Brandon McGuire at the YouTube channel Daily Dose of Wisdom had a great idea. He showed Stephen Meyer a viral video from another channel, the “actually very cool most of the time” Veritasium, and had him react live and on the spot. The video in question claims to show how the unguided origin of life is super easy to envision, involving random chemical “blobs” forming into a convenient replicator, given enough time.
Dr. Meyer explains some of the many problems with this simplification, including the role of time. Rather than a “hero,” time is an archenemy of spontaneously arising complexity — evolution before biology — on the early Earth. For one thing, “The processes of chemical decay happen at much faster rates than the processes of chemical assembly.”
That and other issues with the origin of life are tackled by Dr. Meyer, the formidable Rice University chemist James Tour, and other scientists in the upcoming theatrical documentary The Story of Everything, which opens nationally on Thursday, April 30. Find tickets here.