Welcome to episode 54 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose interview Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of the new 20th Anniversary Edition of “The Privileged Planet”. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Podcast description:

Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.

Episode summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose welcome Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez to discuss the new 20th anniversary edition of “The Privileged Planet”. Guillermo explains the book’s thesis, and gives examples of the link between habitability and measurability from our planet, solar system, and galaxy. Guillermo responds to arguments against design, and talks about getting into trouble with opponents of design on campus.

Outline and transcript

Here is a transcript of the show (with timestamps) provided by TurboScribe AI. TurboScribe AI allows you to translate the transcript into many, many different languages. You can also export the transcript into many different formats, with optional timestamps.

Episode 54:

Speaker biographies

Guillermo Gonzalez is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1993 from the University of Washington. He has done post-doctoral work at the University of Texas, Austin and at the University of Washington. He has taught astronomy and physics courses at the University of Washington, Iowa State University, Grove City College, and Ball State University. He is a world-class expert on the astrophysical requirements for habitability and on habitable zones and a co-founder of the “Galactic Habitable Zone” concept, which captured the October 2001 cover story of Scientific American. Gonzalez has also published over 90 articles in refereed astronomy and astrophysical journals. He also is the co-author of the second edition of Observational Astronomy, an advanced college astronomy textbook.

Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.

Desert Rose did her undergraduate degree in public policy, and then worked for a conservative Washington lobbyist organization. She also has a graduate degree from a prestigious evangelical seminary. She is active in Christian apologetics as a speaker, author, and teacher.

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Music attribution:

Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5744-strength-of-the-titans
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One of the funniest things about young, unmarried women is the way that they choose men who have no morals, and then they’re shocked when those men treat them poorly. In today’s post, we’ll look at a secular leftist woman, who deliberately chooses to have a relationship with a famous secular leftist man. And you know this famous secular leftist man, it’s Kamala Harris’ husband.

Here’s the story from the New York Post:

A former girlfriend of second gentleman Doug Emhoff said she was left “embarrassed and humiliated” when he slapped her following a gala dinner at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival in the South of France — adding that the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris has maintained a “completely fabricated persona” as a public figure.

The woman, a New York attorney identified only as “Jane,” told the Daily Mail in an interview published Thursday she was trying to hand a valet the equivalent of $100 to get her and Emhoff to the head of a taxi line when her beau struck.

“As I’m talking to him, Doug got out of the line, comes up, turns me around by my right shoulder. I’m completely caught off guard, I’m not bracing, I’m in four inch heels, wearing a full-length gown and it’s between 2-3 a.m.,” she told the outlet. “He slaps me so hard I spin around, and I’m in utter shock.”

“There had been no fight, no argument,” she added. “In that moment, his mask had dropped and I saw his dark side.”

What’s funny about these secular left women is that they choose secular men who think that the best way to get out of an unwanted pregnancy is murder. Somehow, they expect that the murder-supporting man will treat them well.

Oh, and there is more slapping in the article:

Jane claimed she already had reservations about Emhoff, now 60, after he admitted he had cheated on his first wife, Kerstin Mackin, with Najen Naylor, the nanny of Emhoff’s daughter Ella — getting the woman pregnant in the process.

“All I did was ask him one question, and he told me the whole story,” she said, recalling the conversation in April 2012. “He’s telling me this very casually like it’s no big deal. He yelled at her. He never said he hit her, but he said he got really angry with her, and she subsequently claimed that whatever he did caused her to lose the pregnancy.”

He may be a misogynist, but he’s a pro-abortion misogynist, so he’s a “good man”:

The Daily Mail previously reported on accusations from the future second gentleman’s former colleagues at Venable that he was “inappropriate” and “misogynistic” toward his female colleagues.

A 2019 lawsuit obtained by The Post charged that Emhoff hired an assistant named “Katya” who was widely considered unqualified but was “young, attractive and friendly with the powerful men in the office.”

And if you show these secular left women a different man – one who is conservative and Christian, and who doesn’t believe in sex before marriage – then they will say that that man is “bad”. The best men, the secular leftist women will tell you, are the ones who don’t have any morals at all.

This is actually a really big problem for young, unmarried women these days.

You might have heard by now that young, unmarried women are becoming more and more leftist in their policy views.

Here’s the far-left UK Independent to explain:

An analysis of survey data from across the developing world had found that “a new global gender divide” is emerging. The analysis, conducted by the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch, showed that the developed world’s young women have rapidly become more liberal. Young men, however, have either become more conservative (as in the US) or been much slower to become more progressive (as in the UK).

And young, unmarried women are becoming less and less religious.

Here’s the far-left New York Times to explain: (archived)

For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.

“We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip.

Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.

What should we make of this trend of young, unmarried women becoming more secular and leftist, and then being shocked when the secular left men they deliberately choose treat them poorly? Will anyone tell them that the root cause of their problems with men is their own worldviews, and their own choices based on those worldviews? Who is brave enough to tell young women that they have to accept responsibility for the results of their own choices?

The origin of life is easy to explain if it is the result of intelligent design, because intelligent agents know how to engineer the building blocks, and how to assemble them into the components of a living system: proteins and nucleic acids. But how can you do it when there are no intelligences allows in your worldview? There is a new article in Nature about that.

The authors write:

To understand how life might have begun, researchers must stop cherry-picking the most beautiful bits of data or the most apparently convincing isolated steps, and explore the implications of these deep differences in context. Depending on the starting point, each hypothesis has different testable predictions. For example, if life started in a warm pond on land, the succession of steps leading from prebiotic chemistry to cells with genes is surprisingly different from those that must be posited if the first cells emerged in deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

Building coherent frameworks — in which all the steps in the continuum fit together — is essential to making real progress. To see why, here we highlight two of the most prominent frameworks, which propose radically distinct environments for the origin of life.

Let’s see what the authors say about the prebiotic soup:

This framework posits that nucleotides are concentrated in a small pond. To form RNA, the simplest and most versatile genetic material, nucleotides must polymerize. That is most easily achieved by drying them out (polymerization is a type of dehydration reaction). Proponents imagine a succession of wet–dry cycles, in which the pond dries out to form polymers of RNA, then fills again with water containing more nucleotides and so on, cycle after cycle, making more and more RNA3.

This is the “RNA World” hypothesis, which I’ve blogged about before. The authors don’t like it:

But this concept raises some difficult questions. It places the onus on an ‘RNA world’, in which RNA acts both as a catalyst (in a similar way to enzymes) and as a genetic template that can be copied. The problems are that there is little evidence that RNA can catalyse many of the reactions attributed to it (such as those required for metabolism); and copying ‘naked’ RNA (that is not enclosed in compartments such as cells) favours the RNA strands that replicate the fastest. Far from building complexity, these tend to get smaller and simpler over time. Worse, by regularly drying everything out, wet–dry cycles keep forming random groupings of RNA (in effect, randomized genomes). The best combinations, which happen to encode multiple useful catalysts, are immediately lost again by re-randomization in the next generation, precluding the ‘vertical inheritance’ that is needed for evolution to build novelty.

If selection on RNA in drying ponds could somehow be made to generate greater complexity, what must it achieve? To make cells that grow and reproduce, RNA must encode metabolism: the network of hundreds of reactions that keeps all cells alive. Modern-day metabolic reactions bear no resemblance to the cyanide chemistry that makes nucleotides in this model. Evolution would therefore need to replace each and every step in metabolism, and there is no evidence that such a wholesale replacement is possible.

The authors are saying that they need to build up complexity from simple to more complex, in order to get the bare minimum they need for simple life. Life basically requires four different capabilities: membrane, energy capture, metabolism, and information storage. And they all have to be there and working right from the start. It’s a frightful amount of complexity to get right – unless you appeal to intelligence.

The authors also talk about life forming from non-living materials in hydrothermal vents:

Our own favoured scenario is that the chemistry of life reflects the conditions under which life began, in deep-sea hydrothermal systems on the early Earth4. In broad brush strokes, this means that gases such as carbon dioxide (the near-universal source of carbon in cells today) and hydrogen feed a network of reactions with a topology resembling metabolism. Genes and proteins arise within this spontaneous protometabolism and promote the flux of materials through the network, leading to cell growth and reproduction. There are plenty of problems here, too, but they differ from those in the prebiotic soup framework.

The first problem is that they need enzymes in order go from simple gases to nucleotides, and they don’t have them:

The first problem is that H2 and CO2 are not particularly reactive — indeed, their chemistry was largely ignored for decades, although rising interest in green chemistry is changing that. But deep-sea vents are labyrinths of interconnected pores, which have a topology resembling cells — acidic outside and alkaline inside. The flow of protons from the outside to the inside of these pores can drive work in much the same way that the inward flow of protons can drive CO2 fixation in cells today5.

[…]But many chemists are troubled by the idea that, in the absence of enzymes to serve as catalysts, hydrothermal flow could drive scores of reactions through a network that prefigures metabolism, from CO2 right up to nucleotides. The chemist Leslie Orgel once dismissed this scenario as an “appeal to magic”. Certainly, further data are required, supporting or otherwise.

They have problems sequencing nucleotides into functioning components:

Polymerization is another stumbling block. Nucleotides have been polymerized in water on mineral surfaces9, but this raises similar questions to those noted for wet–dry cycles about how selection could act. If the problem is solved by polymerizing nucleotides inside growing protocells, mineral surfaces would not have been available. Polymerization would then have needed to happen in cell-like (aqueous gel) conditions, but without enzymes. If serious attempts to synthesize RNA under those conditions fail, the overall framework would need to be modified.

I’m not convinced that mineral surfaces can help with the nucleotide sequencing problem, but they don’t even have those available in the hydrothermal vents.

I studied computer science in university, so biochemistry is all new to me. I am trying to learn it, but I also have to write code all day for work. But thankfully, there are experts who can sort this out for us.

Here is a podcast from the fellows over at the Discovery Institute, and they talked about this article. Podcasts are a great way to try to understand these complex problems.