I. D. The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.

How did so many Americans get this answer so wrong?

Hello, I'm Tom Gilson and the question is how close are scientists to

fabricating life in the lab. Most American adults, especially those

with the college education, think we're already there. Today on ID the

future we'll hear the second part of Eric Mataxus's interview with Dr. James

Tour on the topic. Mataxus is a best-selling author, speaker, and humorist, and in the first part of this conversation which we've already

aired, he introduced Dr. Tour as a world expert in nanochemistry, arguably the most widely influential scientist in the world today.

And now we'll find out just how stunningly wrong most Americans are on the question of life in

the lab.

Mataxus is first to speak as we pick it up here.

What really, the reason I ended up writing my book,

His atheism Dead, is because when we had that conversation about the

origin of life I was so astonished I thought nobody talks about this so let's

talk about this you in the restaurant in Houston you started explaining to me because I think all of us in high school were forced, it was on the test, it was always on the test, how did life begin?

So what is the standard model since

1952 when people say, you know, to high school students, to college students, how life

began? What do they say? It's not only the standard model to high school students, it's a standard model to college students, it's a standard model to graduate students.

It's in all of their textbooks and from middle school through graduate school and it is the primordial soup model.

There is a pond. There's a body of water and there are molecules in that body of water.

There's some lightning strikes and the molecules start coming together and then they assemble into cells.

Those cells start coming together and you get little creatures

...