Harold Gans - The Cosmic Puzzle, Part 1: The Origin of Life

fans tonight i'd like to talk about the origin of life imagine a universe devoid of anything alive there are galaxies there are stars there are planets there are even planets with oceans and blue skies with puffy white clouds but nothing is alive at all anywhere in the universe and then out of nowhere suddenly there's something alive and the question is what happened one moment one fraction of a second it was a universe with just lifeless chemicals and the next second something is alive somewhere in the universe how did it happen how are the first structures of life formed scientists don't have a clue now this is the introduction that i received from rabbi moshe averik at a discovery seminar in chicago a number of years ago he said to me why worry about evolution that talks about what happened afterward how species evolved so to speak but how did the ball start rolling what what happened to begin it all says that's the biggest mystery of all he gave me a copy of his book nonsensity high order and in that book quoted several scientists are saying the spontaneous genesis of life is so unlikely as to be close to a miracle so for example the physicist paul davies in his book the fifth miracle and i quote the living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind how does something so immensely complicated so finessed so exquisitely clever come into being all on its own now maybe you remember when you first learned about these things these people my age long time ago when the teacher would talk about a cell they would draw a circle on the blackboard blackboard instead of whiteboard go back far enough and then a dot in the middle the circle was the cell membrane everything inside was the cell and then the dot was the nucleus and that was it a very simple thing a circle and a dot well a cell is really much more complicated than that as we've discovered with the invention of more and more powerful microscopes even though it's extremely tiny like 25 000 of an inch it is an immensely complicated factory that produces everything that the body needs to replace itself to heal it has blueprint of the entire body all inside of it now if i were to start listing all the amazing things about the cell we would be here all night so i'm just going to give you 13. okay 13 things just to illustrate a little tiny bit of the complexity of this incredibly small factory of which all living organisms are made of first of all let's talk about that circle the cell membrane you see things have to get in and out of the cell right fuel supplies has to get into the cell so that it can keep on burning and working and doing things manufactured products have got to get out of the cell or it doesn't do any good waste products have to get out of the cell how do they get through that line that circle it's not a circle you see it's a very complicated structure and it has portals automatic portals in it all over for both input and output so for example it has sliding doors it has revolving doors it has suction cups suction pumps and it has at each one of these substance recognition detectors things that are going to detect what is this that's trying to get into the cell what is this that's trying to get out of the cell am i going to let it in or am i not or out as the case may be so it can identify all the things that are going on trying to get into the cell things that are going on around the cell so for example substance recognition detectors g protein receptors b cell receptors t cell receptors iron channel length receptors surface recognition receptors these by the way these surface recognition receptors that will detect if there's another cell nearby and if it doesn't feel the other side where there should be it knows there must be a wound and it starts proliferating here and that's how a wound clea clears up it gets healed that was number one number two is a monorail transportation system that runs on rechargeable batteries all inside that tiny little cell and it brings things from one end of the cell to the other if this thing is manufactured here and it's got to get there it gets onto the monorail and there's a thing that walks along the monorail carrying its cargo wherever it's supposed to go these are called microtubules the rechargeable batteries are called atp then the fuel has to be imported and processed in order to recharge the batteries those are done by the lysosomes that's number three number four there are battery recharging stations that's called the mitochondria and then there's a high security blueprint room that is the nucleus that was that little dot it's really a whole new structure inside the cell and it has in it the blueprint of the entire organism it's called the dna or the genome that's number six an implied blueprint of everything then there's a copying machine that's number seven it's called rna polymerase and the copy that it makes of the dna so that it can be copied and used to make whatever product is necessary that's called messenger rna and then there are high security portals into the nucleus so things from the cell that are inside the cell but outside of the nucleus can't get into the nucleus unless they're supposed to get into the nucleus and so there's a nuclear pore complex consists of 456 proteins and everything that needs to get in has got a security code think about it think about the doctor at the hospital right he holds his card up by the detector on the door or he slides his car through the detector on the door and then it gives him entry the same thing over here anything once again to the nucleus or out for that matter has got to have the right code that if it doesn't have the right code it's not getting in the portal is not going to open up for him and the portal itself is incredibly complex it consists of almost like a circle that closes up like the lens of the camera the cover of the camera goes up from all sides when something is authenticated yes this can get in it opens up and there's a basket the thing goes into the basket and it closes again so nothing else can go in and then the basket goes down through a little elevator comes out of the other side where another door opens to let it out that's high security then there's the production room number nine production room it's called the rough endoplasmic reticulum and over there whatever needs to be manufactured with this copy of the dna is going to be manufactured but of course the raw materials have to be transported to the production room that's done by trna and 11 there are assembly machines that actually make the products the structures that are needed by the body and that are going to get out of the cell and go to wherever they're supposed to go these assembly machines are called the ribosomes number 12 there's a final production and a quality control to make every make sure everything is done absolutely correctly and then call the chaperonins finally 13 the packaging and the labeling it's got to be packaged and it's going to be labeled with an electronic label so that it knows where to go and also so that it can get out of the cell because it's going to be examined when it gets to the portals on the membrane it's going to look at the label on the packaging say ah yes i know where this is supposed to go it's supposed to go out open up let it out and then it goes wherever it's supposed to go and by the way this is a very very simplified version of cell just to give you a taste of how complicated it is the question is how did all of this come together right everything all organisms are made of cells so instead of concentrating on on a whole body with a heart and lungs and all that concentrate the little parts of it this is the cell well there are more than 20 different so-called theories about how this came about and not a single one of them is a theory by the way they all contradict each other too see a theory explains how something happened not where or when now the where in the wind are important too but it's not a theory if it doesn't tell you how it happened imagine a detective who's trying to solve a crime and it comes back to his chief his uh the police chief and he says okay i figured it out i could tell you when it happened and i can tell you where it happened okay and who done it or how did it happen well i don't know that i mean that's the most important part right so the question is what is the theory it's not a theory if it's just telling you well i think it happened here and i think it happened then let's take a look at a few examples one example warm pond and lightning here you have a one pond nothing alive just chemicals in there the right chemical is fine but chemicals nevertheless nothing alive and all of a sudden there's a stroke of lightning and lo and behold out comes frankenstein i mean out comes something alive of course only in the movies because you know very well the lightning is going to destroy any organic compound that's there it's not going to make something come out alive except in the movies so that's that's so-called theory number one theory number two uh deep sea thermal events now in both of these cases they're telling you where they think it happened and they're telling you what they think the energy source is because you see it requires energy to put together all the little pieces of the cell right and that's energy has got to come from somewhere the problem is that the energy has to be a directed kind of energy lightning is not a directed energy it's just a huge splash of energy in a particular area but nevertheless it's not directed think of the difference between a lightning stroke and a blow torch okay blow torch is a pinpoint flame that's going to apply the heat in one specific place imagine you have a bunch of links that you want to weld together to form a chain you can do it with a welding torch you can't do it with a stroke of lightning the stroke of lightning is likely to just melt the whole thing into a slab similarly with the deepsea thermal vents there's the energy source this is the heat from the from the vents but it's just heat it'll put a few molecules together but then when it gets too complicated it'll rip them apart again a third one is radioactive beach nice beautiful beach except that it's radioactive same idea it happened on a beach with the energy source radioactivity well we know radioactivity kills it doesn't make something come alive doesn't make someone become spider-man either if he gets enough of a dose he's dead and then of course his panspermia now panspermia says don't worry about it no problem it didn't happen on earth it happened somewhere in outer space somewhere else in the universe and somehow it got here maybe on a meteorite but of course that's just begging the question okay so fine it didn't happen here how did it happen wherever it supposedly happened and that is the biggest mystery of all now if we were to say well look you see science has no explanation for it and look how complicated is all these parts that fit together so perfectly and i could have gone on and on and on with the description must have come from god to which i would say as a scientist as a mathematician i would say why how do you know he said well look how complicated it is i know it's complicated how do you know it didn't happen by itself well uh well i mean demonstrate it to me show me scientifically why this didn't happen by itself and what we have so far is just intuition it's subjective to be scientific it has to be objective one of the first things i discovered when i started on exploring the origin of life was that there was a website that announced a one million dollar prize it's called the origin of life prize for any scientist who would figure out how not where or when how life started it was suspended on october 26 2013 after being around for 13 years now the website is not there anymore it was then when i looked at it which was a good while ago as you can figure out um but there are other websites that describe what was on that website they're still around so it's gone now but it was operational for 13 years a million dollars off into any scientist i could figure out how did life start why was it suspended and on the website it tells you here's what it said and i quote over the last 13 years since the origin of life prize was first announced in nature and science so by the way nature and science are the premier scientific journals of the day nature being the british and science reading the american journal so prize was first announced to nature and signs no submission has ever made it past the screening judges to higher level judges they didn't even pass the screaming judges why all these scientists over 13 years a million dollars and they can't even pass the screening judges what's happened why goes on to explain life origin literature continues to circumvent and ignore the key question if not deliberately sweep it under the rug and what is the key question again i quote how did prebiotic nature prescribe or program the first genome the genome being the dna like the computer program it encodes every detail of an organism what kind of an organism for example is it an e coli bacteria is it an apple tree is it a monarch butterfly crocodile or human and every detail of the organism color size strength intelligence etc so let's try to understand what's going on what is the dna i mean i've told you it's it's like a computer code it has all the information about what the organism is and what it's like and so on but structurally what is it turns out this is the blueprint that we talked about before the dna it's a sequence of smaller molecules which are called base pairs and they're linked together to form a long long chain now this chain is usually wound around like a helix and there's usually two of them and they just go like that like a double helix around and around and around and that's what the dna consists of it can be minimum a few thousand long or it could even be into the billions as it is for humans it's over three billion long into a double helix now these molecules form a four-letter alphabet an alphabet like a language and that's language and it's been decoded this language describes not only all the proteins in your body but also when the proteins are supposed to be done and all controls of when you should produce this when you should produce that in the word circumstances do you do it this way under what circumstances do you do it that way and so on and so on and so on all the kinds of controls data controls a whole inside of a like a computer if these base pairs are just random then there's no information it doesn't describe an organism anymore that is a random sequence of letters describes anything so it's meaningless there's no information in it so they've got to be put together in the right order in order to make sense the letters to make sense in whatever language it's written and the base pairs in the right order so that they describe properly in organism now unlike the letters of a language if you misspell a word or even to a three you can usually figure out what the sentence is saying you can recover what the word is but in the dna one error doesn't necessarily cause a fatal mistake but it usually does most of the time a single error a signal error out of billions will cause the organism to be either not viable or fatal for example in the human genome there are over three billion base pairs one mistake one mistake you should call a point mutation just one point on the whole three billion plus long helix can cause hemophilia certain kinds of ovarian breast and colon cancer sickle cell anemia test disease cystic fibrosis certain kinds of diabetes hutchinson guilford progeria this is a disease in which a young person boy girl young young kid has this disease ages at an accelerated pace and dies of old age at the age of 12 or 13. gray hair looks like an old man just he's still small one mistake so you know you understand what the problem is the problem is you've got to get it all in the right order and in almost all cases you better not make a single mistake a couple here there you might get away with it but very unlikely you might be lucky but you've got to get almost all of them right if you get even one wrong in the wrong place and most of them are the wrong places it's not going to work the astrophysicist fred hoyle and i quote the probability is like the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a boeing 747 the belgian biochemist and nobel prize laureate christian renee du duve talking about rna now rna is the same as dna almost exactly the same as dna except that it's a single helix instead of a double one and then there's one molecule which is different than in the dna but it's simpler than dna talking about rna he called for a quote rejection of events with such miniscule probabilities that they may be called miracles and are not amenable to scientific inquiries so what the scientists are saying is the probability of getting all of these things lined up just perfectly is so incredibly small no way it could have happened how would happen they don't know but they say it just doesn't make any sense well okay that fits with our intuition of course you know think about getting 5000 english letters for example all in the right order so that it reads from beginning to end without a mistake just by chance by still get a huge pot of alphabets on the floor but there's a possible answer professor george wald nobel prize-winning biologist writing in the scientific american in 1954 and i quote time is in fact the hero of the plot the time with which we have to deal with is of the order of two billion years what we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here given so much time the impossible becomes possible the possible becomes probable and the probable becomes virtually certain one is only to wait time itself performs the miracles so what george walter's saying is yeah the probability is very very small but you've got a huge amount of time it went into science 13.8 billion years and not only that not only you have billions of years he said 2 billion sorry this would say even more but you also have a huge universe and it could happen anywhere wherever it would have happened if it developed into people like us or intelligent beings they would say why are we here wherever it is so it could be just here but that's the point there's so much space there's so much time it's gonna happen by chance anyway you know what it's like it's like a person buying a lottery ticket it's got a one in a million chance of winning okay he doesn't expect to win but if you have five million people buy lottery tickets it's fairly certain that at least one person maybe even as many as five might in fact win the lottery because there's so many chances to win well over here there's also a lot of chances to win all the way through 13.8 billion years and all the way through the entire universe which is enormous in size so to find out whether or not walt had a valid objection i decided i would have to do the calculation myself now fortunately having worked for the united states department of defense for 28 years as a senior cryptologic mathematician i possess the necessary skills to make that kind of a computation and so i went ahead and proceeded to do so i started with a particular virus phi x 174 it's a virus that infects the e coli bacteria technically it's called a bacteriophage because it infects some bacteria but it's a virus it's a kind of virus the reason i picked it is because it has the smallest dna known to mankind the dna is only 5 169 base pairs long and it's a single helix instead of a double one like rna so that it's half as complicated and it's the shortest one there is so you would think that if anything could come about by chance surely that's got the best chance you're not going to get a better chance with something which is more complicated so number one i had to calculate the probability of phi x 174 forming all by itself now that's assuming that the base pairs exist already okay we just we give them that okay it's a big question but let's just assume they're there and they're all in the same place the little pond so now the question is they can start linking together randomly somewhere in the universe right it's going to start linking together randomly and the question is what's the probability of getting 5x174 that's that's step number one step number two is it didn't have to be 5x174 suppose if it's a different virus may not be as small as phi x 170 for a little bit bigger well in the universe maybe there are some that could have that could be viable and they may not even exist on earth or anywhere else but they still might be viable so you have to take that into account it doesn't can't be specifically 5x174 with respect to the example i gave before about the lottery ticket you're not going to ask what's the probability of this guy this particular person winning the lottery what's the probability of someone in the group of people who bought tickets winning the lottery that's the question you want to really ask it's the same thing here we don't want to know what's the probability of phi x forming but what's the probability of something similar to phi x 174 forming and it could form anywhere in the observable universe and any time over the last 13.8 billion years that's what we want to compute and i did it and what i got was a probability which is a decimal point followed by three thousand nine hundred and ninety nine zeroes and one and that's an incredibly small fraction let me try to give you uh an idea because it's very hard to grasp such a small number give you an idea what that means that's like playing russian roulette not if you know what russian roulette is russian roulette a person not you or i but a person takes a revolver and there are six chambers he puts a one bullet into one of the chambers he spins the cylinder and then he points at his head and pulls the trigger he's got a one in six chance of dying five out of six chances of winning depending on whether the chamber with the bullet ends up where it's going to be fired through the barrel of the gun only the russians would invent something like that what is the probability of a person playing russian roulette 50 517 times and surviving would anyone in his right mind try it if someone said that he had done it would you believe him that he survived you know if you do it only six times it's two to one odds that you're dead can you imagine fifty thousand five hundred and seventeen times you know if you wanted to write it as odds you would have to write the word trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion 333 times trillion trillion trillion 333 times to one those are the odds of a virus dna similar to phi x 174 in terms of being very small in size coming about all by itself anywhere in the observable universe since the beginning of time for all practical purposes it doesn't happen can't happen in fact scientifically you would the scientific approach would say we reject that possibility because the probability is too small it's more than any scientific threshold set for any kind of a test of this sort we haven't taken into account the fact that dna by itself is totally non-functional it's like an app without a phone like a program without a computer it cannot infect the cell and reproduce or even maintain its structure and not disassemble without protection in a cell the cell protects it but in a virus it's protected by a protein sheath that protects it from the environment holds it together and then we'll enable it to infect the cell so that it can reproduce the protein sheath for phi x 174 consists of 192 proteins if we were to take that into account that calculating the probability it wouldn't be decimal point three thousand nine hundred ninety nine zeros and a one it would be decimal point twenty six thousand five hundred and eighty eight zeros and a one but we didn't do that we just did the dna itself and that itself shows it can't be done and we haven't taken a whole bunch of other things into account for example dna we assumed it could be anywhere in the universe but the fact is dna cannot come into existence in stars it's much too hot it'll rip apart any uh molecule that i form to be life organic molecules just come apart in the heat so it can't it can't come about in any star it also can't form in the intergalactic media because in between the galaxies there's two little atoms particles for it to form from they're too far apart so a large part of of the universe is already pushed away and said no we can't be in that we didn't take that into account we also didn't take into account that dna probably could not form for the first 8.6 billion years of the universe because of gamma ray bursts which would destroy them in addition to that 90 percent of the universe has great fluxes of radiation that would probably destroy it as well and 24 almost a quarter of the universe is helium which is totally inert they're not going to kind of form any kind of dna or anything else for that matter and not only that a virus is not alive it's a piece of dna it doesn't reproduce it doesn't metabolize it doesn't do anything until it gets into a living organism that has cells and then if it can insert itself into the cell it can cause havoc as we well know now we mentioned before the cell we concentrated on the dna but in fact you can work with the cell as well turns out the cell has a communication network inside of it called the interact tone the interactive is a communication network that connects all the different parts of the cell the things we discussed before how does the production machine tell somewhere else that i need business to raw materials so that the tnr trna can bring it it's got to send the signal so it's got to be able to transmit the signal and at the other end it's got to receive the signal and so on signals going all over the place this is called the 11th or paradox of the interactome and it appeared in a article in protein science in 2011 authored by um uh i can't remember their names right now uh i i will give it to you let's see if i can find it here um yeah peter tampa and uh george rose and there we go peter thompson george rose uh protein science 2011 the 11th or prime paradox of the interactive now they do part of the calculation i finished the calculation and what you get instead of a decimal point three thousand and ninety nine zeros and a one you get a decimal point seven thousand fifty-five zeroes and then followed by unite and those are with very very simplifying assumptions it's much much smaller but they just wanted to make things easy for themselves you know what this is the same as let's not even talk about russian roulette no one plays russian i'm not even sure if the russians play russian roulette anymore but supposing i would to take someone out into the street and we would pick out 238 random people when the people the guy doesn't know them at all and say go ahead guess no cheating everyone's watching him carefully guess what's the name of that guy there what's the name of that woman there the name their credit card number the expiration date and the security code that is a decimal point followed by 7055 zeros 238 people guess all this information about them knowing nothing to be given yes random guess and you guess all that information name credit card number expiration date security code that's what that's equivalent to and by the way similar to the dna the interactive is very sensitive too if you have errors in the interactive it's going to wreak havoc in the organism and errors can be caused by bacteria by viruses by chemicals by age and by mutations radiation for example and it can cause things like bacillary dysentery cholera peptic ulcers tuberculosis hepatitis polycystic kidney disease congestive heart failure mental retardation cancer cystic fibrosis down syndrome huntington's disease muscular dystrophy you know just imagine imagine if you were to rewire the inside of a car right so you wire the accelerator to the brake and the brake to the accelerator one simple change a simple interchange you're going to have wreak havoc with the car or think about it in an airplane you know something think about the space shuttle the space shuttle was one of the most complicated things built by mankind it was so complicated that believe it or not that i heard this from the chief engineer of nasa at the time the probability of a space shuttle on any flight having a fatal accident because of the fatal dysfunction of something inside this complicated machine was 1 in 13. 1 in 13 one chance in 13 that the astronauts getting into that space shuttle would never come back alive you know why because it's so complicated there's so many parts to it and so many parts are absolutely necessary without that part working properly it doesn't work the whole thing goes and the human cell or any living cell for that matter is far far far more complicated than even the space shuttle can you imagine if p beams human beings or animals had a 113 chance of dying every time they went into space whatever 1 in 13 chance no one would live for very long now we're understanding what the interactum does one little wire going wrong can cause havoc the authors of protein some of the protein science paper peter tom and george rose writing about the spontaneous genesis of an interacto said it couldn't happen and i quote within any meaningful span of time and then they go on to say every living cell templates the interactome of the mother cell but you see the mother cell had to template its interaction from the mother cell before it and before it and before where did it start it came together by chance no way the probability is much much too small it's telling you that it's illogical to assume that something like that could have happened the organic chemist and molecular biologist alexander graham karen smith that i quote but you may say with all the time in the world at so much world the right combination of circumstances would happen sometime is it not plausible the answer is no there was not enough time and not enough world the problem with the origin of life is not a biological problem sounds like it should be origin of life biological it's not i mean there are biological problems associated with it that's true but the real problem with the origin of life that no one's been able to solve you know why because it's not a biological problem it's a mathematical problem and we have just shown mathematically that it's an intractable problem it's not going to be solved you can't get so much information together all in one place in the right order in the amount of time that the universe has been here or anywhere in the universe that's what we've demonstrated we've done the math we've crunched the numbers and the numbers don't lie as a result of this i would imagine george wald who said that time is the hero of the story time works the miracles he had a change of heart 1984 he wrote in the international journal of quantum chemistry i must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities that mind existed always the source and condition of physical reality it is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life but what kind of mind can this possibly be it existed always it's the source of all existence creator of the universe in life couldn't be life as we know it because there was nothing over there there was nothing then they couldn't the life itself that existed they couldn't create itself it had to be created by someone who designed it and that's what george wald was saying he's not he's not willing to say god did it what he's willing to say is it was some kind of a mind and it must have been a very impressive mind obviously to be able to design a universe capable of supporting life and there's another talk completely and in the book as well about that subject was a totally different subject and designing life producing life creating life to fill the universe which is designed to have life in it we have a name for that mind we call it hashem this has been a small sampling from the book the cosmic puzzle the scientific investigation into the existence of god by harold cairns thank you very very much for your attention and join me please in a few days for the next talk the second part in a sense of this series which will deal with the authorship of the torah and also who runs current events again purely in a mathematical way of course