Equal parts incredible frustration to even more incredible fascination: here is a recent talk on the origin of life by Loren Williams at Georgia Tech.
First, here is your warning.
You will hear one word, over and over in this remarkable talk, that has stolen the place, or taken the credit, for what is undeniable evidence of design. This is frustrating, to the point of the listener wanting to scream (well, maybe).
Let’s call that Bad News First.
Now, the Good News
Williams, a leading ribosome and origin-of-life researcher (getting NASA and NSF money), has picked up the design signal in biopolymers: proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides, and even lipids, which he calls “honorary biopolymers.” We say “design signal” because of remarks like this, at 26:19:
- “Organic chemistry on a rock, on the ancient earth, doesn’t do that” — i.e., construct polyfunctional biopolymers which, as Williams says repeatedly, “can control their own destiny.”
Or this, at 39:05:
- All biopolymers “are thermodynamically unstabilized in water. Which means it’s impossible — that means life could never have originated in the ocean. Right? It’s thermodynamically impossible to make any of these molecules in the ocean.”
So Long, LUCA
Another design signal? Williams is clearly toying with getting rid of the Last Universal Common Ancestor. LUCA never existed, he says, because of what he calls “chicken and egg” enigmas all throughout the prebiotic story. In that respect, the slide at 6:35, which is also the YouTube thumbnail, is misleading. Planetary-wide deterministic pathways from chemistry to cells will never give you LUCA, unless one invokes a probabilistic bottleneck, which contradicts the rest of William’s chemical argument.
Want some frustration, again? The magical word — you’ll instantly discover it — is, by William’s own admission, backed up with no demonstrable mechanism. His lab is trying robotic analysis of wet-dry cycles, but it is a sure bet that nothing biologically relevant has emerged, as one of the last questioners in the Q&A exchange openly and skeptically suggests.
Nonetheless — great talk. This is design evidence, where that inference has been forced to sit on a bench in the hallway, or out in the parking lot.