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