who thinks that you have to have these cycles that are generating resources in the environment abiotically. Otherwise, the moment the next step, replicators come along, they eat themselves out of house and home if they don't have these metabolic cycles going. And there's discussions about whether the reverse of the Krebs cycle operates in a more thermodynamic way. There's a whole bunch of things that are dealing with that. And then those lipid layers again, so we think about what's going on that can then get blobbed in together to form the cellular systems. The replicators, of course, DNA, RNA, PNA maybe, some of the other ribonucleic acids that are different that we don't use now, how many of the pieces that are going on during this hypothetical training wheel phase are things that have ended up as tiny fragments in the existing Luca organisms and how much of it has gotten shunted completely aside, like Montmorelite and all of that, because Luca took over and a whole new ecosystem develops in that timeframe. So to me, those are the ballpark areas that we're talking about to make sure the deep time fits, to make sure that we can know all the players and we know of at least four relevant ones, but there may be more. And then the other issues are what are the things going on before we get to a Luca-based organism after which everything's extremely boring and it's just, you know, hop, skip and a jump into the Cambrian explosion and who cares what goes on there. So that's my summation to the thing. If any time left over, over to you, Sai. Okay. Well, that was a great summary. I'm afraid to say I'm not gonna be as entertaining as RJ, but I will try my best to add a little bit to what you said because everything you said is right spot on with respect to deep time, as you put it. I wanna talk a little bit more about what happened a little later because Luca, and again, Luca is not the first life form. It's the first life form that then gave rise to Archea and bacteria and eventually Eukaryotes. So there was probably definitely some quote life. We don't know anything about what it looked like before Luca, which and Luca was the one that, you know, had the genetic code that we now know all of life with a few minor exceptions have. So that's why we can sit, that's one of the key things we have to know about Luca. But Luca was a pretty sophisticated beast. And the reason we say that is because Archea and bacteria with a lot of exceptions here, but they seem to have inherited various things from in common from Luca. One of the exceptions is membranes, but we don't have to talk about that right now. So what are the things that Luca had? Well, it's quite, Luca was really a remarkable, as I said, a remarkable animal, or I don't know, it's not the right word, a remarkable creature because- How was he? It had an awful lot of very sophisticated and complex biochemistry going on in it. Besides having a membrane of some kind, and we don't know whether it was a bacterial type or an Archea type, it had a very complex membrane. It had the genetic code, which that means that it probably had DNA as its storage of genetic information. It had proteins and it had enzymes. And that meant that it had the transcription and translation machinery. And biochemically, the translation machinery is something that is complex beyond anything that humans have ever tried to invent or came close to inventing. So Luca was already pretty advanced. And to me as a biochemist, the real fun part is how did Luca get that way? Okay, so how did we end up with DNA? How did we have RNA first? And there is a strong hypothesis that RNA was the first genetic molecule. RNA came before DNA. There's a lot of evidence for that. There is now gaining much more evidence against it that perhaps RNA by itself really is not the answer. There's some theories about RNA with peptides but even then, how did we get to RNA and how did we get metabolism going? I have to say that, and RJ kind of alluded to this, he said he's a metabolism first guy. And what we need to say is that in a biogenesis theory, there are two dominant opposing views. And when I say opposing, I mean fist fights at conferences type of opponent. And those two views are metabolism first and replicative first. Now, I used to be a replicative first person because I worked with DNA in my lab. So I love DNA and I just love to think that that came first. But I have to say I have seen the light and I've converted to metabolism first. Welcome aboard. I'll review RJ on that. And there's a lot of reasons that that's the case. And the reason this is such a difficult issue is- I hear you. I'm sorry. RJ, you might be lagging a little bit there. Go with the heads up. The reason this is such a difficult issue is, as it turns out, it's very hard to have metabolism and evolution and actual life like Luca was, unless you have replicators that can replicate the genetic information. But it's very hard to replicate a replicator, okay? It's very hard to make another copy of a replicator unless you have enzymes and proteins and unless you have metabolism to get energy and all that. So the two things seem to need each other. And there have been theories that they both evolved at the same time and things like that. But the real take home message I think, and I think RJ kind of alluded to this is we don't know how life began and we may never know. And in fact, that's not even the focus of a biogenesis research. What the, because how are we gonna figure out how life began? I mean, we're not even sure of the conditions. What we're really looking for is how could have life begun? What are the reasonable chemical reactions at the early stage? The reasonable biochemistry? And most importantly, what kind of evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the early period of the beginning of life? One thing we have to realize is that until living cells were able to divide with great accuracy, evolution is sort of, Darwinian evolution is sort of off the table because if we don't have accurate replication of cells, it's very hard to come up with a evolutionary mechanism. But there are other kinds of evolution and that's what most people are focusing on when they're looking at the early stages. And that often comes under the general rubric of chemical evolution. And there are many theories of how chemical evolution sort of kick-started lots of things to explain. I have my own list and that includes how did chirality come about? I kind of lost track of the time, Erica, so give me a warning when we're ready. Maybe you got maybe a little bit from me. So that I'm, I'm, Oh, I got extra. Oh, great. Okay. You're a good person. Super well, Si, you got, you got about four more minutes if you want. Oh, wonderful. Okay. I'm talking faster than usual, but so one of the issues is this thing of chirality. And I don't want to get into too much detail because it gets really boring and hard to follow. But it turns out that, you know, if you look at your two hands, they're not superimposable. Okay. You can't put your hands one on top of the other and get the thumbs to match up. You can have mirror images, but they're not superimposable. That's true for a lot of chemicals. It's true for amino acids. It's true for sugars. And it turns out, and we're not totally sure we understand how this happened or why it happened, but all amino acids are left-handed, okay? There aren't any right-handed ones in life. And sugars are, so in other words, we have these different, what's called enantiomers. It's just the stereo isomers of these, the shape isomers of these chemicals. And they have to all be the same. And usually in nature, when we look at chemicals in nature, it's a mixture of both. And in fact, if you do a simple laboratory synthesis of some of these chemicals, you will get a racemic mixture, which is a combination of both. But somehow life was able to choose, or did choose, we don't know how, one shape or one structure, and that's all that's used. So that's one of the questions. There is some progress being made on that, but they're mostly theoretical. We have the question of polymerization, because we're meeting meeting time, nine minutes, yikes. Are we facing a hurdle on this Zoom? I don't see that. Yeah, I'm seeing what I was just talking about. Praise, are we by chance on a limited Zoom meeting? A limited Zoom account? Oops. Oopsie. Yeah, you have nine minutes to figure it out. While you're on site. And we thought this wouldn't be exciting, because we agree on it. Yeah. So I've got you with about three more minutes, so if you- Perfect, I'll say a little bit more. Yes, if you- Okay, so one thing is really important to know is, life is chemical. Yeah, there's no question that life is full of chemicals and chemistry is what drives life. But we have some very unusual chemicals in life, and most of those are polymers. They're very long molecules that are made up of subunits. So proteins or amino acids are made up of amino acids. Nucleic acids are made up of nucleotides. And all of that is done in modern life through biochemistry. We don't know how that polymerization happened in early life. Now, I will say that in the laboratory, it's possible to make these polymers, some of them. The nucleotides in particular, RNA in particular. We don't know if that's what happened in early life, but as I said, we're not really focused on what actually happened. We first need to determine how could it have happened. And we're not there yet either. So once we find out what could have happened, then we're a step up into finding what actually happened. And I think I have a number of other things, but we'll probably get to it during the discussion. So- Both of us dealt with LUCA because all of LUCA is a retro-engineering. They're looking at existing organisms and figuring out what would a core unit have to have, because everything from that point on has it. And so you have this little, and I'm trying to remember how much of it is. It's like, is it like five or 600 genes or something like that that's involved in- It's gotten down to around 400, the latest paper I've seen. They keep trying to get it smaller and smaller. But what's interesting is- The tiny house of origin of life problem. Yeah, what's interesting is, is that if you look at actually all the genes that are in common between bacteria and archaea and eukarya, it's only about eight. It's only the ribosomal translation genes that they all have in common, but that's probably because there was so much divergence. See, there's interesting things about RNA versus DNA. DNA has a delicious stability to it. Its molecule holds together well, but yet it's not so whole together that you can't pry it loose, but not too easily. Whereas RNA isn't nearly as stable, but it has catalytic properties that DNA doesn't. And when they discovered that the core of the ribosome that puts all of these little amino acids together is not a protein, but an RNA molecule, they're going, that's a clue about something that was going on in that earlier system. And the thing that always nags me, I try to think about the fact why is it so difficult to pin down precisely where mitochondria came from in the endosymbiotic process, as opposed to chloroplasts, and everybody says, yeah, cyanobacteria, no problem. I think it's because it's possible that the lineage from which mitochondria emerged as an endosymbion is now extinct. And that there have been lineages in bacteria that up, because you've got billions of years of stuff going on before the multi-cellularity revolution. Everyone thinks, well, it's boring, it was just bacteria. No, I think an awful lot of stuff was going on during that period. Now, Luca, if you think about origin of life thing, imagine if you had to make a vat the size of Connecticut and stir it for a million years in order to make life. That's not terribly practical. So it made very well be that it's just the scale of the thing is just beyond our capacity to do more than find each individual little subcomponent piece. Yeah, I mean, that's right. And one thing about RNA, you talk about the difference between DNA and RNA and it's true that RNA is catalytic activity, which was, and that discovery of ribozymes instead of enzymes and ribozymes, that won the Nobel Prize for Thomas. After a while of biogenesis, people were like, kids in a candy store, wow. But it's more complicated. Frankly, that had a amazing boost for the abiogenesis research field because before that, everyone was stumped. How can you possibly get DNA from what, how, where? Well, and like it always puzzled me, why is uracil in there? Here you've got RNA that doesn't even use all the same nucleotides as DNA. It's got that bloody little uracil in there. And it turns out that's probably another clue as to stuff going on. For me, one of the big issues in that training wheel period before Luca comes along is why is there the association between the particular codon assignments and the amino acids? And those, that's one where it's screaming at me. This is not an arbitrary thing. The fact that it's not evenly distributed. Some of them have like five or six assignments. Others are just singleton ones. The stop codon in the book that Jackson and I wrote, we have a whole appendix going into some of these issues because for us, it's one of the most intriguing little puzzles that when we know more about why that turned out the way it is, we'll know a heck of a lot more about what was going on in that training wheel period. Yeah, I mean, that issue of the codon assignment is under intensive research by a lot of people. And in fact, I'm kind of working on that myself with a couple of people that some of you guys know. And we're trying to look at the very beginning of that process, which is still very mysterious. The other thing about the RNA world, which gave us a- How are you on the idea that the early codons might have only had two codons instead of three? Oh, I think that's a consensus now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's generally agreed to. Fewer amino acids, therefore early life might have had fewer proteins available because lesser amino acids, but it's one of those things that it's saying, this is interesting that the amino acids that are easiest to synthesize in prebiotic experiments are the ones most commonly used in proteins. Yeah, and the other thing about, if you have a two nucleotide codon, you can still get 16 amino acids. So you're only missing four. And the four that you're missing are not what you would consider the really basic workhorse amino acid. They're the air conditioning and vinyl roof. Exactly, that's the finishing touch. So there's, I think it's pretty much a consensus that assuming that the genetic code evolves, it's probably gonna be starting with two and then you have the wobble base and you have three. And then the wildcard in the mix is how much of the origin of life only leads to, is there a reason why it's DNA RNA with the codon assignments that we have or are there alternative biologies that are perfectly viable that aren't used now because they've all gone extinct hundreds of millions of years ago in the same way trulobites and ammonites have gone extinct. And that puts a new wrinkle about the idea of whether or not there were alternative versions of those components that we can't know about because none of them led to a form that still exists and they can't be preserved in the fossil record. Well, that's right, but that goes back to my main comment that we're trying to see what was possible, what could have happened. And I think that a lot of people in the field think that if we can reconstruct a pathway or a mechanism that would lead to something that would work, it probably did happen. 137, they'll either give us more time or really be extinct or we'll have to do a speed bump and rejoin, but now- Praise and I are racing against the clock trying to get a hold of James right now. Guys, continue. Okay, all right. This is probably what happened in the origin of life, right? I mean, something went extinct, but then another thing came right along. Yeah, and that's the other thing that always wonders are some of these prebiotic circumstances, ones that will occur so inevitably that they may have occurred even during the later stages of the heavy bombardment that got vaporized by the next incoming and started over again, like the ESSA sketch getting shaken each time. That's a great, I want to bring up that question but we'll probably have to do it in the next iteration, but that is an amazingly important question is how easy was it for life to start? One answer is nothing to it. Every time you have the right conditions, you'll get life. The other answer is it's impossible. It was a miracle. And by the way, the miracle idea is not just something that religious people think, I've also heard that from scientists who are not- They say it was a one-time event, it'll never happen again. The intractable problem that has been facing all of that, and it's one of the reasons why so many anti-evolutionists love going to that origins or bust thing because they figure if they can derail that starting point, they don't care about anything that happened afterwards. RJ mentioned a couple of things that we might want to touch and one of them is something I'm really interested in. In fact, I'm actually working on, I have worked on and that's the way he put it was era catastrophe. And that's a very important issue in biology in general. It's important in virology and lots of things, medicine. But in the origin of life, it's really important because one thing, and I kind of hinted at this before, one thing that's really important to try to understand is fidelity or accuracy. In other words, when DNA replicates or RNA, RNA was the first replicator. When they replicate, it's not enough to be okay. It has to be extremely accurate. In fact, it's been estimated that the minimum accuracy for a really small RNA ribosome is 98%. In fact, in modern life, when DNA replicates, although if you compare all the proteins from one cell to its parent cell before it divided, the accuracy of those protein sequences because of the genetic code, because of the DNA replication or because of the translation, that accuracy is 99.99999%. And all of the evolutionary change is coming about from that little 0.0. Exactly. 0.00. Isn't that amazing? And you have to have, you can't be 100% because of what are you just saying. Got to have mutation. You've got to have some error. But if you have too much error, what happens next? Exactly. It blows up because the proteins stop working, the enzymes don't work. Any resolution to the origin of life in early replicators and early metabolic pre-training wheel, whatever system you want, has to be able to get over that error catastrophe thing to where it can be remarkably accurate. And that connects up with another area that's always fascinated me, is practically every year, they find yet another error correction system that goes on in the cell. You go, where did that come from? That there's just this mass of kluge complicated things that are coming in and making sure that if there is a mismatch there, it can correct it. And when some of those things misfire, you can get diseases and a whole bunch of other stuff. And for me, even though it's not part of the original abiogenesis toolkit, how those systems developed from an evolutionary point of view for my mind are one of the most intriguing unresolved problems in all of evolution. I agree. And actually, I mean, in some ways, I like to think of the origin of life as we define it. And the NASA definition of life is something that evolves. And so for me, what's really critical is to get to the origin of evolution. Because once you've got living cells that evolve, you've got modern life, well. Yeah, and the interesting thing that we can't tell but might there have been alternative biologies whose error catastrophe level was not quite so high. And that's why they're gone. I'm sure that's true. And that the ancestors of Luca got it in that nice little goalie lock zone. Just fine, just accurate enough, but not too accurate. And a way you know, and pretty soon you got kind of rinks and Donald Trump. Yeah, it's kind of like the fine tuning because you have to have enough accuracy, but not 100%. So there's a very narrow range. It's actually a kind of a different area because unlike the fine tuning argument in terms of like gravitational constants and all that kind of stuff, that may be factory presets. Literally, you can't change that in the same way that E is always going to equal MC squared. But the error catastrophe issue is much squishier because in principle, what you're having are chemical bonds happening. And so anything that theoretically can lead to an error catastrophe resolution system, a replicator that is good fidelity that can avoid breaking up because of the noise of the environment that it's operating in. We don't yet know all the parameters of what can operate in those sorts of systems. So it all has to be done from scratch experimentation. And no wonder it's not easy to do. So let me geek out a little more even than we've been doing. I have a favorite enzyme and it's an enzyme that's involved in the translation. In other words, making proteins. It's an enzyme that links together the right amino acid on one hand and the right transfer RNA on the other. And it's the transfer RNA that binds to the RNA and actually starts the protein process. But you have to have exactly the right amino acid binding to the right tRNA because the tRNA has the codon which codes for that amino acid. If you get the wrong one on there, everything gets screwed up. Now that enzyme not only binds these two completely different kinds of molecules, amino acids and nucleotides are chemically distinct. It binds them both, it sticks them together, it uses energy from an ATP phosphate and makes that reaction occur. But then it does something even more incredible. It takes that RNA, tRNA and amino acid complex and it puts it into another site on the enzyme which only the correct amino acid will fit. I'm sorry, it will not fit. All the wrong amino acids will fit into that site. So if you had by mistake, a smaller amino acid like glycine bound to the wrong tRNA, it goes to the editing site, it fits in very nicely and it's destroyed. This is one enzyme does all. So it's like you have a garbage disposal system being swung along during the square dance. Exactly. Yeah, that's, I like that one. I'm a writer, I come up with these things. Now think about this, this enzyme was present in Luca. It had to be because we had translation already. Maybe not exactly the same, maybe a little better with time. Is there something to, by the way, what is the name? Geek us out with the full name of it. Oh, amino acyl tRNA synthetase. I hate that name. Yeah, yeah. Okay, one of those that gets an acronym, right? Yeah, it's A-A-A-A-A-R-S. Is the understanding of it, is it made up of other subcomponents or is that still uncertain as to what things made up? It's not subcomponents, but it's a very large enzyme and there are 20 of them because there's one for each of them. What's the length of them in amino acids? I don't remember. It's around the 300. Oh, that's a big mother, yeah. It's big, well, it's got four binding sites. It's got to bind the amino acid, it's got to bind the tRNA, it's got to bind ATP and it's got to have this editing site and I don't know what else. I mean, it's a monster enzyme and it was present at Luca. So, you know, that's an amazing story. How did we get an enzyme? Where did the thing come from? Could it have had an other context in which it's built up by components that it's doing a completely different thing and then gets co-opted? Or did the hand of God come down like Michelangelo, Zot, let there be this large acronym and here's a gift to you, South Cordova, be prepared. Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you something. Now we're talking about religion. I believe the hand of God was involved, but that doesn't mean that I think that God did it. As you like this, we like to say God did it because whatever God, I as a Christian, I believe God created everything, but the question for science is how? Yeah. And it doesn't matter whether you believe that God created it or somehow it happened spontaneously, but we still want to know how, how did this happen? And I mean, frankly, I don't want to get into a long religious thing, but the early Christians, the earliest Christians in the West, in Christian Europe, that's why they were studying nature. They wanted to understand how God- Oh yeah, Nicolasteno and geology, they would like to know why their backyard looks the way it does. That's right. So anyway, I find, you know, this was part of how we ended up with, as you said, error correction systems. That's what made me think of it. And, you know, there's DNA repair. At one point in my professional sciences life, I was actually studying DNA repair and it's absolutely amazing how many error correction systems exist in biology. And that also includes gene regulation, which turns out to be an incredibly important issue in modern biology. Genes just don't do stuff. If anything, I would, I'd say a huge chunk of what involves evolvability in other areas has to do with the regulation of genes, not the origin of new genes, because the toolkit of us and arthropods isn't all that different, but boy, we certainly look different than a mayfly. Yeah, and, you know, evodivo evolutionary development follows from that. So yeah, it's, and so all we, these are some of the questions that have to be dealt with when we talk about the origin of life because it's not enough, and we know this because people have tried it for decades, you can't just take some DNA, some RNA, some protein, some enzymes, some other chemicals. Dump them into the, into the plant. It doesn't work. They don't do anything. You've got to have these systems. My co-author, Jackson, came up with the term monocosism, which is that obsession with the single cause for the thing. And then you have the fistfights between the metabolism first versus the thing. Oh, no, no, excuse me. There's probably a bunch of, that was the case with that lunar origin thing. Both of the two models for the formation of the moon were wrong. Right. And actually, if you think about it, I love that term, monocosism, thank you, Jack. Use it freely. That doesn't work anywhere. It doesn't work in history. It doesn't work in politics. Out of Africa versus the multi-regional model in human origins, you know, or the cursorial versus the arboreal model for flight origin in birds. It turns out that always, it may lead to some interesting fistfights along the way, but ultimately some new generation has to come along, particularly if they're interdisciplinary, to where they're going, this part is pretty good, and this part's pretty good. And then this part here that I've been studying, and was there a problem here before? It's like, yeah, let's move on. Oh, on the corality subject that you detest, I'll say this. My reading of the latest literature has to do with the amount of the degree to which space conditions, including ultraviolet light, which is normally thought of as a terrible problem, but in the chiral thing, the idea that it can skew a little bit here, a little bit here, a little bit here, and then the stuff coming into the pot. It's certainly a complex layer. Oh, I got something calling me. I'm gonna have to, hold the phone. Carry the show for a second. Hello. It's you, Si. So, yeah, well, here. I'm literally in the middle of a debate, and there's no movie tonight. Just mute yourself for a second. RJ, mute yourself. Praise, just mute RJ for a second. A lot. If possible, if praise is there, I would do it myself, but I lack the power. Okay, so what RJ was just talking about this issue of chirality, which I talked about before, the left-hand, right-hand. You know, there are probably some solutions to that. He was talking about UV light, and there could be other solutions that have to do with a solid state chemistry. And I think a lot of these very difficult questions have solutions, but one thing we have to keep in mind is, is that the solutions are not easy. They're not something that we can find quickly. And that has a lot of implications for some important things like astrobiology. You know, if it turned out that we had not necessarily solved the question of abiogenesis, but at least solved the question of how life could start, then we could be very confident that we would definitely find life in lots of places where it could exist. I'm not that confident, frankly, because I see all of these problems with the origin of life. On the other hand, we have to go back to what RJ said at the very beginning, which is that on earth, it looks like life began almost as soon as it possibly could. I mean, it actually, the... That's why geologists want to go to Mars in person to find out was there ever life on Mars? Venus is like the ultimate hellhole, so I don't think anyone's gonna be dealing much of that. No, but was there ever life on Mars? And is there any way of figuring out if it's like, I had a minor error catastrophe of my own because a friend of a friend's refrigerator died in our heatwave here, and so he's arranging to bring his stuff over and I got space in my refrigerator. Yeah, yeah, it's wacky, yeah, it's wacky. Okay, RJ, hold on, because I think Sai was making a point there, I just wanna make sure that he got the rest of his sentence out. Go ahead, Sai. I don't know, I was saying that, I agree that Mars, it's really important because there are these two opposing things. First, we had life start very early on planet Earth, as soon as it could, heavy bombardment was just starting to end when already we have evidence that something was going around. On the other hand, why is it so hard to figure it out? I mean, we know all the chemistry, we know a lot of it, most of the biochemistry, and I'll tell you my own view, which is philosophical, is that we're missing something basic, and I don't know what that is if I did. Yeah, we know, if you knew who you wanted to be. I have kind of a Gaia hypothesis approach to it, which is once life gets going, it basically takes over, and it self-homostatically modifies stuff in that, and that's part of the reason why it would be a astonishingly interesting thing if it turned out there was actually some sort of hunkered down bacterial form of life on Mars, but I'm not holding my breath. Well, I don't know. I mean, it'll be an interesting answer once whatever the answer is. And then Europa, another place to look at, in terms of potential oceanic life under its ice caps, that too, I'm not holding my breath, but boy, wouldn't it be neat. And then the other issue is life as we know it. It's always that little asterisk life as we know it, and maybe there can be life other than as we know it, although I'm not holding my breath on silicon-based organisms either. I have to say on this issue, I am very, very conservative. I really believe that life requires carbon because of its- Chomps, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur. And why do I say that? Because carbon is uniquely able to be the basis of so many different kinds of chemicals. And liquid water moderator. Sorry? Liquid water moderator. You can give ammonia to do it at high pressure, but water is handy. Plus it freezes from the top down, which is nice for critters anyway. So you need water and you need carbon. And I went to a seminar recently from somebody who was talking about all kinds of other life forms based on ice, based on, I don't know, all kinds of things. And I listened politely, but frankly, I don't see the chemistry working. I mean, life almost by definition is incredibly complex, chemically speaking. It makes cute science fictions, but not good science. Science fiction is interesting, but you never see a mechanism for all these weird things. And even silicon has some major- Mars is too wet for a silicon-based organism. Oh, that's interesting, didn't it? Yeah, because the silicates break down in water. And so Mars is not arid enough to avoid a silicon-based organism just going, boop, boop, boop, boop. Yeah, okay. Well, that's interesting. Yeah, and that's a problem with silicates. Unlike carbon, where it's promiscuous, but not too promiscuous, so it can make those little multiple bonds like silicon and they can be coupling and uncoupling just enough, silicon, once it makes those oxygens, it's stuck there and it ain't going back. That's right. So I really do think that life has to be carbon-based. And a lot of people will say, well, you're not using your imagination, which is true. But I do use my imagination when I try to think about what we're missing in the origin of life. I think that there are, there's some, and I always go back to physics when I talk about this because nobody could figure out how is it possible for the speed of light to be a constant, right? And nobody could get it. And how did Einstein get it? He took a whole new kind of map that no one had ever used before. Well, they used it. Although William Clifford, Riemann math and all that stuff was perilously close to relativity theory back in the 1860s, but he dropped dead in his 30s. And so we never quite worked it out. So we might be talking about Cliffordian relativity theory instead of Einsteinian had he lived. Was he using Remanian math? Yeah, yeah. He was a British mathematician and he was really, as many were pressing into that area but then he died and nothing came of it until that funky little patent clerk there in Germany said his mind to it. So I think that biology needs something like that. I think we're in many of these areas of understanding including, you know, how did, which came first metabolism, you know how did RNA begin and how did RNA start? Some of it will involve interdisciplinary work where they're modeling and some of the tools that are probably being used in completely different areas that allow people to visualize four dimensional processes, things that are happening in space and time, you know, easily dealing with way. We're finding that in geology where they're working out plate tectonics in a much more sophisticated level because they can model stuff that's buried down in the deep earth. I think exactly that modeling is one of the hurdles that you have to get past for a lot of benefits. And I agree. And I think that one of the big problems that biologists have is not being very conversant with math. And that's a problem. And I agree with you about the modeling. Some of the best people in the field are very mathematically sophisticated. Jack Sostak, for example. Yeah. One of the leaders. In some respects, a topological problem. And we know how incredibly sensitive some biological processes are as to a particular atom in a particular thing along a trench. You have to think of it three dimensionally. You just can't look at the sequence. And I'm sure that some of that is playing a role. There's always the thought that some scientists from 2175 comes in the time machine back there and explains to us all about it. And we're going, oh duh, come here. Yeah, like what we do. Well, actually maybe, but maybe not. I mean, Einstein came up with the fact that time is not constant. That's why the speed of light is constant. And that's kind of tough, but it is true. I mean, it's demonstrably true. So math is a beautiful example because of the Fermat's last theorem. That old pissy-ant Fermat wrote this thing. Oh, this little formula here. And I think it's true. And I have a beautiful proof of it, but it's too big to fit in the margin, FU. And mathematicians spent the next 400 years, the biggest minds in math, banging away at Fermat's last theorem and no one could prove it or disprove it. And then some little lower echelon mathematician figures it out within my lifetime, our lifetime. And he did it with mathematics that wasn't known to Fermat. So even though we now know that Fermat was correct, we still don't know whether he was bullshitting us in that he couldn't possibly have had a proof or not. It was done by a mathematician named Andrew Wiles and it required computer work. So there was no way that was Fermat's solution. Yeah, and I think some of that involves some of the complex topology, mathematics and stuff that didn't exist back where they're looking at a higher level of things. So some, some boffins, people in your generation, Erica, are going to be interconnecting stuff because all of the most interesting science that's been going on is interdisciplinary where people could get outside of their comfort zones and have somebody come in, seeing it from a completely different perspective, visualizing things using mathematical tools. I'm a Platonist in that I think the universe is what mathematics does for a living. So I think that that's the one I roll here. I want to bring up something that may be a lot more controversial, but I'm going to leave it a little bit of time, like two to three minutes to do it. So I know you'll get excited, but give me a chance. So I found a paper by Dennis Noble, who is one of the great physiologists of our time. He did a lot of work in cardiology and he has some very interesting ideas about evolution, about biology in general. And he had a paper published in 2017 called, was the match microblind or was she one-eyed? It was published in a journal called Biology. And it's a fascinating paper. It's fairly philosophical, but what he's talking about, by the way, I should say Noble is not a Christian. So this does not have anything to do with faith-based stuff. But what he said is, and he's not alone, many people have said this, including, by the way, Daniel Dennett, who we know is not a Christian, okay. But he is persnickety. What he's, yeah, and this is a persnickety idea. What they're saying is, we need to bring something back to biology that was excluded from biology during the 20th century. It's teleology. Exactly. We need to bring back teleology. So I read the paper and it's very, very interesting. I had never thought of this, even though I knew the biochemistry. What Noble said is, there is teleology, not just in the way animals work and run around and hunt each other, whatever everybody does. They do things for a purpose. But this teleology within the biochemistry of a cell and his example is the immune system. He talks about the fact that you have this system, I'm not gonna go into the details because that would take an hour, but you have this system where you have the necessity for creating a lot of mutations very quickly that allows for a great deal of diversity in the antibody structures. How do you do that without destroying the main antibody? And the way you do it is you have one small region of that gene, of that protein, which is very variable, which is hyper mutable. So that region is mutated tremendously. You get a million different variations, each of which provides a binding site for a different antigen, okay? But the rest of the gene is hypomutable. You never get a mutation, it's called the constant region. And that allows you to have a very, that allows you to maintain the basic structure of the protein while making many, many changes and many, many iterations and differences in the antibody binding site, which is what determines what antigen it's gonna attach to. And what he said, and of course I knew that, you learned this in graduate school, but what I never thought about is how does that work? How does the cell, how does the cell know that it should mutate this part of the gene a lot and that part of the gene not at all? I don't actually know how that works. Yeah, and no one yet knows about it. No, no, but somehow that happens. And it happens, it turns out he also has a table with several other enzymes that are hypomutable in one place and not in others. But, you know, it's, and he calls this, this is a form of teleology. Now, this is not somebody who's thinking, oh, what do I need to do? I would do the argument that that is a loaded word. And part of it that might be going on here as well, that isn't quite in that same thing is the whole notion of evolvability, that certain systems that occur deep in the switching of things can lead off in a direction that's extraordinarily interesting. And this happens over and over again in evolution. Why, amongst all of the Cambrian phyla that come along, some struck their thing on the stage for quite a while but fizzle out, whereas the little wormy chordates had features about them that made it more resilient. And so are there higher level structures that you could slap the name teleology onto or you could put the name of evolvability onto where those things have more options available. What it looks like in that immune system is a system of stable core with a busy little square dance going on on the top where that works at a level where some alternative one. And of course, in the immune system in general, there's an awful lot of layers going on in the immune system. I think almost that it's not like a system. There's umpteen different versions of it in varying organisms, even in the vertebrates. Yeah, and I think, I think you're... I'm sorry, go ahead. I'm just gonna let you guys know you got about five minutes before we're gonna move into the Q and A if that's okay with you guys. And you've got a billion questions. We've got some that I want you guys to take your time. Well, you got some good ones. Last call for questions during this last five minute period if you guys have a question for one or both of the debaters, shoot on that modern day debate. Okay, keep going, sorry. Take us outside. Well, I think we, you know, to call this a debate as sort of a stretch, we haven't really argued about anything. What we have basically done is double team, you know, talking about what's obvious, I think for everyone that we are both very passionate about and that is the science of biology and especially how it all started. And I think that, you know, there is so many, if anyone listening is thinking about biology as a career, do it. There's so many question marks in there that somebody will find something of interest to work on. Absolutely, you can't lose. I mean, even if you just wanna go into the abiogenesis field, you have your choice of amazing questions to look at. And, you know, maybe you won't cure a disease, but maybe you will. I mean, you never know. So I think that this is a truly wonderful area of science to look into. And I will also say to any of my Christian brethren who are watching, this is a fascinating area of the theology as well. And we didn't talk about that tonight. This is not the subject, but it, you know, philosophy and theology have to come in here somewhere because, you know, life is just too big to be ignored by anything. I mean, everybody. If it was good enough for the Newtonian era to thrash over theological issues of stuff, of course the living systems are just even more so. Right, absolutely. You know, I have some astronomy friends who like to throw big numbers at me, like, you know, the huge size of the galaxies, the huge size of the cosmos, how many planets, how many stars. And I say, you're not talking about big numbers. You talk about how many molecules are in a single cell. Yeah. Then you talk about big numbers. And the thing that gobsmacks me, and I think maybe one of those variables that play a part in things is how rapid the process is. Amino acids being plugged together in proteins. It's not like clink, clink, clink, clink an assembly line. No, it's. Yeah. And that speed of which molecules are connecting together in ways what sub connections are happening in that churning cauldron in possibly pre-Luca organisms that we can't even model yet to be able to figure out how that's affecting the scene. Right, exactly. So it's a rich area. And I think with that, we can go to questions. Yeah. They better be good ones, Erica. That's the perfect spot to end it on. Cause I mean, I, you know, no one will see her from the moderator, but I feel the same way. That's what makes science so awesome is that there's so much room for people to get in there and really sink their teeth into a question. Do you feel like? It's effing fun. You can use, yeah. There's something for everyone. If you're interested in it, you can research it. So cool. All right. So our first question is from Ron Neckadness for $10. And I think this is more for both of you to answer if you'd like. They say, Cojo has published results showing that L-form amino acids and racemic amino acids could be co-crystallized with L-A-S-N. They could be preferentially crystallized in depressions of rocks on seashores. So I think that's more of a statement if you guys would like to discuss. Yeah, that's what I meant when I said there's a lot of research on how this could have happened, including, you know, seashores. And that's more of that wet dry cycle things. Yeah, Shoshuki Kojo. He's got a 2015 paper of him, S. Isolvaline-Contained in Meteorites induces enantoneric excess in the glumatic acid during recrystallization. That one's in the origins of life and evolution of the biosphere. And yes, there's a damn journal devoted exclusively to this subject. There's a chirality journal. It does nothing but chirality. As it should be. Yeah, Shoshuki Kojo, S-H-O-S-U-K-E. And an awful lot of that material will be available open access for people. So dive in, kids. The water's fine. All right, from Jeannie Russell for $5. They say, God did it. Where shall we draw the line on naturalism? Hey, they're trying to pick fights here. I say it's on the opposite side of left of Texas. It's a great question. Frankly, I think it's a great question. And I think it's something that everyone has to think about, depending on their point of view. If you believe in God as the creator, you're gonna have a different answer than if you don't. And science by itself is not gonna get you there. So, you know, I'm not even a new issue. This is something Isaiah had to wrangle with. You know, the God of all knows all, good and bad. Figure it out. So yeah, I mean, I think it is a good question, but it doesn't matter what the answer is. Because even if the answer is, God created life. Which I happen to believe. But that doesn't tell us anything. That just tells us God created life, which is nice. But how? It's what I said before. What did God do to create life? Did he come down with a chemistry set and play around with it? And that was one of the big distinctions. Let me give me a plug for the role of Christianity in the origin of science. Unlike the Chinese Taoists who were doing kind of protochemistry and stuff in that context, they didn't like the idea that you could take nature apart and look at it and learn shit. Whereas part of the notion, in part because the way in the Middle Ages, they began to depict God as a draftsman with compass and straight edge, scribing the heavens and all of that. That mental image that you could maybe take the pieces apart just like you could take apart a clock or take apart something else and look at the things and learn from it. And that was the thing that over many, many centuries and Cloakie's false starts and all the rest eventually led to the scientific and industrial revolution on which is a whole other subject. All right, from experiments in prebiotic chemistry for $10, they think we have observed hundreds of naturalistic causes, but never a supernaturalistic cause for anything. So it's likely that the origin of life has a naturalistic cause too. I think we are pretty close. So. Okay, well, first let me take the end of that first. We're not pretty close, okay? I mean, it depends how you define close. We're closer than we were. James Ture, who I admire is a great chemist. He often says we're no closer than we were, you know, in 1953 with the Middle Ages. Well, that's not really real. I mean, we are closer, but we are still hugely far away from getting the answer and you heard many of the reasons why. Yeah. With respect to supernatural and natural, obviously that's true, but in many ways, what I like to say is that depends on how we define natural and supernatural. Yeah. Okay, so science keeps moving. And as we were talking about before, it keeps changing, it uses new math, it uses new kinds of philosophical ideas, it uses new tools. And as that changes, as it progresses, what used to be maybe considered metaphysical or supernatural, like what we now know the way electrons behave, become natural. So yeah. And yet when you dig down into that, it turns into this weird quantum world where you have an entire, and the same thing with relativity theory. There's a wonderful line from Inherit the Wind that I'm reminded of at this point where Adero, who is after all the pro-evolution guy in the story, and he's saying that a child's ability to memorize a multiplication table is one of the great miracles or wonderments of the universe. And so there's all sorts of things that even down, one of the tests that Alan Alda's bunch where he's trying to get scientists to learn better to communicate with people in learning theater and all of that, one of the first problems they put, they would ask children to ask questions to get an answer to it. And one of the very first ones off the block was why the fire flame looks the way it does. And it turns out that's really a complex problem. And the moment they had to start thinking through what that meant, another one that I love to use is when we're talking about the origin of life, you know something we don't know what causes it exactly? Lightning in a thunder cloud. It's still not resolved how positive and negative charges can segregate to make a zot on frying you on the golf course when you put your putter up too high. And yet it's still electrical. So why should we expect the origin of life to be any more in there? But yeah, please everybody out there that's a non-believer, don't go off to say, hey, we've resolved the origin of life. No, you're only gonna get beaten in the ass on that one. All right, next question for $5 from Lockbeard. Einstein stole most of his ideas from Henry Poincard was wrong anyways. At least he married his cousin, right? Stop worshiping that lying fool. So take that how you will. No, yeah, yeah. Now, point care. All right, next up, Amy. And the answer is no, he didn't. Amy Newman for $5 after show at my channel. Great job, Monning Erica. Thank you, don't mind if I do. It was easy with these guys. And question for Dr. Gart. Oh, before I move on, there's also going to be an after show at South's channel, Evidence and Reasons. So two after shows, Amy Newman, Evidence and Reasons. Please go support these two. They support Modern Native 8 and we love them both. So question for Dr. Gart from Amy. What would it take for you to believe in a naturalistic origin of abiogenesis? I do believe in a naturalistic origin for abiogenesis. I've already, I published one paper in peer reviewed scientific literature on the whole issue of fidelity and continuity in replication. It's a modeling theoretical papers and a theoretical journal. I'm now working, as I think I mentioned before with a couple of guys who both atheists on looking at the very, very earliest stages of genetic code, codon evolution. So I'm looking at that. Keep shooting me the papers on those as they come up. I don't already have them in my thing. Yeah. I'll put a link on the description when we're done. Let me shock everybody. I bet Psy and I and Erica all believe in a naturalistic origin for the Rocky Mountains too. But let me just say that I also believe in, yeah, I believe in a natural origin for the world and I believe in a natural origin for everything because that's what we study with science and I'm a scientist. But I also am a Christian and I believe that God is behind us. I don't know how. And that's not something that I can predict. Let me just finish. That's not something that I think I can find out scientifically because science doesn't deal by definition. Science deals with nature. It doesn't deal with anything that's outside of nature. So we can't address those issues scientifically. These are matters of faith and they have a whole different way of looking at things. So it doesn't take anything. I'm already there. I'm already saying the origin of life is naturalistic. That does not rule out my faith in God anyway. I was just gonna say that if somehow or other some clever scientist cracked the problem and figure out how life originated in that mechanism and demonstrated in the lab, religious people can easily say, look how clever God was to have designed a universe which matters self-organizes that way. Yeah, I mean, there's one thing that I mean, I'm very active on Twitter and I often get into arguments with atheists and one of the arguments that I don't enjoy is every question we've ever had has always been answered naturalistically and never by supernatural. And they talk about for and lightning. I hate to tell it to you, but for and lightning is hundreds of years old. There are active people who say, oh no, it wasn't natural, God came down and did this. I don't know anyone who said that. I mean, they may say that it happened 6,000 years ago of the younger creationists, but nobody's talking about that. Yeah, I mean- And look at who's Lamaitra at the root of Big Bang cosmology. People who had a religious faith, the Jesuits that started out as the shock troops of the reformation, a counter-reformation turning to all these astronomy geeks there at the Vatican Observatory. Yeah. Just yesterday, the unbelievable show which is a great British show had two physicists on to talk about believe it or not, origin of life. Everybody's getting into it, right? So- Yeah, jump on the bandwagon. One was Jeremy England, who was an Orthodox rabbi. And one was Paul Davies, who is not religious, but he says he's like Einstein. He believes in some kind of a- Quantum uncertainty and quantum consciousness. Yeah, some kind of force or something. So I mean, spirituality is- And neither of them used that in their discussions, which were all about physics and biology. They came up as a question and they both explained how they felt, but I don't know how to explain this any better than I can. When you're doing science, you're doing science and we know how to do science. The rules are very clear and the methods are very clear. And you don't violate that. You stick with that and you learn what you can learn. And as a Christian, I firmly believe that what we, why we worship God is not because of what we don't know, but because of what we do know. And I put that in my book and I talk about that all the time. Yeah, and I can then put on the field Julian Huxley's, I think it was Julian Huxley, who, no, no, a JBS holding the old line that says not only is the universe, he used the word queerer than we can imagine, it may be queerer than we can imagine. And so even in a universe that may or may not have gods in it and has naturalistic processes, there are levels of, whoa, that are very probably built in to the structure of the universe. Because even within my own lifetime, we've seen the process of going from billiard ball Eddington style atoms to particles, subatomical particles, to quarks, to possibly vibrating strings, to maybe turtles all the way down. Who knows what it's going to be? And that's just one little discipline. So there needs to be a degree of humility and amazement, the fact that the universe is a really weird, amazing place that we can understand pieces of by the science thing. And let's just go with that, shall we? Got it, good. Yeah, we're on the same page there and just a clerk for $5. And just to note, we have about 10 minutes, maybe 15 given we had that little blip in the middle before we've been at about two hours. So what I think we'll do is, depending on how you guys feel, we'll do this our last super chat and then we'll go one or two of the- Time flies, even with the interruptions. Or if you'd like, we can end directly at the hour. It's completely up to you guys because we here at modern day debate respect the time of the debaters. Discussers today, I would say. First of all, we'll hit Joseph Clark's super chat. They ask, doesn't science presuppose logic, a discipline that expands the scope of reason to embrace universal and formal axioms by which man can discover God? I think that's very topical. I hate to- I think it cuts both ways. I hate to say this and I'm interested in what RJ thinks, but logic, I love logic. I studied symbolic logic in college. It's great. You know where it doesn't work at all? Biology. Biology is not a logic of science. What's that? It doesn't even work in logic. And the bugbear here is Ernst Gödel, Kurt Gödel, undecidability propositions. Hold onto your seats, kids. Fasten your seatbelt down, write this one down. All logical systems contained within them undecidable propositions. Right. Live with it. And when you look at biology, one of the logical principles that is always disobeyed is Occam's razor. So, you know, there are so many examples, but the one I use is nucleotide synthesis. You have these pathways of synthesis which are totally redundant. There are like three or four different ways to activate or inhibit a particular metabolic pathway. You don't need that. It's extra complications, but that's what biology is full of. Yeah. And that extra complication is giving us a clue as to what was going on. You have to have a system that ends up with that degree of multiple interactive redundancy. That is itself a clue. Yeah, it is. And sometimes that redundancy, we find out, oh, that's why, but sometimes we don't. And I think one of the points is that biology works and in order to work, you got to have backup systems. I mean, this is true in engineering. Have you read, have either of you read Douglas Hofstadter's old book, Goodwill and Sir Bach? Yes. Yeah, have you, Erica? I'm answering super chats one second, Arjay. You got to keep talking, sorry. Yeah, it was one of the most thought-provoking, annoyingly thought-provoking works that I've ever read in my life. And even though it was written like 40 years ago, still remains thought-provoking, even though our understanding of biology and things have advanced beyond it, the basic percepts that are in there, you learn about Bach and Goodwill and Max Escher, the guy with the paintings where people are walking up around the ceilings, all about the role of non-linearity and systems and unpredictability and all that. And so it's a gigantic monster of a book. But if you ever want to have a thing and you can literally read it in any order you want, that was part of that recursivity element of it, that it's one of those things that will remind you of how immensely complicated systems are. And you'll be thinking along, is DNA the way it is? Is it because it's the only system that will work? If you can have a brain composed of little chemical signals where there is no brain-y thing in there that's you and yet there you are, can an ant colony be self-aware? Because it has little ants doing things that are the counterpart of calcium molecules going across. How do we draw the line on all this stuff? It's an immensely thought-provoking book that it's a monster to read, but everybody should. What's the name of it again, Arjun? Goedl Escher Bach, The Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstetter in 1980 something. I think it may even be available downloadable and all of that. It's one of those, it's gone with the wind and the war and peace of philosophical, biological, speculative thinking. It's a whiz bang of a book. It's not, yeah. That sounds like a multiple sit-down kind of book. We have another super chat from Ron. Goodness, we have two more super chats if that's okay with you guys. For $5, they asked, this one specifically for Psy, does Psygar believe, I think he kind of answered this, but they want to know, I guess, more specifically, does Psygar believe that God created Luca? Well, I think it's the same answer that I gave before. I don't know. I mean, if God did create Luca, then he did it in a way that we want to know how. Okay. It's true that there is a big gap there, but again, I don't go with God of the Gap. So if there is a big gap, we need to know, is there a mechanism that we don't know about? I mean, RJ mentioned the origin of mitochondria and, you know, endosymbiosis, how did that happen? I mean, that represented a big discontinuity in the evolution of life. And all of a sudden, you know, we had this new organelle get into scale. The hole is bigger than the sum of its parts. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, I would rather keep the question scientific for this discussion. I mean, the answer to the question is simply yes. But again, I have to go back to what I answered about 10 minutes ago or five minutes ago, what that means. And I'm not gonna repeat it now, but... The essence of the scientific mind, and for that matter, people who like to read mysteries and all that, is that you wanna know how the magic trick's done. There you go. Thank you. I like that. From Bubble Gum Gun for $5. I guess it's just for both of you, but whoever wants to answer it by all means, they say, when God becomes accepted as truth, how do you think that will change our social interactions? How will people change if they fear demons or hell? Gee, haven't we already reached that stage? I don't know. Hey, man, the question's for you guys, not me. Yeah, yeah. The great Golgafrinciam from there, you know, the gargle seizure is something from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As a secularist, I look at the point is that there has never been a point in human history where everybody believed the same thing. And everybody's religion has been a thing that has evolved over time and people can fold the history of things in. There's benchmarks in there just as much as there is on Luca. And so it could be argued that a religion that cannot adapt to the new understanding is probably gonna bore the shit out of everybody and is gonna disappear, which is why there aren't too many Athena believers today. Right. Yeah. Okay, guys. And Sai, unless you wanna add something, that's all of our super chats and we're about two minutes to the end. We have a lot of other questions that weren't super chats, but there were a lot of them and I'm not 100% sure of the order that they came in. So I'm kind of hesitant to get into that. And we've been going for about two hours as well. Well, if there are any science questions, if you didn't call that out, I'm here for the duration. And Sai is, we're here until they kick us out of the door. But let's stick the theological ones because we've already answered that. Okay, here's one for you, RJ. And we'll go through them then. We'll go through the ones we got because I think there are quite a few science ones in here, which is great news for you guys. From standing for truth, for RJ, he asks, can you show us a technical paper of a non-functional ERV going from non-functional to something extremely functional in determining cell types, embryo, logical development, cell stress responses, and immune system balance. Thanks. Gee, right off the bat out of memory. No, but that is a trope that you've been doing in lots and lots and lots of debates with people over the times and we could go into that. Why would you expect that that should happen? That would be the thing we're expecting your monograph on standing. Okay, from Dessal Drace, this one's for Sai. So we're going back and forth. Dessal asks, you mentioned polymerization in the phylogenetics information of membranes. Any thoughts to share on Nick Lane's model in the vital question and power sex suicide? Okay. Sai, Sai's. I don't know how much I can answer that. Nick Lane's book I read and I found it interesting, but frankly, I didn't find it really germane to some of the biochemical issues that I'm interested in. I mean, he is a, I think he's a biochemist. I don't remember now, but I wasn't, I mean, it mostly deals with the whole issue of energy conversion. And now the question that was about polymerization. Phylogenetics and formation of membranes. And then- Oh, okay. You were talking about Nick, your thoughts on Nick Lane's specific model as well. Yeah. So the phylogenetics of membrane structure really is interesting because it, and I don't remember what Lane says about that, so I can't answer it. But what's interesting is that it diverged radically after Luca when you look at archaea and you look at bacteria. And so we don't know what the original membrane structure was, or was it a combination of these two? It's different phospholipids were being used in these two different kingdoms or whatever. So the phospholipid, what we're used to is what we have in bacteria and in eukaryotes. But the archaea have a totally different phylogenetics for membranes. And it's, I don't remember now what the chemistry is, but it's a different kind of phospholipid. Nick Lane and William Martin did a 2012 paper in the December 21st issue, 2012 of cell on the origin of membrane bioenergetics. So that probably is the most recent thing I've seen in terms of them stating what the ballpark issues and stuff are. Yeah, that's coming back. So in other words, so again, a little bit to explain this whole thing a little more, biological energetics depends on membranes. It depends on the transfer of protons and sometimes electrons across membranes. It's a gradient system. So once you have these protons crossing a membrane, eventually that can lead to the turning of a molecular machine which puts another phosphate onto an adenosine diphosphate making ATP. And once you've made ATP, you then have the energy currency for the rest of the cell, everything else in the cell that requires energy uses ATP. And so that's chemical energy, which is created by this mechanical energy of protons going through a membrane, which is created by this osmotic force. So it's an incredibly complex and just beautiful system of several kinds of energy conversion. I'm sorry that I don't remember what Lane says about it. It's been a couple of years since I read the book. Yeah, and he's got a wire cells powered by protein gradients that he did for nature education in 2010. So a lot of it is like a decade old. So it's kind of like lane is like in the on off ramp of the hot lane of current research. Yep, I am totally with you, with both of you guys. Our next question, actually you guys are, you guys made the right call on this one because there are a bunch of really good science questions that are fairly divided between the two of you. It's fine. And I can tell you guys are enjoying this and I'm loving it too. I'm just trying to manage our questions as well. And the chat from Church of, or sorry, from Creo Debunk there first. And this is to both of you or I guess to all, I don't know if they're including me. I'm going to assume that no. Hey, why not? They say absolutely, Erica. Hey man, you know what? I'm staying removed today, but as much as I would love to, there are some subjects that I just can't, you know, keep my mouth shut about of course, but this is all you guys. They say have you, the two of you heard about the recent experiment where some blobs show selection of pure chemical reactions, some blobs. I'm not sure what that's referring to maybe just. Yeah, yeah, that would that be English or metric blobs. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure. I know about some of the things in terms of membrane formations. And I think some of that comes up with the name that suddenly escapes me. The guy just doing the research up in Iceland and all of that where- Oh yeah. Yeah. And- I don't know what he's talking about. The thing is is that it's all part of the stuff of trying to do experiments real time with very limited amount. That's one of the pitfalls of science research is that you've got to trim it down to a manageable level where you can look at your variable and measure the specific variable. Whereas complicated things like life have a bunch of variables all happening at once. But if you can't do an experiment where you're learning anything where you've got all that happening at once because you don't know what's happening. All you can look at is the output. So yeah, I'm not exactly familiar with the blob literature on that. I'd have to see the technical paper on it. I would actually like to see the technical literature too because I'm always tickled when you get into the- I've seen the movie of it though and that was with Steve McQueen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well I read the Goosebumps books which I'm sure covered very similar topics but I do love when the literature delves into such- Blobs. Blobs. All right, from church of entropy to both of you could bound photon fields be responsible for the DNA manufacturing and enzymes lowering the ignition energy of digestive processes, like EG- Ooh, I think that's more in your field side than mine. Yeah, but say it again, I didn't get the first part. I'm sorry. No, no, no problem. To both, could bound photon fields be responsible for the DNA manufacturing and the enzymes, enzymes and quotations lowering the ignition energy of digestive processes, EG consciousness is light. Boy, that's a wide range. Yeah, I'm not, I don't understand- I'm getting whiplash on that question. Could what, what was it? I gestured in consciousness, that's a broad things. Yeah, something about- What was the something that could- Yeah, it's- Protein bound, I don't know, is that the electron configuration of the- They say bound proton fields, so could bound- Bound proton fields. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Photon fields, I mean- Photon fields, bound. Photon fields be responsible for DNA manufacturing and the enzymes lowering the ignition energy of digestive processes, i.e. consciousness is light. Church of entropy, if you're in the side chat and you feel like clarifying- Yeah, could you translate that into English for us? I just don't know. Yeah, I- It sounds like a bunch of trainwreck of concepts where they're not actually connected. My first thought was the, like with consciousness and the digestive pro- I know the digestive system, gastrointestinal systems have a ton of neurons involved in how they work, but I don't think, I think I'm way off. I think that's- I think this is- Let there be photons and we move on. Yeah, yeah, I guess so. Okay, let me make sure we've got everything. Because I think that was our last question. I think we've hit everything that I've got here on the side. We've resolved every possible thing. It's done perfectly. Guys, we solved the biogenesis. We solved the biogenesis. The answer is 42. Yeah, yeah. There you go. That's the end. 42. I'm double checking the side chat to just make sure that if anybody, perhaps we missed anything, Church of Entry says I'll think on it and I'll explain it on Amy Newman's channel if they can get on. So if you want more information, you could go to Amy's after show. Beware what you ask for. And before we kind of wrap up, I want to reiterate for Modern Databane on behalf of James that this is, of course, a neutral platform and we're very happy to have anybody on. And that's what makes the channel so cool is that you can discuss a lot of different things. That's why we can have this conversation. And maybe more discussions instead of debates. Now, listen, you're appealing to my sensibilities because I love discussions as well. I'm not a huge fan of the blood sports, but that's just me. A huge thank you on behalf of myself and Modern Databane, James, to RJ and Cy for coming on and having this chat. I enjoyed the heck out of it. I'm gonna have to rewatch it because a couple of times I was trying to collect all super chats of praise and go and organize them and what have you. And the last thing, last order of business is that again, if you guys are interested in talking about this more, both the two of you who I know would be invited and anybody in the side chat watching this right now, there are indeed two different aftershows going on. One is on Amy Newman's channel and the other is on Evidence and Reasons channel. That's Sal and that's just gonna be Amy Newman the channel and then Evidence and Reasons the channel. And I'm sure they'll both be having some really sweet conversations. So with that, do you guys have anything else you'd like to say before we kind of close off here? Well, well, well, size thinking, I'll just say that I think we achieved the goal that we set out to do. We wanted to convey the fact, boy, there is so much interesting work that's going on in this field and related to so many connective elements. And I think we touched on an awful lot of it there that it gets obscured in the debate fist fight mode. Instead we wanted to talk about all the science stuff. And I think we got what we wanted to out of the way. Yeah, and I think knowing the science or at least some of it, we just touched a small amount but knowing the science is critical for the further philosophical or theological discussions because if you don't get the science right, you're not gonna go anywhere. So I think I agree RJ that we were able to at least communicate, I hope, not just the science but the passion that's involved in- And that along the way, hopefully, some people in the audience will have dun, dun, dun, learn some shit. Hey, I think the passion here was important. Everyone in the side chat was talking about the subject and talking about how cool it was that this was such an engaging and cordial discussion. So I think that you guys did an superb job kind of conveying this information to even someone like Mia Layman to this subject. I felt like when I was able to, I could follow along quite well. We live in such an amazing time on the accessibility of information that it is unconscionable for that to be left on the sideline in these kind of discussions. I concur, RJ. Guys, thank you so much for being here. And as Jim would say, were he here, keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable and let's hit that end, exit, outro, outro music.