In this next clip, Dawkins responds to Alex O'Connor's point that Darwin may have

solved the mystery of complexity in living things, but not the origin of living things.

Question we're trying to answer.

We're trying to answer how did the first self-replicating entity come into existence?

And that's a big question.

It only had to happen once, unlike the rest of evolution,

where it happened over and over and over again. The same thing happened over and over again,

all over the world, different continents, different species, different kinds of animal and plant and so on.

The origin of life could have been a very, very

improbable event because it only had to happen once and therefore we are potentially allowed to

postulate something very unlikely, something very implausible. I find that quite an interesting

point actually that, that, yes. I mean if you take it to an extreme, so suppose we are the only

planet in the universe which has life, which is, we can't rule that out, I think it's highly unlikely, but we can't rule it out.

If that's true, then that means that the origin of life on this planet was a stupendously

improbable event.

And therefore, when chemists try to postulate

a possible scenario for the origin of life,

they're not looking for a plausible argument.

That's fascinating, yeah. I don't believe that because I think that probably it was not that

improbable an event and therefore the likelihood is that there's lots of not that Dawkins doesn't think the origin of life is all that improbable, Bill.

Right. In my study of the origin of life for my systematic philosophical theology,

I discovered that among origin of life

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