On this episode of ID the Future, Robert J. Marks interviews Walter Bradley, co-author of the seminal 1984 ID book The Mystery of Life’s Origin, now being released in a revised and expanded edition with updates from multiple contributors discussing the progress (or lack of it) in origins science in the 35 years since the book’s original publication. In this first of two podcasts, Bradley discusses the history of the attempts to explain life’s origin naturalistically, and how the three authors of the 1984 book came together to shake up the world of origin-of-life science.

The origin of life from non-life remains one of the most enduring mysteries of modern science. The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy investigates how close scientists are to solving that mystery and explores what we are learning about the origin of life from current research in chemistry, physics, astrobiology, biochemistry, and more. The book includes an updated version of the classic text The Mystery of Life’s Origin by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen, and new chapters on the current state of the debate by chemist James Tour, physicist Brian Miller, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, biologist Jonathan Wells, and philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer.
See also: Researchers: Homogenous RNA could emerge from a primordial mess Friends doubt that the random polymerizing of nucleotides is going to explain the origin of information needed for “RNA genomes” to come into existence.
as to:
In regards to James Tour in particular.
First off, James Tour rocks!
Secondly, in the following video, Dr James Tour, (who is very well respected for his breakthroughs in synthetic chemistry, and who is also regarded as one of the top ten synthetic chemists in the world), states the insurmountable problem in OOL research for atheistic materialists as such:
What Dr. Tour touched upon in that preceding comment is the fact that having the correct sequential information in DNA is not nearly enough. Besides the sequential information in DNA there is also a vast amount of ‘positional information’ that must be accounted for as well.
The positional information that is found to be in a simple one cell bacterium, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, is found to be on the order 10 to the 12 bits,,, which is several orders of magnitude more information than the amount of sequential information that is encoded on the DNA of a ‘simple’ bacterium.
,,, Which is the equivalent of 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”
More interesting still, now classical “sequential’ information is shown to be a subset of quantum information by the following method. Specifically, in the following 2011 paper. researchers ,,, show that when the bits (in a computer) to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer’s state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,, In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that (in quantum information theory) an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer.
Moreover, in 2010 the Maxwell’s demon thought experiment, which was originally devised by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867, was finally experimentally realized. As the following paper highlights, it has now been experimentally demonstrated that knowledge of a particle’s location and/or position converts information into energy.
And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”
And as the following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,,
quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,,
Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
Again to repeat that last sentence,“Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
That statement about entropy being a property of an observer who describes the system, for anyone involved in the ID vs. Darwinism debate, ought to send chills down their scientific spine.
In other words, Intelligent Design, and a fairly direct inference to God as the Intelligence behind life, (via the non-locality of quantum information and/or the non-locality of quantum entanglement ), has, for all intents and purposes, finally achieved experimental confirmation.
supplemental notes:
The original book marks the real start of the ID movement.