Is Biogenesis Scientific? — Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith

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.

Creation and the Origin of Life

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 the 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 the computer industry, means nothing to do with thought, but only, and everything is to do with a pure surprise effect.

Nothing else than a 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, if you were to take, not A, B, it's 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, that 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 you see, 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.

Thoughtful Information and Logos

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, which you mustn't put it in scientific circles, is 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. 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 Sol 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.

Thermodynamics, Entropy, and Order

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.

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, it 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 through the entropy hole, and to get it out again you've got to have an activation energy to do so.

DNA as an Information Storage System

Now, 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? Do 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 they're 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.

Molecular Chirality and the D/L Forms

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 vital 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. CHCHCH3CH3CH3CH3COOHCOOH.

Now that's the same formula as the alanine I wrote down there, but I've written it a different way. The tetrahedron's written there, CH3CH3CHCHNH2NH2COOHCOOHCOOH. 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 CH3NH2COOH CH3NH2COOH. 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. 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.

Separating L-Alanine from D-Alanine

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 of the D and 50 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, and 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. 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.

L-Brucine and the Resolution of Racemates

Now, if you go to the deadly nightshade type of plant, the deadly nightshade produces a substance called, a base called brucine. Here 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 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'd just evaporated from the lab, and nobody found him.

But he was the man who did it. And you see, he was pretty, a pretty sharp thinker. He got hold of this brucine, and he combined his DL acids with the L-brucine to make LL and LDL. 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, the 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'd separated out the basic materials you need to make the DNA molecule store its information in three dimensions rather than in two.

Borrowing Biological Information to Synthesize Life

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 by 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 and 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 came 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 gazing 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.