Well, I'm going to speak this morning on
this subject, that the naturalistic, purely chemical mechanism
of spontaneous biogenesis are unscientific.
And I'm going to show you that the
creation explanation of the origin of life is,
strictly speaking, scientific and not religious.
So I want to do the two things
with you, but I'm going to assume you
know something about chemistry.
You do, don't you?
You're in a well-known, renowned college here,
so I suppose I can.
If you don't, put up the white flag,
would you, if you're stuck on a particular
term that I might use, and then I'll
make sure you do understand it.
Because there's nothing worse than talking to people
who don't understand you.
They get a blank look in their eyes,
you know, which is rather hard to combat.
I'm going to read one word from the
holy scriptures.
Then God said, let us make man in
our image, after our likeness, and let them
have dominion over the fish of the sea,
and over the birds of the air, and
over the cattle, and over all the earth,
and over every creeping thing that creeps upon
the face of the earth.
So God created man in his own image.
And in the image of God, he created
him.
Male and female, he created them.
Now, I'm going to show you on the
screen, first of all, some of the laws
which you need to know.
The evolutionary theory for biogenesis, that is the
origin of life, is this one, number one
here.
And it's m, which equals matter, plus t,
which equals tempus, that is time, plus e,
equals energy.
That is supposed to give you abiogenesis, that
is the origin of the cell, the origin
of life.
Now, that's the first part.
You can't have any evolution until you've got
life to evolve.
And if you can't get life to evolve,
there's no evolution.
That's a bit of straight logic, isn't it?
Now, once you've got the primitive cell out,
here's your abiogenesis to give you your original
cell.
Once you've got that, then the evolutionary explanation
of the evolving of the simple cell, as
it's so called, no cell is simple, but
that's what they say.
The way the evolution goes forward is the
same.
Time, tempus, plus energy, plus mutation, plus natural
selection, gives you evolutive speciation.
Okay?
That's the evolutionary theory in a nutshell.
I'm going to put it in the formula
form so that you can keep it in
your minds.
There's nothing worse than arguing with people who
don't know what they've got in their mind.
So you must know what you've got in
your mind, and a formula is a very
good way to put it there.
Now, the creationary theory, which is so much
rejected and laughed at, laughed to scorn by
the majority of scientists today, the leading scientists,
the creationary theory, when you put it down
in a formula, is not so silly after
all.
It says that matter, plus time, plus energy,
plus information.
Now you all know what information is, don't
you?
In the days of the computer age, I
wouldn't like to have to explain that to
you, but it means the writing down of
thought processes in formula form, capable of being
used in computers.
Information of that type.
Now there's a confusion here, which you must
know about, otherwise you'll get confused in less
time than it takes to say Jack Robinson.
Information in the modern sense of the word,
in computer industry, means nothing to do with
thought, but only, and everything is to do
with a pure surprise effect.
Nothing else than the surprise effect.
That is, if you're going to start building
a sequence of words, say you start with
A, B, now if you're going to put
another letter to it, it could be C.
Now the, if you were to take not
A, B as your surprise effect, but you're
going to take say A, Q as your
two letters.
Now what is the letter that always follows
Q in the English language?
U.
That's it.
So if you were to put in, if
you were to put in A, Q, and
then say U was the next one that
came in, there's no surprise about that at
all, because that's the law of the English
language, which you follow the Q with the
U.
But if it were A, Q, T, then
you could say there's a surprise effect there,
and you would get a plus information sign
coming in if you put that in.
Now just let me put that quite clearly,
because I may have succeeded in clouding the
issues up in your mind in doing it
like that.
If you were to take by chance, out
of a hat, C, A, just two letters
and then you take out of the hat
by chance the next letter, which is T.
Now that means cat, doesn't it?
Now that would be quite a large surprise
effect, because there's nothing to give you an
idea that T should follow, nothing at all.
So it has nothing to do with thought.
The ordinary informational theory that you learn in
computer technology, it has only to do with
what you wouldn't expect, which sometimes does apply
to thought, doesn't it?
When you get the answers of some people
to certain things, they're certainly not what you
expect.
But that's the definition of information according to
science today, and the definition according to real
information theory is that information writes down informally
the contents of thought.
Now if you have in your mind a
machine, say you're going to build a car
engine, okay?
Now you can put that all down in
a blueprint, can't you?
The thought that you have that you want
to put into practice.
Now the creationists say that you've got to
have information which is thoughtful to make life.
The Darwinists say that time plus energy will
do it.
Now the only difference between the evolutionary formula
and the creation formula is the addition of
thoughtful information.
Now ladies and gentlemen, what does that remind
you of?
Thoughtful information.
What's another word for thoughtful information?
What was that?
Well, I'll put it a bit quicker, put
it a bit easier than that.
It's logos.
Logos is the Greek for it, isn't it?
So if you were to put down here,
but you mustn't put it in scientific circles,
is logos, because they suspect you of theology
and you're out then if you do that.
If you put it down as information which
is more exact, it'll be all right.
So the only difference between the two formulae
is that the creationist one says you've got
to have thought behind it or information.
Now are we okay?
No difficulties about that?
I don't think that that's so silly, you
know.
As they say it is, they laugh at
all creationists because they believe in God.
But if you tell them that they believe
that God supplied the information, then they'll laugh
on the other side of their face.
Because obviously all research on the synthesis of
life is research concerned with adding to matter,
time plus energy, plus thought.
That's what the scientist does.
That's what Saul Spiegelman and Arthur Kornberg did
when they synthesized the first living virus.
They didn't put the matter in a super
centrifuge and let energy, you know, by spinning
it round, work on it and give it
time then to work and produce.
If they'd set about producing their virus that
way, they wouldn't have got the grant money.
The simple difference, Darwin, you see, who invented
this evolutionary theory, he did not want to
have the necessity of thought, because he thought
that would involve the necessity of God.
And he was right, but he didn't know
it.
So when you've got your God, Jehovah, whatever
you like to call him, to supply the
informational thought and supply it in a form
that can be absorbed by matter, they've got
the preconditions for getting life.
And all scientists do that.
If they set about their research work without
thinking, I'd fire them, take away their tenure,
and they wouldn't do it again because they
wouldn't get any results out to show for
the money they've absorbed.
Now, right, the three laws of thermodynamics are
these, which you ought also to know.
The first law, matter, M, can neither be
created nor destroyed.
Second law, the total energy of the cosmos
remains constant, but the amount of energy available
for useful work is always diminishing.
You got that one?
The amount of energy available for useful work
is always diminishing.
Put it like this, if you have up
in the mountains a reservoir with, say, a
million gallons of water in it, and you
let those millions of gallons through a turbine,
you'll get a million gallons out at the
end, won't you?
Plus a lot of energy from your turbines.
So the amount of water remains constant, but
the energy that's available gets reduced.
Because when you're down in the lake at
the bottom of the mountain, you can't use
it again for a turbine to generate energy.
So that's all that law says, that the
amount of energy in the cosmos remains constant,
like the amount of water in the lake
remains constant, whether it's up in the mountains
or down in the valley.
But you can't, when it's in the valley,
you can't get the energy out of it.
So that's what the energy laws, the laws
of thermodynamics talk about.
Now the next one is this, and this
is very, very important because it's universally overlooked.
The third law of thermodynamics states that there's
absolute zero, at absolute zero temperature, minus 273
degrees centigrade, as absolute temperature minus 273 degrees
centigrade is approached, in a perfect crystal, the
entropy of that crystal will also approach zero.
That is, the disorder approaches zero, and you
get the highest neg-entropy you can get,
as you cool a crystal down.
You get nearer to higher entropy, neg-entropy,
in that crystal.
Now what they say in most science is
that if you keep a crystal warm enough,
a matter warm enough to combine, then its
entropy will get reduced in forming DNA molecules
and all that.
That is, as you raise the temperature, then
you'll get more available energy.
The opposite is the case.
The fact is, as you cool it down,
so you get more order.
That's a very important thing to remember.
Now let's leave it at that.
I want now to do an application of
this.
I need somebody to tie this to my
mouth so that I can work with my
hand, but I'll do my best.
Now if you have here your high amount
of neg-entropy, I'm sorry it's a bit
squiffy, but that's because I can't hold it.
Thank you.
You have here your high amount up there,
and you're going down here, the water in
the lake, here's your H2O on the mountain.
I'll just write mountain there.
All matter tends to run down the gentle
entropy slope to your lake at the bottom.
You needn't think of that as a lake,
you can just think of this as the
order in the universe.
Here you have high order neg-entropy, and
here you have low order in the lake,
and there's a gentle slope of all matter
towards disorder.
That's called the entropy slope, because all matter
gradually goes downhill to disorder.
If you leave your house to students during
the vacation, the entropy of your house will,
unless they've been well brought up, increase, until
in the end you can't get in the
kitchen door.
Okay, now look, this is important what I'm
going to say here.
If you have here what you might call
in golf a T-hole, okay?
Now if your golf ball is working down,
running downhill, and it comes to this T
-hole, what happens to it?
It'll fall into the T-hole and stay
there, won't it?
And it won't run down any further because
it's in the T-hole, okay?
Now that you can call in science an
entropy hole.
And lots of substances behave as if they
were in an entropy hole, in that they
don't decompose.
They don't get more and more disordered.
In rolling down the hill, they fall into
a T-hole and you can't get them
out, because the T-hole, to get them
out you've got to supply directed energy to,
which is called the activation energy, to get
them out of the hole, okay?
So there is a case where your matter,
like a golf ball, is running downhill, but
it falls into an entropy hole, and then
you can't get it out again.
Now this is quite important for reasoning.
If you want to get it out again,
you've got to apply an activation energy to
it.
That has to be directional.
So I'll put an arrow there to show
that it's directional energy to get it out.
It can't be just any energy to get
it out.
You won't.
You must have it directional to lift it
up and get it out.
Now let's consider what that means for our
little talk about evolution and entropy this morning.
You get it down to the entropy hole,
and to get it out again, you've got
to have an activation energy to do so.
Now look, look, in life, in the DNA
molecule, you have to have a certain type
of molecule to get the basis of life's
information storage and retrieval system going.
You know what the information storage retrieval system
of life is called, don't you?
The information storage and retrieval system in life
is called the DNA molecule.
Now do you, ladies and gentlemen, know how
one stores information in the DNA molecule?
Do you know how it's done?
You know it is done by sequencing, don't
you?
If you take a line, oh thank you
so much, that's kind of you.
You take a line like this, and you
put sequences on them.
You're storing information there.
Say the dot is c, a, t, like
that.
But in one dimension, the standard way of
storing information in computer industry is to do
your sequencing according to a code in one
line, that is in one plane.
One letter after another.
If you look at a sequence in the
newspaper, you scan a line, you'll see that
c, a, t means a feline, doesn't it?
Okay, now if you were to want to
store all the information necessary to make a
man or a woman their equal genetically, there's
only one difference, that's the x and y
chromosomes.
Okay, nothing else.
Everything else is perfect, both in man and
in woman, but you do have the 46
chromosomes.
If you were to do that in a
single line like this, this is very important.
You would need a DNA molecule several yards
long.
Now think of building a sperm or an
ovum several yards long to get the information.
You'd be in quite difficulties, wouldn't you?
Now the DNA molecule does something which is
absolutely superb.
It doesn't store like this in a line,
it stores not in two dimensions, but in
three.
That is, it stores one after another, but
also one above another, or one below another.
So you've got three dimensions.
Now the logic of this is absolutely vital
to understand the point I'm going to make
to you this morning, if you hold out
as long until I do get it finished
with you.
Look, you know what we're made of, don't
you?
Now to the elite of Christ College, you
know what that substance is, don't you?
Shout it out to me.
Pardon?
It's an amino acid, but you know that's
too general.
What's its name?
Its name is alanine.
Alanine, okay.
Let me see.
Now we're made of about 20 to 21
amino acids, and they're all like this, except
that the CH3 is replaced by R to
get your 21, 20 amino acids.
Now listen, I said that in order to
make the DNA molecule, you've got to be
able to store the information in it in
three dimensions, didn't I?
Now I'm going to give you the method
of getting out the three dimensions, because this
is the turning point on which the whole
argument depends.
Now if you write alanine, if you write
alanine down like this, can you see that?
This is a tetrahedron, you see, which is
this carbon atom there, this carbon atom there,
and this carbon atom there.
CH, CH, CH3, CH3, CH3, CH3,
COOH, COOH.
Now that's the same formula as the alanine
I wrote down there, but I've written it
a different way.
The tetrahedrons written there, CH3CH3CHCH,
NH2NH2COHCOHCOHCOH.
What's the relationship of this one to that
one?
Yes there, did you say enantiomers, would you
say mirror images?
The relationship of the one is the relationship
of my right hand to my left.
Okay, now do you think there's any difference
in the chemical analysis of my right hand
and the chemical analysis of my left hand?
If I were to give you a slice
of my thumb from my right hand and
analyze it, would you get the same analysis
out from the same slice of my left
-handed thumb?
You would.
Now this is vital.
That is, the entropy status of those two
molecules, the mirror images, is identical.
The entropy status of these two molecules is
identical.
That is, you can't distinguish between them chemically.
You couldn't distinguish between my right hand and
my left hand chemically because the analysis is
just identical for the two.
But what is different in the two?
The arrangement in space.
Okay, the arrangement in space is different between
the two CH3NH2COHCH3NH2COH.
The only difference is the arrangement in space.
Now the scientists say that means that you
can't distinguish energetically, entropically, between those two molecules.
You can't do it because there isn't any
difference to work on.
Now can you tell me how then you
can distinguish between those two molecules?
This is vital.
How could you distinguish between those two molecules?
Pardon?
Optically, you can do it optically.
If you pass polarized light through one molecule
in solution, thank you, and pass the same
type of polarized light through the other solution
containing that, you do that, in one case
the polarized light will be tipped to the
left, and in the other case it'll be
tipped to the right.
So you can do it optically.
Now how else could you do it?
Well you could do it by pattern recognition,
couldn't you?
By pattern recognition you could do it.
That is your eye coupled to your computer
here could do it, but you need a
computer to do it.
I mean it's no good just to see
it, you've got to interpret what you see,
and that takes a computer to do.
So to distinguish between these two molecules, and
these two molecules are used to build the
DNA molecule.
Now the DNA molecule and other ones are
optically actively used to build the DNA molecule,
but that doesn't matter, the principle is the
same.
That means that in order to get these
two, to build the DNA molecule, to build
in three dimensions, you see here you've got
the three dimensions at work in a tetrahedron,
not in a line, but in three dimensions.
Now if that's the case, then what we
want to do, chemically speaking, in order to
get the raw materials out for life to
build the cell, is to separate the L
-form from the D-form.
That's the first principle you've got to do.
Now listen, organic chemistry and straight work in
the lab with ordinary organic chemistry, such as
the molecules produced by Fox and Miller.
You all know about Fox and Miller, don't
you?
Who doesn't know about Fox and Miller?
Well, Fox and Miller, that's very good of
you to tell me, because I don't want
to go and dive into a pond which
is too shallow for me, and I hit
my head on the bottom, you see.
I shouldn't like to do that with you
worthy people here, because you wouldn't come with
me if you are coming with me now.
What chemistry can't do is produce the third
dimensional specificity necessary to produce the DNA molecule.
The DNA molecule is a spiral molecule which
stores its information linearly, that is in a
line in one dimension, one point after another,
one sequence after another.
In order to get that, you have to
introduce a third dimension, and chemistry will always
produce 50 percent of the D and 50
percent of the L, so that one neutralizes
out the other, and your DNA molecule by
ordinary chemistry would be a racemate which could
only store its information in two dimensions, not
in three.
That is, it could store them along here,
you see, but it couldn't just store them
back in the tetrahedron, couldn't do it.
Now, there's only one way to do it,
ladies and gentlemen, perhaps you'd give me that,
would you?
Thank you.
I didn't want to stay there, thank you.
There's only one way to do it.
I said I was going to talk about
entropy this morning and that's what I'm doing.
There's only one way to do it, that
is to introduce a means of making this
molecule different from that, so that chemistry can
decide between them, can distinguish between them.
Now, you can do that if you introduce,
this is hard chemistry, but if you haven't
done your homework beforehand, I can't do it
in two minutes for you, but I'll do
my very best that I can.
It's a challenge for me to get this
over to you, because it's quite hard, but
it's absolutely firm, yes?
So the problem is to make these molecules,
the left-handed and the right-handed one,
distinguishable to ordinary chemistry.
If you can do that, then you can
build a DNA molecule, left-handed and right,
which could store information in three dimensions.
Otherwise you'd have to have a DNA molecule
several yards long to store the information needed
to make your nose, or your eyes, or
your face, or anything else that's human about
you.
Now what was the name of that substance?
That's alanine, that's right.
Now this is the L, and this is
the D form, which in this way of
writing it you can't distinguish, you see, but
I did it with a tetrahedron to show
you can distinguish between them if you put
them in the right dimensional form.
Now if you go to the deadly nightshade
type of plant, the deadly nightshade produces a
substance called, a base called, brucine.
It is, I'll write it down, and it's
L-brucine, and it produces that from the
information on its DNA molecule.
The problem is to make the L-enantiomer
different from the D, so that chemistry can
separate it, okay?
So you do it by combining your L
-alanine with your L-brucine to produce the
salt, and let's write the salt down in
a form that we can all easily understand
it.
L-A-L-L-brucine.
Now you've got the D-L molecule there,
so the other one we've got is D
-alanine plus D plus L-brucine equals the
salt, and that equals D-A-L plus
L-brucine.
Now you've got these two, you see these
two are not identical, that is their entropy
status is different in each case.
Now the man who found that out was
a brilliant man, who was considered to be
so brilliant that he wasn't human.
He was called Emil Abderhalden, Emil Abderhalden, and
he did this work 100 years ago.
He was a little old man, you know,
one of these real scientists who didn't know
anything that was going on round about him.
He was so engrossed in his work that
he worked on donkey's milk to get the
enzymes out of donkey's milk, and he was
a brilliant man.
One day he went across to the hospital
in Frankfurt, where he worked, and you know
the assistants sitting in the administrative office, they
don't know anything about scientists or about the
brilliance of science, they saw this little old
man coming along, and it was a psychiatric
clinic that he was working at, and when
he came they said, good morning sir, and
he said, I've come for my donkey's milk,
and they said, yes sir, we know all
about that, and two strong men in white
clothes took him down bars, you see, they
thought they'd got another one who'd escaped and
put him in prison, and he stayed there
all day because nobody knew, he just evaporated
from the lab, and nobody found him, but
he was the man who did it, and
you see he was a pretty sharp thinker.
He got hold of this brucine, and he
combined his D-L acids with the L
-brucine to make L-L and D-L,
and the result is he could separate them.
Now the L-salt of alanine with brucine
is beautifully crystalline, it's just like snowflakes coming
out of the solution, and the D-form,
D-L-brucine is a brown oil and
stays in solution.
So he separated them by that method, brilliant,
he separated that 98 percent, and the yield
was 48 percent.
So he separated out the basic materials you
need to make the DNA molecule store its
information in three dimensions rather than in two.
So he made life possible by discovering, are
you listening, by discovering that if you employed
the information on the deadly nightshade plant which
it has to produce the L-brucine, if
you couple that to your chemistry, the information,
then you can do that which chemistry alone
can't do, that is separate racemates and resolve
them into their D and the L-form.
Now there you have the absolute way of
doing things and showing that the formula put
up for the creationists for making life consists
of matter plus time plus energy plus information,
only it's the information of a plant which
is programmed, which is required to do that.
And he worked that out, and if we
want to do anything quickly today, if we
want to make life by easy steps in
synthesis today, all we go and do is
pinch some of the information of a plant
which makes L-brucine, and what do you
say here, Bob's your uncle, that's the way
it goes, it's as simple as that, but
you've got to know how to do it.
Now the basis then for creationism in saying
that information is necessary, thoughtful information such as
you find on the genetic code, even of
plants, it all speaks of information which is
definitely conceptual information, that is information of thought,
the way to do it is to harness
the programmed information of a plant and put
it onto your chemistry, and then your chemistry
is able to separate two isomers which have
no difference in entropy status.
Okay?
You put in entropy status differences where it
isn't naturally there, and you do it by
borrowing the information of a plant to do
it.
If you do that, that's how these people
synthesized their virus in the first place, they
stole, they borrowed the information on natural biology,
and applied it to their synthetical chemistry with
the result that they could produce a virus
which was living, but you can't do it
without it, chemistry cannot do it.
Now if you look through the world's literature,
you'll find this, that everybody's trying to make
chemistry alone by naturalistic means produce life, and
you can't do it, because chemistry can't separate
optical isomers which have an identical entropy status.
If you've got that one, you can see
that the formula that I put up first
of all is absolutely correct, but the information
that we got out in that formula, the
information here, where did it come from?
I just want to see if you're awake,
where did it come from?
It comes from the genetic code of a
plant, and if you can have the understanding
to couple that genetic information to that formula,
you have the possibility of making the DNA
molecule which is capable of storing the information
in three dimensions, and you can't do it
without that, because DNA, if you make it
without that information here, is racemic, that is
it's D and L, and will only store
the information in two dimensions rather than three.
But if you get it in in the
three dimensions, then you have life budding out
of the test tube, and it's been done.
The Nobel Prize was given to Arthur Conrad
because he successfully did that.
He coupled the information of a virus onto
another virus, which was dead, and made it
alive by that mean.
Read his work, it's a marvelous piece of
chemical manipulation, but if you went and told
him afterwards, although he was an evolutionist himself,
that he'd made the information by just guessing
at it, he'd have clipped your ear for
you, because he knew that he didn't, he
had to work hard to be able to
stick in this information to get his good
result out, which resulted in several hundred thousand
dollars as a Nobel Prize, you see, for
it.
So if you told him that it would
just come out without him, if you gave
him enough time to do it by chance,
I don't think he'd have felt flattered at
all.
He didn't work very far for me in
the University of Illinois when I was there
in those days.