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Tour, Meyer: Some Very Hard Problems Facing Origin-of-Life Research

Image credit: Arek Socha, via Pixabay.

On a new episode of ID the Future James Tour and Stephen Meyer begin a discussion of the hard problems facing researchers trying to discover how the first life could have come about naturalistically. Meyer is director of the Center for Science & Culture; Tour is a world-renowned chemist at Rice University with over 700 research publications and multiple major awards, recognized by Thomson Reuters in 2014 as among “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Though Professor Tour doesn’t sign on to ID theory, he says he’s sympathetic to the idea, and certainly not impressed by any naturalistic explanations for the origin of life. In today’s episode he and Tour explore problems ranging from the extreme improbabilities associated with protein assembly, to what precisely has gone missing in the nanosecond when a cell dies. The episode is excerpted from a longer interview Dr. Tour conducted with Dr. Meyer as part of his excellent new video series, The Science & Faith Podcast: Follow the Evidence.