Typically brilliant, lapidary talk by Eric Smith. The man's incredible--he has a Feynman-like ability to distill complex ideas and present in lay language. He's made significant contributions in about five fields, from astrobiology to economics. Should note that this lecture represents a view that has good support from geochemists but is disputed by geneticists and organic chemists. Genes-first and primordial soup models are still around. I admit I don't see how Smith doesn't *have* to be right, at least in basic outline. But there are folks who emphasize different features of the system.
Wow! One of the best science lectures I've ever seen in my life. Synthesizes physics, chem and bio to shed light on how life may have begun. Blows my little mind to here him say that basic organic molecules (and cycles) of metabolism arose and maintained themselves "spontaneously" from basic chemical principles, due to energy imperatives!! They've come a long way since my college bio classes in the pleistocene (1970's).
+JinxMinxNYC This is nothing more than an extension, by imagination of Kauffman. "Self Organization" schemes are an effort to patch up the errors of Neo-Darwinism. However it fails to address the "Information Problem."
It is extremely complex to understand the origins of life and the universe. I'm glad that some scientists are tackling this issue. Hope we will get closer to the truth in time. I think we're heading in the right direction.
He is on the right trail,early earth chemistry to the first self- replicating molecules .If you accept that life emerged from the chemistry of the early earth, he makes a convincing argument for complexity to arise from the conditions existed in the chemistry of the early earth,which is so, so different from what we perceive now in the biosphere that has been created by the interaction between animated carbon chemistry and the geosphere.Time to go back to basics.
Fascinating lecture, thanks! On a similar subject, Addy Pross book, "What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology" has also an interesting theory about life being an inevitable process.
absolutely brilliant, this is one of the videos that make you think of what that Chinese philosopher say 朝闻道，夕死可以 which means "hearing the truth of universe at dawn, I can die satisfactorily at sunset"
Was hoping that he would address the memory (DNA, RNA) question. There is another "camp" of origin o' life researchers who think that memory came before metabolism. I suspect that they somehow developed in concert.
This guy is a good scientist. He's onto something good, and with people like Nick Lane and Peter Hoffmann, and Stuart Kaufmann as well, he can go where Ilya Prigogine was headed. That is where this quest will find its grail. I don't know why he mentions Gould so much. Stephen J Gould was maybe the most overrated biologist of the 20th C. He was marginal at best, other than with snails per se. Often , as when he got into human biology, he was pitiful. As an evolutionary biologist, he was more of a politician.
I've been looking for this sort of explanation, I believe it's hammering on the door where the secret lies. But I don't think the emergence of life needs conditions that are not around today, as he seemed to imply when answering the first question, but not imply when talking about the underwater vents.
The necessary geochemical conditions probably are around today, but extant life is too efficient in exploiting them to allow for the inefficient pre-biotic systems to develop.
Intelligent chemists use templates, designed synthesis machines, unnatural lab conditions and donor genomes.....And this is all suppose to happen on a harsh primitive planet somewhere? all mindless unguided processes? yea ok..... Abiogenesis is laughable!!!
My take home from this was... The reason we can not recreate first life, is because we don’t know (and can not synthesise in a lab) the exact complex environment in which life first occurred. Is that right?
How can we speculate about the origin of life if we do not know yet what life is? Given the bio-chemistry as a necessary condition for life how can it account for the origin of bio-information, i.e., the origin of genetic code? Is it possible to resolve this chicken and egg riddle without anticipating a fundamental physical law to be discovered?
This is what we really know about life. It always comes from life every time and life of the same basic kind. That's why there is a Law of Biogenesis, unlike just the theory of evolution. . Life has never been made in a lab, though people have tried. The most they have ever been able to do is to take a pre existing cell or other life form and alter it with intelligent design in a high tech lab. . Regarding your supposed ape update status, there are actual facts though. It is a fact that we were once told as gawd's truth scientific fact that a 3 foot high Australopithecus, Lucy, was our great, great etc. granny. Based on? Some minor similarities, namely "similar homology" namely the Correlation Does Not Imply Causation logical fallacy. The fact that she was pretty much like any other ol' Australopithecus was irrelevant to them. Incomplete Comparison logical fallacy. . Since evolutionists are always disagreeing with one another on everything, now some of them say, No, it wasn't Lucy but some other such creature. Some creature with no evidence it ever existed. Presuming Omniscience logical fallacy. . Now how do they know Lucy et al even had a single descendant, much less one significantly different from it, much less one that could cross the impossible genus barrier? Presuming Omniscience logical fallacy. . Guess for how long any "transitions" are missing between you and Lucy or some other transition du jour? Oh, for just 3 to 5 million Darwin years. The rocks say no transitions exist. The evo spin, their Presuming Omniscience logical fallacy tells you, again as gawd's truth scientific fact, that they are just "missing." Riiiight. Never ask them how to tell a missing link from a non existent link. You will get no answer that makes any sense whatsoever. . You are not an ape update. You are infinitely more than that. Here is some actual, observable and documented evidence to help you see that: . Now in the Bible we are told of a Man Who believed in Adam and Eve and Noah as being actual, historical figures. The Bible says He did miracles and told others to do things like raise the dead and heal the sick. It also describes His death and burial. Is there any actual scientific data to support those stories? . Absolutely! See Medical Marvel Beyond Chance, from a secular source, with a pediatrician giving his report. this one attesting to a dying chld's healing which cannot be explained by modern medicine, and came after a relative laid hands on her and prayed for her. ua-cam.com/video/Xyko-56NCSw/v-deo.html . See secular news reports about Val Thomas, dead for 17 hours but now also alive and normal after prayers from her family and her Church. . Here is some more documented, scientific, evidence, not nearly all of it at all. See CBN Dean Braxton. You'll hear his critical care doctor, rated the best patient care doctor in Washington state, saying "It is a miracle...a miracle..." that Braxton is alive, has no brain damage and is normal in every way. Why? He had no heart beat and no respiration for 1 3/4 hours! His family believed in divine healing and they and others were praying for him. ua-cam.com/video/c3Zjt8r-hNA/v-deo.html . Also see CBN Dr. Chauncey Crandall Raises A Man From The Dead. ua-cam.com/video/s-7ZkleLu1w/v-deo.html Part 1. This video is a bit faded but has the most complete information on this story. . Get Dr. Richard Casdorph's book The Miracles. There he gives medical documentation for miracles, mostly, but not all, from Kathryn Kuhlman's healing services. Casdorph came to Kuhlman's meetings to debunk her but turned into a supporter, as did other doctors. You can see him and other doctors in some of her healing services on YT. (She is now deceased.) Delores Winder is one of the cases documented in his book. You can watch her amazing story on YT with Sid Roth. ua-cam.com/video/V-pgKbylrUM/v-deo.html . The book The Audacity of Prayer by Don Nordin lists medically documented miracles. . On Andrew Wommack's vids you can see doctors talking about "miracles" too. Check out the YT vid with the opthamologist who says Yes, Ronald Coyne could see out of an empty eye socket after a faith healer prayed for him. You can see him doing demos. At the end of the book Don't Limit God you see a medical statement by a doctor saying that his patient used to have M.S. and diabetes but is now cured. . Do you think that Someone Who can raise the dead and heal people of deadly "incurable" diseases, Someone Who created time, space, matter, energy and you - needed "evolution" to make life forms? No He created them fully formed and fully functional in 6 days just as Genesis, a Book He always supported, tells you. . Then there is the Shroud of Turin. If you don't know, the Shroud is a linen burial shroud with the faint image of a crucified man on it. If you have heard that the Shroud was proven to be a Medieval fake based on carbon 14 testing, in the documentary Jesus And The Shroud of Turin you can see the very inventor of carbon 14 testing saying that the sample was invalid due to contamination. ua-cam.com/video/XTtDhvk_aw4/v-deo.html . The vid demonstrates many more miraculous features such as pollen from Jerusalem and faint images of flowers that are found only in the Jerusalem area during the spring, as at Passover when Messiah was crucified. With modern technology we also see that the Shroud has an x ray quality which reveals bones and dentition of the Man on the Shroud. . Maybe start out with a short vid, though,The Jew And The Shroud on Tedx, with Barry Schwortz. . In the 70s a NASA scientist noticed the Shroud's photographs had inexplicable, unique in the world, qualities. He got up a team of scientists, called STURP, to examine it in person in Italy. (No, the Shroud is not "just a Catholic thing" as the Vatican only came into possession of it fairly recently in history.) They used NASA, and other, high tech equipment with 100s of thousands of hours of research. Their findings are seen all over the net and were published in respected science journals. . The team was composed of 3 Jews, at least one agnostic and one atheist, and people of various faiths. They all agreed on these things: There is no paint on the Shroud and they have no clue how the image got there. It exactly matches, down to blood stains where a crown of thorns would be, the description of Messiah's death and burial as given in the Bible, what NT writers report. The image could not be duplicated with modern technology. . These miracles are not what many would call proof. But they are certainly evidence. In a court of law you generally rely on evidence, not proof, as the actual crime is historical and cannot usually be observed (unless there was a video cam.) . About the Shroud I say "If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, maybe it's a duck." Maybe that Man on the Shroud is your very Best Friend and Savior. I pray you will find that out. . You're going to need a miracle some day friend. They are out there in abundance for those who humbly seek them from their Creator, the One Who made all that DNA out there.
Excellent talk. He knows the subject and more importantly he knows how to express the ideas clealry.
Typically brilliant, lapidary talk by Eric Smith. The man's incredible--he has a Feynman-like ability to distill complex ideas and present in lay language. He's made significant contributions in about five fields, from astrobiology to economics.
Should note that this lecture represents a view that has good support from geochemists but is disputed by geneticists and organic chemists. Genes-first and primordial soup models are still around. I admit I don't see how Smith doesn't *have* to be right, at least in basic outline. But there are folks who emphasize different features of the system.
Wow! One of the best science lectures I've ever seen in my life. Synthesizes physics, chem and bio to shed light on how life may have begun. Blows my little mind to here him say that basic organic molecules (and cycles) of metabolism arose and maintained themselves "spontaneously" from basic chemical principles, due to energy imperatives!! They've come a long way since my college bio classes in the pleistocene (1970's).
+JinxMinxNYC This is nothing more than an extension, by imagination of Kauffman. "Self Organization" schemes are an effort to patch up the errors of Neo-Darwinism. However it fails to address the "Information Problem."
Too bad only 1,000 views as this is perhaps an iconic presentation.
So true, this scientist is grabbing the nexus of inorganic and organic.
Eric is an exceptionally excellent speaker/teacher....very few can pack SO much into an hour.
Probably the best science talk I've seen.
It is extremely complex to understand the origins of life and the universe. I'm glad that some scientists are tackling this issue. Hope we will get closer to the truth in time. I think we're heading in the right direction.
"Oxidative life is reductive life wrapped up in a spacesuit that is able to capture light"
24:36
He is on the right trail,early earth chemistry to the first self- replicating molecules .If you accept that life emerged from the chemistry of the early earth, he makes a convincing argument for complexity to arise from the conditions existed in the chemistry of the early earth,which is so, so different from what we perceive now in the biosphere that has been created by the interaction between animated carbon chemistry and the geosphere.Time to go back to basics.
Woaw !
Life as a by-product of redox chemical reactions !!
That's new and interesting (for me).
I am loving this talk.
Fascinating lecture, thanks!
On a similar subject, Addy Pross book, "What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology" has also an interesting theory about life being an inevitable process.
brilliant!...Could someone explain in more detail, Eric's use of the word "control"> thanks...
Well said and explored
Excellent
Everything is inevitable, Everything!
absolutely brilliant, this is one of the videos that make you think of what that Chinese philosopher say 朝闻道，夕死可以 which means "hearing the truth of universe at dawn, I can die satisfactorily at sunset"
See also Harald Brüssow, "The Quest for Food: A Natural History of Eating," Springer (2007).
Wow, this is interesting - turning the tables around !
Was hoping that he would address the memory (DNA, RNA) question. There is another "camp" of origin o' life researchers who think that memory came before metabolism. I suspect that they somehow developed in concert.
This guy is a good scientist. He's onto something good, and with people like Nick Lane and Peter Hoffmann, and Stuart Kaufmann as well, he can go where Ilya Prigogine was headed. That is where this quest will find its grail. I don't know why he mentions Gould so much. Stephen J Gould was maybe the most overrated biologist of the 20th C. He was marginal at best, other than with snails per se. Often , as when he got into human biology, he was pitiful. As an evolutionary biologist, he was more of a politician.
I've been looking for this sort of explanation, I believe it's hammering on the door where the secret lies. But I don't think the emergence of life needs conditions that are not around today, as he seemed to imply when answering the first question, but not imply when talking about the underwater vents.
The necessary geochemical conditions probably are around today, but extant life is too efficient in exploiting them to allow for the inefficient pre-biotic systems to develop.
Intelligent chemists use templates, designed synthesis machines, unnatural lab conditions and donor genomes.....And this is all suppose to happen on a harsh primitive planet somewhere? all mindless unguided processes? yea ok..... Abiogenesis is laughable!!!
Agreed, but at origin there were many times more vents than today.
agreed
When we know all of the materials that houses are made from, why is it that we can't we figure out how they make themselves? It's SUCH a MYSTERY!!!!
My take home from this was... The reason we can not recreate first life, is because we don’t know (and can not synthesise in a lab) the exact complex environment in which life first occurred.
Is that right?
How can we speculate about the origin of life if we do not know yet what life is? Given the bio-chemistry as a necessary condition for life how can it account for the origin of bio-information, i.e., the origin of genetic code? Is it possible to resolve this chicken and egg riddle without anticipating a fundamental physical law to be discovered?
This is what we really know about life. It always comes from life every time and life of the same basic kind. That's why there is a Law of Biogenesis, unlike just the theory of evolution.
.
Life has never been made in a lab, though people have tried. The most they have ever been able to do is to take a pre existing cell or other life form and alter it with intelligent design in a high tech lab.
.
Regarding your supposed ape update status, there are actual facts though. It is a fact that we were once told as gawd's truth scientific fact that a 3 foot high Australopithecus, Lucy, was our great, great etc. granny. Based on? Some minor similarities, namely "similar homology" namely the Correlation Does Not Imply Causation logical fallacy. The fact that she was pretty much like any other ol' Australopithecus was irrelevant to them. Incomplete Comparison logical fallacy.
.
Since evolutionists are always disagreeing with one another on everything, now some of them say, No, it wasn't Lucy but some other such creature. Some creature with no evidence it ever existed. Presuming Omniscience logical fallacy. . Now how do they know Lucy et al even had a single descendant, much less one significantly different from it, much less one that could cross the impossible genus barrier? Presuming Omniscience logical fallacy.
.
Guess for how long any "transitions" are missing between you and Lucy or some other transition du jour? Oh, for just 3 to 5 million Darwin years. The rocks say no transitions exist. The evo spin, their Presuming Omniscience logical fallacy tells you, again as gawd's truth scientific fact, that they are just "missing." Riiiight. Never ask them how to tell a missing link from a non existent link. You will get no answer that makes any sense whatsoever.
.
You are not an ape update. You are infinitely more than that. Here is some actual, observable and documented evidence to help you see that:
.
Now in the Bible we are told of a Man Who believed in Adam and Eve and Noah as being actual, historical figures. The Bible says He did miracles and told others to do things like raise the dead and heal the sick. It also describes His death and burial. Is there any actual scientific data to support those stories?
.
Absolutely! See Medical Marvel Beyond Chance, from a secular source, with a pediatrician giving his report. this one attesting to a dying chld's healing which cannot be explained by modern medicine, and came after a relative laid hands on her and prayed for her. ua-cam.com/video/Xyko-56NCSw/v-deo.html
.
See secular news reports about Val Thomas, dead for 17 hours but now also alive and normal after prayers from her family and her Church.
.
Here is some more documented, scientific, evidence, not nearly all of it at all. See CBN Dean Braxton. You'll hear his critical care doctor, rated the best patient care doctor in Washington state, saying "It is a miracle...a miracle..." that Braxton is alive, has no brain damage and is normal in every way. Why? He had no heart beat and no respiration for 1 3/4 hours! His family believed in divine healing and they and others were praying for him. ua-cam.com/video/c3Zjt8r-hNA/v-deo.html
.
Also see CBN Dr. Chauncey Crandall Raises A Man From The Dead. ua-cam.com/video/s-7ZkleLu1w/v-deo.html Part 1. This video is a bit faded but has the most complete information on this story.
.
Get Dr. Richard Casdorph's book The Miracles. There he gives medical documentation for miracles, mostly, but not all, from Kathryn Kuhlman's healing services. Casdorph came to Kuhlman's meetings to debunk her but turned into a supporter, as did other doctors. You can see him and other doctors in some of her healing services on YT. (She is now deceased.) Delores Winder is one of the cases documented in his book. You can watch her amazing story on YT with Sid Roth. ua-cam.com/video/V-pgKbylrUM/v-deo.html
.
The book The Audacity of Prayer by Don Nordin lists medically documented miracles. . On Andrew Wommack's vids you can see doctors talking about "miracles" too. Check out the YT vid with the opthamologist who says Yes, Ronald Coyne could see out of an empty eye socket after a faith healer prayed for him. You can see him doing demos. At the end of the book Don't Limit God you see a medical statement by a doctor saying that his patient used to have M.S. and diabetes but is now cured.
.
Do you think that Someone Who can raise the dead and heal people of deadly "incurable" diseases, Someone Who created time, space, matter, energy and you - needed "evolution" to make life forms? No He created them fully formed and fully functional in 6 days just as Genesis, a Book He always supported, tells you.
.
Then there is the Shroud of Turin. If you don't know, the Shroud is a linen burial shroud with the faint image of a crucified man on it. If you have heard that the Shroud was proven to be a Medieval fake based on carbon 14 testing, in the documentary Jesus And The Shroud of Turin you can see the very inventor of carbon 14 testing saying that the sample was invalid due to contamination. ua-cam.com/video/XTtDhvk_aw4/v-deo.html
.
The vid demonstrates many more miraculous features such as pollen from Jerusalem and faint images of flowers that are found only in the Jerusalem area during the spring, as at Passover when Messiah was crucified. With modern technology we also see that the Shroud has an x ray quality which reveals bones and dentition of the Man on the Shroud. . Maybe start out with a short vid, though,The Jew And The Shroud on Tedx, with Barry Schwortz.
.
In the 70s a NASA scientist noticed the Shroud's photographs had inexplicable, unique in the world, qualities. He got up a team of scientists, called STURP, to examine it in person in Italy. (No, the Shroud is not "just a Catholic thing" as the Vatican only came into possession of it fairly recently in history.) They used NASA, and other, high tech equipment with 100s of thousands of hours of research. Their findings are seen all over the net and were published in respected science journals.
.
The team was composed of 3 Jews, at least one agnostic and one atheist, and people of various faiths. They all agreed on these things: There is no paint on the Shroud and they have no clue how the image got there. It exactly matches, down to blood stains where a crown of thorns would be, the description of Messiah's death and burial as given in the Bible, what NT writers report. The image could not be duplicated with modern technology.
.
These miracles are not what many would call proof. But they are certainly evidence. In a court of law you generally rely on evidence, not proof, as the actual crime is historical and cannot usually be observed (unless there was a video cam.) . About the Shroud I say "If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, maybe it's a duck." Maybe that Man on the Shroud is your very Best Friend and Savior. I pray you will find that out. . You're going to need a miracle some day friend. They are out there in abundance for those who humbly seek them from their Creator, the One Who made all that DNA out there.