I. Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host Andrew McDermott. Today we're pleased to share a new discussion between Dr James Tour and Dr Stephen Meyer about recent critiques of origin of life research published in the prestigious science journal Nature.

The interview originally aired on the Science and Faith Podcast hosted by Dr. Tour.

In a recent nature comment,

biochemist Nick Lane and bioengineer Joanna Xavier

give a sobering assessment of the Origin of Life research field,

advising fellow researchers that, quote,

brash claims for a breakthrough on the origin of life

are unhelpful noise if they do not come in the context

of a wider framework, unquote. Here, Drs.'s tour and Meyer discuss the article's findings.

They also comment on a recent book review by Oxford Emeritus biologist Dennis Noble,

calling for a major rethink of biology in a piece titled,

It's Time to Admit that Genes are not the Blueprint for Life.

Dr Meyer thinks the Nature Articles represent a healthy corrective to a research field

be sought by hype and empty promises.

He also reminds us that the more we learn about how to build an animal, the more challenging

the origin of life problem becomes.

If you want to evolve one animal body plan into another, he says,

you've got to change the developmental gene regulatory network,

which is responsible for the

building of body plans. But the one thing we know experimentally is that that's

the one thing that doesn't happen. So just how do you get from one animal body plan to another in light of new things we've learned?

Currently no theory of evolution can answer that question

...