Nanotechnologist James Tour on Evolution Myth – Tucker Carlson Show (Transcript)

I mean, there’s these bacterial, these rhodopsin type molecules that every time a photon of light hits your eye, this thing is changing its configuration and then it has to relax back. And this is why you see the image of me every time you learn something about me. It’s just an electronic interaction and then this is going to protein synthesis.

And then this protein synthesis as you go to sleep tonight, it’ll turn into hardwired interconnects in your brain. Who knows this but a scientist? And you give glory to God. This is amazing.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s interesting, though, because I think many scientists would describe the properties of a tree as you just did and wind up worshiping the tree.

JAMES TOUR: Yeah, it’s unfortunate that happens. I mean, it’s like G.K. Chesterton said, “When you stop believing in God, you don’t stop believing in everything. You start believing in anything.” I mean, so you think this tree is your God? I mean, so, yeah, it’s really unfortunate.

But, you know, I think scientists sometimes give an image on the outside that’s not really what’s on the inside. I’ve many times sat with them and I said, “Do you really understand life? Do you understand how this thing works? Do you understand what’s going on here? Do you understand how these things came about?” I’ve never had a scientist say to me, “Oh, yeah, no problem, I understand. We have a pretty good grasp on this thing.” Never. Never in private. Never in private. They’ll never say that.

I’ve had people say, “Jim, look, I hear you. Don’t quote me, but I’m with you on this thing.” And so I think the vast majority of them agree with me, but they don’t say it.

The Problem of Scientific Honesty

TUCKER CARLSON: So without even getting part—I mean, I want to get to the core question, which is, what is life and how is it created? But before we get there, what you just said makes sense. Of course, there’s no evidence anyone really understands any of this, but why not just admit that?

JAMES TOUR: Sometimes the community is not very warm when you admit that sort of thing. You get excluded from certain societies, from certain academies. When you start speaking like that, when you don’t toe the party line. Scientists are just like everybody else. We want to allay our fears and be part of the crowd and be part of the group. And so we say things.

TUCKER CARLSON: I thought that science required, well, honesty above all. An admission that you know you don’t know something, and then a declaration that you do, if you think you do, et cetera, et cetera. But you always have to kind of come back to what you know. So why wouldn’t you admit when you don’t know?

JAMES TOUR: So you thought that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I did think that. I was told that in school.

JAMES TOUR: Yeah. So sorry.

TUCKER CARLSON: I actually only learned during COVID that wasn’t true, but I didn’t know that.

JAMES TOUR: Yeah, yeah. Many people learned during COVID that wasn’t true. And scientists have lost a lot of credibility and rightly so. It needed to be lost because we’re not very honest about many things.

A lot of times we’ll see things and I think that we will keep preaching the same thing and underscoring. And you have this ancestral sort of relationship in the sense of it’s peer review. And if the paper you’re reviewing seems to come against and discount some of the things that you have been saying your whole career, it’s very easy to nix that paper and just say, “I don’t think this paper should be published” and to give reasons why it shouldn’t be published.

So if you want to get grant money, you need to say certain things. And it’s very hard to come with something that’s going to shake up a field. It’s very easy to come in with small developments. But to something that’s going to shake up a field, that’s very hard to do. The system is not made for that.

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The Crisis in Scientific Integrity

TUCKER CARLSON: But then you wind up, I think, destroying the system. If you don’t adhere to the basic precept, which is science is about telling the truth. It’s a process designed to make sure we’re telling the truth. That’s my read of it, anyway.

JAMES TOUR: Well, I don’t think—I don’t think that any scientists go into this thing with dishonesty. I believe that on their forefront, you know, they don’t wake up in the morning, “I’m going to write something false today.” I don’t think they do.

And we all get brought up in this educational system where we’re taught something, and then as we start researching this and we start saying, “Hey, this is not exactly right, I don’t see exactly what you’re saying,” that bothers people.

And, I mean, I can give you examples of this. Many times I’ve challenged the—I mean, show me where I’m wrong on this. Show me, and nobody will come forward. I mean, I have specific examples. I said, I’ve even gone so far as to say I don’t understand the chemistry behind the evolutionary process.

I mean, you’ll talk generalities. You want to fly over 30,000 feet and look down, okay, you can describe it. But tell me about the chemistry. Tell me about the molecular interactions that are going to have to occur, the changes at the molecular level and how that happens. You would think my colleagues would say, “No problem, Jim, let’s go out to lunch.”

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, I would think that actually.

JAMES TOUR: “I’ll tell you how it happens. I’ll tell you what happens.” But they don’t. They don’t. They don’t tell me how it happens. It’s very rare. Only one colleague in my whole career from Washington University in St. Louis reached out to me, and he tried to explain to me.

We got together, I flew out there. I mean, this is how badly I wanted to know. “Talk to me about the chemistry behind this evolutionary process, because I’m just not getting it.” And I spent two days with him, and we got a room there in his building, and he just took me through it. And I appreciated his taking the time, but I still walked away, not really seeing the chemistry, but I appreciated his trying.

TUCKER CARLSON: You flew to St. Louis to hear this for two days?

JAMES TOUR: For two days.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, I don’t want to take us off track. And I will get back to the question of evolution and what do we know and what don’t we know? But can we start at the beginning, which is with life? What is life?

The Definition and Characteristics of Life

JAMES TOUR: Well, what is life is not answered by science. There are the characteristics of life. What is life is probably something much better explained in the Bible. You behold and you say human life is this way. It’s pretty corrupt and it’s fairly weak. It rebels against God. This is the “what is life” question.

But the characteristics of life is that it’s responsive to the environment. It has growth and change, it has metabolism, it breathes, has homeostasis. It’s made of cells and it passes on traits to offspring. Those are the characteristics of life. That’s very well defined by science.

And now you see scientists trying to change those definitions and give it a much smaller number of those things. So it’s something that they can claim that they have made, but what they’ve made is just a bunch of nonsense. It’s really not life at all. It’s things people have seen for a long time. It’s just really not life.

I mean, show me the homeostasis. Homeostasis is a constant internal state. So if you go outside on a freezing cold day, your body has to maintain its body temperature. And not just your body, every cell in your body has to maintain a proper temperature, proper pH balance, proper proton interactions, has to still make ATP, still has to carry out all of these functions.

That’s homeostasis, all of these vast number of things that have to happen. You show me any one of your synthetic garbage that you say is a cell and show me the homeostasis in this. It’s not there. Show me the metabolism here, show me that it breathes, show me what it’s doing with oxygen. Show me. It’s not there.

And so this is the characteristics of life. And every cell has it. It has to be made of cells. This has always been a characteristic of life, has to be made of cells. So we see this in every cell, but we don’t know how to mimic it.

Redefining Life: The Origin of Life Researchers’ Agenda

TUCKER CARLSON: I had no idea there was an effort underway to change the definition of life. Who was behind that effort and what’s the point of it?

JAMES TOUR: Origin of life researchers, they want to claim that what they’ve done in their laboratory is made life. And sometimes they’ll use these words as code word. “Here’s some proto life,” what does that mean? And then you see it ramped up in the lay press. “Scientists have created life and it’s really quite simple.” You know, this is what they’ll say, and it’s really simple.

I mean, even articles from 2025 are claiming that scientists finally figured out how to make life. It’s nonsense. These scientists say these sort of things. So, I mean, I’ve challenged them. I said, any of you can come on my podcast and tell me about this, or if you’re afraid that I’ll doctor it somehow, we’ll go on your podcast or we’ll get a neutral party podcast.

You would think that there would be lots of origin of life scientists that would come forward and they say. I say, you can’t even hook two amino acids together. You can’t even take the amino acids D and K and hook them together without the side chains interfering. You can’t even hook two molecules of glucose together, let alone a polysaccharide with proper attachment using prebiotic chemistry. You can’t do it.

Am I the only one seeing this? If I’m wrong, come on my channel and tell me how this is done. And none of them will come on. You say, well, they haven’t seen my challenge. No, I also emailed them. I also emailed them. I said, come on. Come on, talk about this. None of them will come forward.

One said, “Oh, I could explain to you these things in an hour.” I said, okay, I will come to you. I will come to you, your institute. I will come to you, and I will sit there for an hour. You explain it to me. I said, I’ll even sit there all day and I won’t ask any questions unless I don’t understand something. I won’t challenge you. I’ll just listen. He said, “I’m too busy for that.” I mean, so this is a game now.

Empty Claims: What Scientists Point to as “Creating Life”

TUCKER CARLSON: What are they pointing to when they say, “we’ve created life”?

JAMES TOUR: Yeah, they’re pointing to their 40 years of career where they’ve been saying, “we’re on the verge of making life.” I mean, there are people that are doing this that they say that they’re on the verge of making life.

I mean, Jack Szostak, who was a professor at Harvard, now he’s at the University of Chicago, Nobel Prize winner, said in 2014 to a gathering in New York, a gathering of lay people in New York, that he will have life in his lab in three to five years. That was in 2014. Guess what? He missed his deadline.

And then years later, he now says, you know, “we’re still working on trying to get the RNA, just trying to get RNA.” He hasn’t even made RNA. From RNA to life is a chasm that’s universe wide. He hasn’t even made the RNA yet. He was making claims to the lay public that he’d have life in his lab in three to five years.

And then Dimitar Sasselov, astrophysicist from Harvard said, “Well, it’s not going to be three to five. It’s probably more like five and not three.” He said at the same gathering, well, guess what? He missed his deadline.

I mean, Steve Benner has said on podcasts, he says that most of the, that’s exactly, most of the many of the paradoxes in origin of life have been solved. Like none of them have been solved. Zero have been solved. In his own mind, they are solved. And I challenged him on it. I said, what is solved? You said that they’ve been solved. What is solved? Tell me about this. And he had no answer for me.

I mean, I walked up to the guy, I saw him come to a gathering. I walked right up to him and said, explain it to me. And so he has made these sort of comments.

Lee Cronin, another origin of life researcher, has said that within a couple of years, he said in 2011, within a couple of years, he would have made life in his laboratory. Guess what? He missed his deadline. They’re nowhere close. Nowhere close.

So, yeah, and then this goes from their mouths when they say this sort of thing to the press, which ramps it up, and then it goes into the textbooks, and it’s in all of our textbooks, not just in elementary school, even to the advanced graduate level, not introductory graduate, advanced graduate level. Textbooks in biochemistry talk about the same sort of nonsense.

The Unsolved Paradoxes of Life’s Origin

TUCKER CARLSON: So creating life would be taking something that’s inorganic we can all agree is not alive, and then turning it into something that meets the criteria you described for life. You say there are paradoxes in the origin of life itself, and they haven’t answered any of them. What are those paradoxes?

JAMES TOUR: You have to have four classes of compounds. So there’s four classes of compounds that build us. You have the lipids which surround every one of our cell structure. You have the polysaccharides. This is the sugars hooked together. This is our energy sources. And some of these act as channels through which ions can flow.

You have the nucleotides, which are RNA and DNA, and then you have the polypeptides, which are proteins, and our enzymes, the little things that construct our body. Nobody has ever made those polymers. Any classes, any of those, by prebiotic route.

By prebiotic route, I mean using the chemicals and techniques that would have been available on an early Earth. That means prebiotically, can we make some of those structures synthetically in a laboratory? Absolutely. We can do this normally. What we’ll do is we’ll take a cell and deconstruct it and then rebuild the pieces as we want.

Not only can we not make the polymers of these, we can’t even make the individual units of these in a prebiotically relevant manner. Each of these has stereochemistry. People will say, well, what about the Miller-Urey experiment? In 1953, the Miller-Urey experiment made several of the amino acids just by taking sparks and this reducing environment and having certain gases in there. And they found amino acids.

Nobody has ever been able to take that type of mixture and do anything useful with it because the molecules don’t have handedness. Molecules can come in two forms, a right handed and a left handed version. Almost all biological molecules…

TUCKER CARLSON: Do molecules have handedness?

JAMES TOUR: Absolutely.

The Handedness Problem in Molecular Biology

JAMES TOUR: Just as if you look at your left hand and your right hand, these are mirror images of each other. If you hold your left hand up to a mirror, you will see what looks like your right hand. If you hold your right hand up to the mirror, what you’ll see is what looks like your left hand. The two are not the same. And you know that when you try to put on a glove, the glove doesn’t fit right. And so they have this mirror image relationship.

Almost all biological molecules have a mirror image relationship. So when they will use a prebiotic method to make these molecules they only get the mixture. Biology can only run on one. It can’t run on the mixture of them. It’s hard to get one.

Are there modern techniques to do this? Absolutely. Are there any techniques that could mimic what went on on an early Earth? Nowhere close. Nowhere close. And people say it happened on a chiral surface. People have tried this on chiral surfaces. They’ve never gotten good handedness qualities, never.

So we don’t even know how to make the basic building blocks of the building blocks that make us. We don’t know how to polymerize them. We don’t know. And then even if we had them, we wouldn’t know what to do. So, for example, you can take a cell, a living cell, and you can deconstruct it. You can take it apart.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

The Challenge of Creating Life in the Laboratory

JAMES TOUR: And you put in each bottle each one of these four classes of compounds and all the ions in another bottle and say, okay, not on an early earth, but just in your modern laboratory. Can you take all of these chemicals and just make a cell? Here’s all the components of a cell.

And in fact, in here you also have the informational code. You have to have the code. The code is the DNA that prescribes how this is going to be assembled. Just like when you build a house, you have to have a code. You have to have the plans to build this thing. That code is what you need.

And so when I give you the polymers in full form, that’s the informational code because that’s the sentence, the DNA, that’s the code, and that’s the sentence that has you the discrete molecules before you polymerize them. That’s just letters. It’s like a bunch of letters, alphabetic letters, that means nothing, that has no words. And those don’t come together and form any construct of words. If you shake it a lot, you might see the word “the,” you might find the word “in.” But you’re not going to get much, you’re not going to get much out of this. And you have to have a lot of prescription here.

So I give you all of this in your modern laboratory and I’ve challenged the entire origin of life community with this. I’ll give you everything. Can you just assemble a cell? And I’ve given you the code because I’ve given you the DNA structure. Just assemble a cell. Can any of you do it? Nobody’s come forward and I say that the year that you do that, you will win a Nobel Prize for sure for doing that. Can you do it? Nobody can. We’re nowhere close to that. Nowhere close.

So even if you could make all of these pieces, could you do something with it? And the answer is no. They don’t know what to do. And a cell is an amazing machine. People will say, “Well, cells were much simpler back then. Much simpler.” No, we already know what the simplest cells are, first of all. Yeah, we know what the simplest cells are because the simplest cells that we have on Earth today are very similar to the cells in the fossil record. The simplest cells in the fossil record, that hasn’t changed.

But biophysicists have already told us you can calculate what is the simplest cell that you could have that could still be operable. They can calculate this. All right, make one of those nowhere close that has like 15 basic components, structures that have to be made. How many of those 15 have been made in a prebiotic sense? How many of those have ever been made? Zero. None. None. None of them have ever been made.

We are so far from life. And people will say, “Oh, we’re getting closer.” No, we already know we’re nowhere close. And the way you know, in science that you know we’re close is this. You look okay. How far am I from the target? This is my target. This is where I am now. So I move a little bit closer. I figured out something. But what’s happened is the target has moved miles away from us. The target has moved miles away. Just even though I moved a nanometer closer here, every year the target moves further away.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why?

JAMES TOUR: Not because the cell is evolving, but because we learn about the complexity of the cell, we go, “Oh, I have to make that, or I have to do that, or I have to have the whole system level structure here, this whole system level structure to this.” I have to have something called chiral induced spin cell activity, which we didn’t even know about until 25 years ago. I have to have the whole interactome solved, which we didn’t know about until 20 years ago.

So these things become increasingly difficult to think about solving. It’s very hard to think about solving this because the target is moving away from us much faster than we’re approaching it.

The Mystery of Life’s Origin

TUCKER CARLSON: So if we don’t understand how to create life, then I think it follows that we don’t understand how life was created.

JAMES TOUR: No, we have no idea how life was created. We have no idea. And I mean, the Bible tells us that God created it, but he doesn’t give us much details. He spoke it into existence. And what I mean, the beauty of science is that God has done things. God has done certain things. And then he allows us then to investigate through science what are the details behind this? And that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to find the details. We’re clueless on this.

TUCKER CARLSON: But there is a very obvious sense in which the kind of research, air quotes, that you’re describing is like, it’s more than science. It’s like trying to kind of take credit for creation itself. It’s like putting yourself in the place of the creator.

JAMES TOUR: I mean, if they could make life. Yeah, if they could make life. You know, the question then becomes, why are they projecting? Why are they projecting as if they’re on the verge of making life or having made life? I think that’s fundamentally the question that you’re asking, why? Yeah.

And so why would they do this is, you know, I’ve often thought about this. I don’t think, again, I don’t think scientists wake up in the morning and say, “You know, I got to somehow project that I’m able to make life.” You get caught up in this. It’s like, you know, there’s mob mentalities that you get caught up in. People can get caught up in a mob mentality very easily.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve noticed.

The Mob Mentality in Science

JAMES TOUR: We’re quite susceptible to this type of thing. And what happens is you hear people talking about this and that we’re on the verge of making life, or we’ve got this thing figured out, and there’s more and more people that are coming on and they feel that they need to speak like this too. But they feel very uncomfortable sitting down with me for a discussion because I’m going to ask them the details.

And as soon as I ask them just a few little details, I’m not like a, I’m not a hard interviewer then. I gotcha. No, I just ask them a few very simple little things and everything starts to wither around the edges. And they know it. They know it. They know they don’t have an answer to this.

And these people, I mean, these things have actually happened. I’ve seen it. Steve Benner, major origin of life researcher, and you say, “Well, why am I calling them out by name?” Because they’re the ones bringing it forward. Steve Benner can get on a podcast and tell me I’m all wrong and come forth with life, just make life. If you’ve got this thing figured out. He said that they’ve got all the pieces. They’ve got all, pretty much got all the pieces figured out.

And so I saw him at a meeting. I didn’t ask him. Somebody else did. Said, “Okay, if you’ve got all the pieces, why don’t you just put it together and make a cell?” And what he said is, “Well, I’ve been a professor now for four score years, and so I’ll leave this to the younger guys to do.” I mean, this is a total cop out. Total cop out. This is the level that we’re at and people, “Oh, okay, nice guy. He’s going to leave it to other people, get the glory.” I mean, he can’t do it. Nobody can do it.

Is cloning making life?

Understanding Cloning

TUCKER CARLSON: What is cloning exactly? And where are we in the…

JAMES TOUR: No, no, no. With cloning, you start with life. You start with life. You’re never making life. So you never make that original cell. You take cells and you start duplicating them. Or you take a cell and you can put in other genetic structure into that cell and then that genome will start duplicating from there so that you can start doing. And I think that’s coming along. Certainly they do it with pets. I mean, you just saw Tom Brady just had his dog cloned. I mean, he had a dog he really loved and so he just got a dog cloned. I mean, there are these companies that will do it for you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well.

The Danger of Human Enhancement

JAMES TOUR: You know, what’s going, it’s going to be next people is what I think about. You know, I’m really not that concerned about the dog. But when you can start doing it with people and you can start making a superhuman race, I mean, that is deeply concerning to me.

You know, it’s interesting you think about this. If you have this fertilized egg and it seems as if this is life. This egg is now fertilized and God puts a spirit in this. Now sometimes this egg will split into two. And now you have identical twins. And if there was a spirit there, it’s like God puts another spirit in that other egg as well that is just formed. They just split off this first one. Because you get two independent entities that are identical twins, and they each have the spirit of God that he’s placed within them. That he’s put this spirit within them. They’ve been made in the image of God.

So when you think about it in this context, you see that God seems to put a spirit along with that physical fertilized system. There seems to be a spirit there that he puts along with it. What would he do now that you have a cloned system? My guess is there’ll be a spirit along with it.

But you talk about things that you can do. So if I could take steroids and be 10% faster than anybody else, I mean, that’s a huge advantage. If I could take some sort of drug and be 20% smarter than everybody else, that is a huge advantage. And we would say, you know, that’s unfair. You know, we can’t have that in sports. We can’t have that in competition. But you could do that. You could do that. I mean, you could make things, people, animals that are advanced.

It’s kind of frightening because, you know, what people would do with such a thing. You know, every technology has advances. People say, “Aren’t you afraid that this technology that you’re developing might be used in the wrong way?” I say, “Yeah, certainly, I think about it.” But all technologies are like that. People are really devious, and we can figure out how to do things and control things and weed out certain people and have others coming forward.

So, yeah, I think it’s a danger because as the Bible says, Jesus didn’t trust anyone. He didn’t entrust himself to anyone because he knew what was in all men.

The Threat of Engineered Superiority

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It’s increasingly obvious what’s in all men, I would say. It’s such a change. And advances in biotech get relatively little publicity outside of biotech, outside of the specialized world you guys live in. But my understanding is we’re moving close to what you’re saying. And that’s something that at 56, I was warned about my whole childhood. Like one of the lessons of World War II is creepy race science is like bad, it’s immoral. You shouldn’t be doing stuff like that. I mean I remember hearing that in school and nodding along and yeah, that’s good.

And it does seem like there are a lot of well funded people trying to build like, I hate to use the phrase “master race,” but like people who are engineered to be over everyone else. That just seems like a huge problem. Or am I letting my imagination get away with me?

The Ethics and Dangers of Genetic Engineering

JAMES TOUR: Well, I mean there’s massive restrictions upon that type of thing in the United States for government funded research. And as far as I know that’s not going on in the United States. But there are nations around the world where there’s no inhibition on this type of thing. So I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already there. I mean if you can clone a dog, we’re not that far from doing this as well.

TUCKER CARLSON: And what would that look like?

JAMES TOUR: Well, you could make them look all identical if you wanted to or you could make them a little bit different. They would be superhuman in many ways. I wouldn’t think that you would want to make an inferior race.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, that’s right.

JAMES TOUR: Yeah, they’d be superhuman. And yeah, it’s an interesting. Now I don’t work in that area but we can’t be far from that now. There are many good advances that can come from this. So if you have a child with a genetic disorder, for sure, the prospect of saying look to see a doctor and the doctor says “don’t worry, we can take care of that.” I mean imagine what that would do to a parent. They’d be like, “you can take care of my child, my child has autism. You can just splice out this segment and put in another segment where you just change a few of the nucleotides on there and he’s going to be better.” Yeah, we can do that.

I mean the hope for that is so good. Or “I’m predisposed to having breast cancer” as many women find themselves and their families. I mean the horrendous thing is that we still lop off body parts in this day and age to deal with this and women even doing it preemptively.

TUCKER CARLSON: A lot of women.

JAMES TOUR: A lot of women. And if you can say “no, no, we can deal with that,” that is tremendous hope. And that’s where most of this is going. That’s why this is continuing to be developed to offer these people hope. Are there things that you could do to modify people? Yeah, it could be abused. It could definitely be abused. And it’s the same with many things. I mean a car can be an ambulance, a car can be a getaway car from a murder and a bank robbery. I mean everything is like that, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: But we, you know, we arrest the getaway car driver and I don’t. That’s the point. Of course, everything, you know, chainsaw is a tool or a weapon. I get it, nitroglycerin. But I don’t think we’re making any effort as collectively to say, wait a second.

JAMES TOUR: Well, the scientific community is.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, good.

JAMES TOUR: It is. In fact there was an abuse of this that came out in China about five years ago, six years ago. And the kibosh was put on this.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, what was the abuse?

JAMES TOUR: There was an operation where they were taking human embryos, a human embryo and modifying the genome a little bit. And they said it was all much like they had done with animals and it was done on a human and it came out. And the professors, I mean the Chinese professor I think was eventually put in prison. I mean there was a huge amount of pressure and the scientific community really came after the people.

There was an American who was collaborating with them and his career was about ended as a result of this. And I knew him, I mean he’s a nice guy, I knew him, yeah. But it was about the end of his career and I think there was a five year penalty that you couldn’t get government funding again, which is going to toast a career. That’s the end of the career for an American academician.

So the community came strongly against that. Worldwide, worldwide biochemistry community. That’s the one that got that made the news. Are the countries doing this that it’s not making the news? We can only imagine.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, we can only imagine. I think we can guess. Yeah, evolution. You flew to St. Louis to hear about the chemistry of evolution. Can you just describe for people who are not in your business what the theory of evolution is? And then if you could tell us what you think is incomplete or wrong about it?

The Theory of Evolution and Origin of Life

JAMES TOUR: Well, you know, most of what I speak on is origin of life, which is before you have life. What evolution does is it takes from that first cell and says, how do we get the diversity of what we have today from that first cell? So most of all of Origin of Life is getting to that first cell, LUCA, it’s called the last universal common ancestor. So that cell, which happened to be the progenitor of all life, and that cell then modified into the diversity of life that you see today. That’s what evolution tries to do.

TUCKER CARLSON: Adapting to its physical environment.

JAMES TOUR: Adapts to its physical environment. Yes. And so to do that, it’s a huge, huge leap. A huge leap to have that cell go into the diversity of what we have now. You talk about the evolution. The definition of evolution is constantly evolving. Constantly evolving. It’s constantly changing. And so what I grew up on was that it was natural selection and random mutation. Random mutation, natural selection. That’s what a lot of us grew up on. What Darwin was talking about, he was talking about natural selection. He knew less about the mutation aspect. And then the mutation and natural selection is what pulled this forward.

TUCKER CARLSON: So natural mutation, as I understand, is the idea that, you know, you’ll have like an anomaly. And it turns out that anomaly is better suited to the environment. And so that creature, that organism, is more successful in breeding and then that becomes the dominant strain.

JAMES TOUR: Yes. And that’s what that is. But there are two distinct things. There’s something called microevolution and there’s macroevolution. Microevolution, we definitely see, we can see changes over time in say, the bill of a bird. You can see what we do in my own lab, because we work a lot with bacteria and trying to knock out super bacteria, is that you can see changes in bacteria to make them more antibiotic resistant. This is what we see that these antibiotics don’t work anymore.

And these are very small mutations that may happen, very small permutations more often than not. What happens, for example, with the bacterium is that you will have a population of bacteria and you treat them with an antibiotic. And there’s one or two in this huge population that happen to have some level of resistance. Those are the only two left. And then they start to propagate. And so that’s why, if you’ve ever been told to take these antibiotics, finish the whole regime.

TUCKER CARLSON: Correct.

JAMES TOUR: Or else you leave the really strong ones, the really ones that are somewhat resistant, and then they become the dominant population. And so you really want to knock all of these out. And so you see these, and then they start sharing their DNA between them. Bacteria are amazing. They even have these little tubules that they can transfer some of their DNA to another one. And you see this, and now you have a new population that is resistant.

TUCKER CARLSON: That sounds like intent.

JAMES TOUR: Oh, it sounds, yeah. I mean, these are insidious little things. I mean, but what is that?

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, that is, that sounds like behavior that suggests consciousness.

JAMES TOUR: Well, many people actually say that there is consciousness within a cell for these very reasons that they act according to the things that are put upon them. You know, so this is a new concept that’s being put forward. It’s different than the consciousness that you and I think, of course, who am I? But they are responding to their environment. Something has come at them and they’ve responded to try to get around this. So, yeah, this is.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that maybe consciousness is not the right word.

JAMES TOUR: Maybe consciousness is not the right word.

TUCKER CARLSON: But that word is being used anyway, right?

JAMES TOUR: It’s being used.

Microevolution vs. Macroevolution

JAMES TOUR: All right. So you can see these small permutations, but what you never see, never see are what is called body plan changes. Body plan changes. And this encompasses many things. But you see, these genetic networks would have to change. So a body plan change would be an invertebrate, something that does not have a spine going to a vertebrate, something that has a spine, something like a worm going into something that has a spine. You never ever see that you never see.

Now, there are hypotheses where people will see fossils and they’ll say, “oh, this must have been a precursor to this.” They will never see the transformative thing, that is for sure. And I’m not the only person that is saying that. It’s not just Jim Tour, the creationist, saying this. And the problem with body, to be.

TUCKER CARLSON: Clear, the fossil record does not support the theory of evolution as at least as you’re defining it.

JAMES TOUR: Well, yes, it does not support body plan changes. There are small permutations like the ones that I have just told you. But you will not see body plan.

TUCKER CARLSON: Changes in any fossil record that we found.

JAMES TOUR: The only thing that you will see is people will hypothesize over that fossil. They’ll see a fossil here and a fossil here, and they’ll say, “oh,” and then they’ll see a fossil here. “This must have been the transition to this.” And they’ll hypothesize with that. But it doesn’t have to be the transition. This is strictly a hypothesis. And so we don’t see that in the fossil record. Many people don’t see that in the fossil record. Some people will say we absolutely see that. The absolute people are actually becoming less and less.

The problem with this, in order to have a body plan change, you have to have these genetic networks. These genetic networks are going to have to change. So the genetic networks occur very early on in life. This is the wiring that is going to occur to run this system. You clip one wire, it is catastrophically lethal to the organism. It is lethal. Everything goes haywire. And people will say this. And there has never been an example of this where you can get into these early genetic networks and start changing things. Because if you change one little thing, you have to have many, many downstream things. So it’s not one little change can change this organism. No, no, no, no. It’s not going to happen.

Now, there have been experiments, like Lenski. What he’s done is he’s looked at bacteria. Bacteria can multiply every 20 minutes, you know, so with a person, it might be every 20 years. Bacteria multiply every 20 minutes. And this is why you can feel fine right now. And then after a few hours, you’re like, “wow, I feel terrible. I got to go home.” Because this bacteria is doubling, doubling every 20 minutes, doubling every 20 minutes, it doubles its population. That’s what bacteria do.

And so he has studied since 1988 and continues to this day studying the multiplication of bacteria and putting it under certain stresses to see what’s going to evolve. He’s never seen a body plan change, nowhere close. The only thing he’s seen is a little change in a citrate operation. And I’ve done a podcast on that with one of my colleagues who is a biologist, and he talks about how that change, what was actually in the bacteria was already there and it just turned that gene back on. It’s just a regulatory thing.

But in any case, yet no body plan changes. We’ve never seen the macroevolution, the body plan change, never has been seen. And here we had what was equivalent in bacteria to 2 million years of population change. 2 million years. And we’ve never seen that.

The Cambrian Explosion

JAMES TOUR: And so what we see, and we don’t even see in the fossil record, this, what we see is the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion is that you went from about 540 million years ago is presumed when this thing happened is all of a sudden you burst on the scene with all these new species, all these new life forms, and it happened over a short period of time, little over 500 million years ago is what the fossil record is suggesting. You don’t see transitional forms, you don’t see transitional forms before them.

TUCKER CARLSON: They just appear.

JAMES TOUR: They just appear. As if God spoke it into existence. As if God said, “let these kind form.” There is an explosion. And even firm people like Stephen Gould, who was a staunch evolutionist, said, “you know, this thing just pops out here.” And so he spoke about, doesn’t that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Kind of blow up the theory right there?

JAMES TOUR: Yes, it does. It gives consistency.

TUCKER CARLSON: Evolution is real. Then there would of course be a gradual ramp up to that from a single cell.

JAMES TOUR: And there is not. And there is not. And that’s where he came up with this idea of what he called punctuated equilibrium. Everything is in stasis. Then all of a sudden, boom, it happened and then it stays. What does that mean? Punctuated. That was his definition of this. So I’m not alone in this. I mean, Levine, Wagner, Davidson, Irwin, these are key biologists are saying these genetic networks are not going to allow body plan changes to happen. And so there’s a big problem.

TUCKER CARLSON: But how do they explain the Cambrian explosion?

JAMES TOUR: There is no explanation for that. There’s no explanation.

TUCKER CARLSON: That seems like a big stumbling block as a way to faith and evolution to me.

JAMES TOUR: Yeah, so we should see this seamless transition if it were a gradual process. And in the Cambrian explosion, we don’t see that. There’s this abrupt change, an abrupt change where many new species burst forth. So we don’t see body plan changes.

So you are absolutely right. I mean, I’ve seen some of the things that you said. We’ve certainly seen microevolution. Now that’s why this term “evolution” is sort of a squealy sort of thing. It depends on how you define this thing. We certainly see microevolution, these small changes within a kind, within a species. You see these small changes, but we don’t—

TUCKER CARLSON: See the creation of new species through evolution.

JAMES TOUR: In the fossil life, I have to be careful of that because sometimes in plants you can have a doubling of the genome for some unknown reason. And so in that sense you could see, say it is a new species that has formed.

TUCKER CARLSON: I was thinking among animals, right?

The Problem of Body Plan Changes

JAMES TOUR: And you don’t see the body plan change. You don’t see new digits coming, you don’t see new organs, you don’t see unicellular going to multicellular organisms, which you would have to have a lot of. You have to have LUCA, this one cell going now to multicellular organisms. This we don’t see.

And again, it gets back to this regulatory genetic network, this regulatory genetic network which is this whole wiring plan. It is extremely complex. And you go monkeying with one thing in this and all of this is formed very early on. And now once this thing is formed, you change this—I mean, you’ve lost a digit. It’s huge. And it’s usually highly lethal.

And again, I’m not the only one saying this. People are going to say, “Well, Tour, you’re a creationist. That’s why you’re saying this.” No, I mean, what are you going to say to Davidson? What are you going to say to Levine? What are you going to say to Erwin? What are you going to say to Wagner? I mean, these are key guys that are saying exactly the same thing. These regulatory gene networks are a huge problem.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it sounds like everyone’s moving, I mean, toward your view, toward creationism of some kind. Because if they’re using the term “design,” then that of course implies a designer. How do you get design without a designer?

JAMES TOUR: Implies designer. I mean, some people go far, so far as to say it looks designed, but of course it couldn’t be. And so they’ll go as far as to say something—

TUCKER CARLSON: Now we’re getting into religious faith. If they’re telling me that they know something and that’s the starting point against which they evaluate their observations, that’s religious faith. That’s not science, is it?

JAMES TOUR: Well, I would agree with you. It is a terrific problem for them. It’s a terrific problem. And the more we learn about the cell, the more we see that this thing is an amazing entity and it certainly looks designed.

Why Questioning Evolution Remains Taboo

TUCKER CARLSON: So why is it, given that at best, the orthodoxies around evolution that I grew up with, or thought I grew up with, the extent I paid attention are being questioned and haven’t actually held up to scrutiny and the knowledge that we’ve accumulated, why is it still considered like a deal killer to question evolution?

JAMES TOUR: Yeah, so I bet I haven’t checked—

TUCKER CARLSON: Your Wikipedia page, but I bet it’s on there. “Questioned evolution.”

JAMES TOUR: Oh, yes, yes, yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is it?

JAMES TOUR: It’s there. It’s there.

TUCKER CARLSON: Good guess. So—

JAMES TOUR: Origin of life is a little thing compared to evolution. Evolution, that’s the—holy cow. I mean, that’s the thing. You don’t touch evolution. There’s so much around evolution. There’s whole departments on evolutionary biology in every university.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.

JAMES TOUR: And I’m not—I would never say we should stop teaching evolution. I would say that we need to teach the problems with evolution and put those up front and all over so people can see the huge problems with this. Each year we’re learning more and it makes it more difficult.

And I’m going to be totally blasted for this thing, and there’s going to be a hundred YouTube videos that are going to go and try to contest with this. But my position is getting stronger all the time. Show me the molecular basis. Because I’m a chemist. I want to see the molecular basis for this. Show me the molecular basis on how you can have gross body plan changes. As of right now, it is not there.

Now, if somebody knows this, come forward. Take me through the chemistry that makes these vast body plan changes. I don’t understand it. And as a chemist, who better—who should be able to understand this better than me? I mean, who should be able to understand it better than me? Certainly not the biologist. The biologist doesn’t talk at the chemical level. So maybe the biochemist. Maybe the biochemist would come forward and show me, the organic chemist, the molecular pathway for how these body plan changes would occur.

TUCKER CARLSON: And no one’s taking you up on that?

JAMES TOUR: No, nobody’s taking me up. And nobody will. They’ll make a bunch of YouTube videos, but they won’t sit down and go through the chemistry.

The Resistance to Scientific Inquiry

TUCKER CARLSON: So the question is more philosophical than scientific. But, like, why the YouTube videos? Why the resistance? It seems to me if you’d never mentioned your religious faith and I heard this, I would say, that guy’s a scientist. He’s making a completely rational case based on measurable observations. And I wouldn’t be mad at you. I’d be like, that’s really interesting. But people are mad at you and mad at anyone who questions this. What is that? Where does that come from?

JAMES TOUR: Well, I mean, let me underscore it for you. Based on my record, I’m not just a regular scientist, I think. I mean, the numbers came out a few years ago. I was in the 0.001% of scientists, based on the metrics of how you determine accomplishments, something called H-index, something called a number of publications, something called the number of citations and things like that.

So you would think that I of all people should be able to understand this. And why is it that I can’t? Number one, why is it that when I say that I can’t, it causes such problems?

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s it right there. What is that?

JAMES TOUR: Now, the YouTubers, they’ll come forward and they’ll start saying it. But the expert scientists, the PhDs in this area, they don’t. They don’t come forth and tell me the problems with this. They don’t come forward and show me the molecular pathway to this. The people who really should know are not the ones coming forward. And the people who don’t know, the people who know very little, they’re the ones coming forward and saying this.

That’s the problem. Why doesn’t the community do this? You know, people have come with scientific ideas before that people thought was totally outlandish and then they’ve been proved wrong. Yeah, they were outlandish because the whole—

TUCKER CARLSON: History of science is that.

JAMES TOUR: Yeah. And so why is it that they won’t come forward? And I can tell you part of the problem is they cut your funding and they make it very difficult for you. You don’t get into their societies anymore.

TUCKER CARLSON: But what’s—I mean, I know very little about science, as I’m sure is obvious. I know a lot about lying and propaganda and I know that when you see a lot of it, there’s something underneath it that is being protected. There’s a reason.

Of all the things to be mad about, someone, quote, “denying evolution.” Denying, like you’re denying the Holocaust. I mean, really, it’s a moral crime. I mean, they frame it like you’ve committed like a crime. You know, just what is that? Like, why do they care so much? There’s something underneath all of this that’s very important if they’re defending it with this level of viciousness.

The Cost of Dissent

JAMES TOUR: I agree. That might be better for a philosopher to answer. When I think about the human beings that I know is that first of all, they’ve made their career around this thing. Our textbooks are built totally around this thing. This is all people know. This is all people know. And it puts people in a position of power. We know this sort of thing. And it is frightening to people.

So in my career, I’ve seen things cut. I’ve seen grants cut. I’ve had two people from two different federal agencies—two different federal agencies—come to my office because they did not even want to put this in an email to me. And they said, “You what?” Yes, they said, “Jim, you can stop writing proposals because they’re never going to fund you. They’re never going to fund you in this agency. You’re not going to get funded.”

And I’ve even had a proposal that got a very high score. And then I called the program director and I said, “What happened? This was—what happened? I mean, at this score, this should have been funded.” He says, “You weren’t funded.” It shocked him. Someone above him nixed this. So are there power brokers on this now? So two federal agency people told me I can stop writing proposals to their—

TUCKER CARLSON: Agency because you had questioned the orthodoxy on evolution.

JAMES TOUR: Correct, man. Because I had public—it was even more specific than that. In around the year 2000, I had signed a statement that was put out that questioned—that it was carefully worded. And this was sent to me in an email. You know how fast you go through emails? I got an email said, “Could you agree to this statement that we view random mutation and natural selection as being inadequate to explain the diversity of life, therefore further research is warranted?”

That’s it. It didn’t say it’s wrong. It just said, we were skeptical of this simple little thing being able to explain the diversity of life. Further research is warranted. Now, scientists will always say, always say, further research is warranted.

TUCKER CARLSON: They should say that because scientists—

JAMES TOUR: And because this is how we get our money. We wouldn’t say, “Well, got this figured out.” No, no, you take it back. I’m good. You don’t need the money. No, no, we always say that.

Because I signed that statement. Because of that statement, these things started happening. It was in 2005. I was never being put up for the National Academy of Science, and I went to my college. Your colleagues are supposed—and no, there was one person was in—they were both in the National Academy of Science. They were the ones that are supposed to be putting me up for this. One of them was a Nobel Prize winner, and the other one wasn’t a Nobel Prize winner, but he was in the National Academy.

And just so that your audience knows, it was not Rick Smalley. Rick Smalley was a good friend of mine and Nobel Prize winner. It was not him. It’s two other people. And they told me, “Jim, you’re not going to get in the National Academy of Science because you signed that statement.” I said, “What state—what are you talking about?” That statement that came to me in an email and they said, “Could you agree to this?” I said, “Sure, I could agree to that.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Who wouldn’t agree to that?

JAMES TOUR: So I said to the one who was a Nobel Prize winner and this other—I said, “You know, I have done as much as anybody getting in for to the Academy.” And the one Nobel Prize winner said, “No, Jim, you’ve done as much—you’ve done twice as much and you’re not getting in.” Twice as much.

So that is real. Now I’m in the National Academy of Engineering because of that statement. Because of that statement. That’s what they said. And I said to them, “What is it on this statement that you don’t like?” Neither of them knew what the statement said. I said, “Okay, you guys go back and read it and you come back and see me and we’ll discuss it again.”

We reconvened. They went and they read it. They said, “Well, it was carefully crafted.” I said, “Well, duh, you know, you’re not going to get people to sign something that’s not carefully crafted.” I said, “What is it?” They said, “Well, that statement has been used to try to get creationism in schools.” That had nothing to do with me. I mean, that’s—

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, man, you’re living my life. Yes, I know those words have been used, used by other people at other times to do something bad. Therefore, your connection to them proves your connection to the bad people.

JAMES TOUR: I see.

The Bigger Picture Behind the Controversy

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, been there. So I’m looking at this and I’m thinking without understanding any of the details, there’s a big story here. Because we can judge the importance of something by the reaction to it. We must suppress this idea. If enough people say that I want to, it doesn’t mean the idea is right. Of course it doesn’t. But I want to know what the idea is because it’s provoking such a reaction.

And I don’t think I’ve heard many ideas that have provoked the kind of reaction you’re describing. I mean, this is amazing. So it makes you think once for the third time. Underneath all of this is something really big, and it’s bigger than funding. And it may be that if evolution as we understand it, macroevolution, is not the explanation for what we’re seeing, then there must be a creator. It points to God. That’s maybe that’s the problem.

JAMES TOUR: I think that may be the big problem. And one of the data points I have on this is that people see my content where I start blowing apart origin of life and I start questioning evolution. And they write to me, they said, “You know, I walked away from my faith because of what I was learning in high school and in college. And now I see you saying what you’re saying, and I see these guys don’t have it figured out. I’m coming back. I’m coming back to my faith.”

And I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they’ve seen what I have to say and they’re coming back to faith.

TUCKER CARLSON: Could it be then, from what you just said, that evolution, as it’s been described to us in school for the last hundred years, has been employed as a weapon against religious faith?

JAMES TOUR: I think it certainly has been employed as a weapon. I don’t think a lot of scientists go out with that intent.

TUCKER CARLSON: I believe it. Right, right. And Darwin, you know, probably didn’t try to overturn Christianity when he wrote about the beagle or whatever, but, or I don’t know, maybe he did, but it has, in effect been used that way. It sounds like to me, it seems.

JAMES TOUR: Like it’s drawn a lot of people astray now. And I will tell you that some of the people who used to come against me on campus were the biologists. Were the biologists. They came against me. And the students would say, “Oh, there’s such and such biologists saying these things.”

And I said, “Okay, well, why don’t you go and tell her that I would be glad to go toe to toe with her and she can explain to me what her trouble is with what I say.” And then she stopped. She stopped saying things about me like that.

And so really, when you come right to this, I don’t think that they can defend it. I mean, ask them if we don’t have a molecular basis for this, if we don’t have a molecular explanation. If you fly over New York City at 30,000 feet, you can say there’s a few structures. But it’s when you get down into the heart of that city, it’s when you get under that city and you see the infrastructure on all the tubes and things, that’s the chemical basis behind this.

We have to have a chemical understanding for this. And they will not give me a chemical understanding. That’s when I know there’s a problem.

The Punishment for Asking Questions

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just funny. They’re punishing you for that. I mean, you’re not the one at fault here. I wouldn’t say. You ask a simple question. Can you provide the chemical basis for the theory that you’re telling me is true and they can’t, and you’re the criminal? How does that work?

JAMES TOUR: Yeah, it shakes up the apple cart. And plus, these people, their whole career has been on this. I mean, I’ve had a lot of…

TUCKER CARLSON: Careers that were totally stupid. And when you find out that you’re on the wrong side of something, you just say so and move on. I don’t understand. Why would you cling to something that you can’t defend?

JAMES TOUR: You’re a different sort of man. I mean, this…

TUCKER CARLSON: I think most people would think that makes sense, right?

JAMES TOUR: No, no. I think people live lives all the time. They live lives all the time and then they just move on. They just move on. But I think it’s a real problem. Now, we’ll see what the community says. I mean, just come on forth. Give me the how did they deal with these regulatory genetic networks? How do they deal with this? How do they deal with this at the molecular level? How do these changes occur? How do you get body plan changes?

I mean, you would think that they’d come forward. All they’ve got to do is just come forward and explain this thing to me. Not on a podcast where nobody’s going to challenge, just to me explain. Go to a whiteboard, go to a blackboard and just start drawing it out for me. Show me the chemistry.

Nobody wants to do this. This is what I’ve challenged people before on origin of life. They won’t go near a blackboard. It won’t go near it. “Oh, I don’t need a blackboard. I’ll just explain.” No, show me the science. In any other thing related to chemistry, you go to the blackboard and you draw the molecules and show me. This is how you do it. This is our language, this is the language we speak. And now you don’t want to use the language.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, use the language of censorship and exclusion to get you to be quiet. Again, a familiar pattern. So since you basically described an unsolved mystery, nobody can really say how, you know, the earth began, life originated, and we wound up with this sort of breathtaking array of different forms of life. That’s a mystery. They claim it’s not, but I think you’ve shown that it is.

What are the other things that we don’t know? Like, as you sort of gaze over what we know, what scientists have determined to be true, like what are the big, like do we know what sleep is for? That’s one I’ve always wondered.

The Mystery of Sleep and Memory

JAMES TOUR: You know, again, I’m not a biologist, but I’ve read a little bit about the studies that, for example, DARPA has studied this, where they tried to make it, where soldiers wouldn’t have to sleep. Can we make it so that they don’t have to sleep? And then what happens is long term memory goes away.

So a lot of our memory is strengthened when we sleep. That’s why I said early on in our conversation, when I first speak to you, what you’re getting, this is electronic. I mean, you’re getting an understanding of it electronically. And then this goes into protein synthesis, then proteins start forming to give you the memories of what I just said.

And then when you go to sleep, those will start to strengthen and you’ll get hardwired interconnects in your brain so that the rest of your life you might remember this conversation, that, “Hey, there is this chemist that 20 years ago, was telling me this. And I still remember him telling me this.” That’s a hard wired interconnect in your brain that is locked in there.

You lose that when you don’t sleep. You lose the ability to have that. And so there are these things that strengthen in our sleep. So there’s a lot going on in our sleep that is, I mean there’s experts in sleep that know there’s much better than I do. And I’ve talked with them at times. It’s really, really quite interesting how they study these brain waves and how when you start sleeping, you have all these different waves in going.

But then when you sleep, everything starts going in unison and everything starts resonating in unison. The explanation of really what’s happening is we may not have a detailed explanation.

TUCKER CARLSON: But are there other parts of the human experience or of nature that you look at and say that we should understand that, but we don’t know anything about it?

The Mysteries of Biology and Human Experience

JAMES TOUR: Of natural systems? I look at so many things in nature that I don’t understand. So the entire thing of anatomy, even the anatomy of a cell is where I ponder all the time. I mean, how can this be? How does this thing work? How do you build a structure like this? How does this… Anything in biology is so extraordinary. It’s something we can’t go near.

Now I could try to duplicate the material of this table and I would build it out of a composite of plastic of say a nylon plus carbon nanotubes make it really strong, so I could try to substitute it out. But to think of building the structure of this, nobody can really fathom how amazing this is. I mean, we know what it is. It’s these carbohydrate strands and these alignments between them. Again, this is biology.

So biology, there’s a lot of mysteries to biology. There are whole courses, there are whole textbooks. So we understand a lot. But there’s much more that we don’t understand about even this human experience.

I had seen a talk. So for example, do you know this feeling somebody’s sitting behind you and staring at you and you get this feeling that somebody’s staring at me. And people will explain this. “Well, this has been good. These organisms get it because when prey was staring you down, you would know it and you would know to run.” All right, okay, fine, you want to explain it that way.

But that doesn’t tell me how this is happening, how something behind my head that I cannot see, that I cannot hear, that I cannot feel. They’re 20 yards behind me, but I know they’re staring at me and I’m like, I want to look back at them and see what’s going on. These phenomena are hard to understand.

What might, I might be able to manipulate. Can I manipulate something with my mind? Why is it that when a child goes through something that a mother senses this? “My child is struggling.” There’s been no word. Have they called you? “No, I just know something’s going on.” How does a mother know this? So there’s a lot of phenomena that we just don’t understand.

And even within the realm of science, I mean, in science we are told, we are told that 70 to 90% of all energy and matter is dark energy and dark matter, meaning this. So for example, if I think of the electromagnetic spectrum we see in a very narrow piece of this, this is the visible spectrum. This is from 400 nanometers to about 750 nanometers. This is where we see. It’s very narrow.

The entire electromagnetic spectrum is much broader. It goes from gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet rays, and then visible, where we see. And then it goes to near infrared, infrared, microwaves, radio waves, all these things that we can detect but we can’t see.

So when people say, “Hey, I’m aware of what’s going on in my world,” no, you’re only aware of a very narrow bit. Now, we have tools that can detect all of this. So for example, I could put a radio here on the table and turn it on and start playing. The same waves that are hitting that radio are hitting me. I don’t feel them. The radio detects them.

So we’re able to, so we can detect things today that people 500 years ago couldn’t detect. But there’s a whole type of matter and energy that is called dark matter and dark energy that we have no ability to detect. Not just with my physical body, we have no tools to detect them. That’s why it’s called dark matter and dark energy. And you say, “Well, how do you even know it’s there then?”

TUCKER CARLSON: Good question.

Dark Matter and the Limits of Detection

JAMES TOUR: And it’s there by difference. So in other words, they look at the matter and energy that must formed in the creation of the universe, the Big Bang event. And there’s a lot missing. And that is what they call dark energy and dark matter.

Now that’s not to say that someday we might have a tool that we, “Hey, we can detect this dark matter.” What to us right now we’re blind to. One day we will detect. And I presume, you know, every year, you know, there’s discoveries and dark energy. And maybe one day we’ll be able to tap into that energy and use it as an energy form to run our world.

So there’s lots of things as scientists we don’t understand. There’s far more than we don’t that we don’t understand than we do understand in many ways. We don’t even know how to ask the questions of why don’t we understand this? Because we don’t even know it was there.

Why do we have the fine tuning of the universe? Why are the physical constants the way they are? If you change the dipole moment of water just a fraction, dipole moment is the amount of electron density on one side of a water molecule versus another. If that would change just a fraction, there’s no life. There’s no life.

Everything is fine tuned for life. How do you have all these fine tuning things just for life? It would make you think that someone designed this thing and everything is fine tuned for life in this universe. That we can sit on a planet that has an atmosphere and that we can breathe, that we know no other planet that is like that.

This that you can look up to the heavens and that you can see the sky. That we have an atmosphere that we can see through and we can see the heavens. This is a very unique place. Why? Why are the physical constants the way they are? Who made them physical constants? Why are they the same constants throughout the entire universe? Anywhere I go in the universe, the periodic table of elements is exactly the same. Why.

The Power of Personal Testimony

TUCKER CARLSON: Are these the kind of questions that drive you to ponder God or that strengthen your faith?

JAMES TOUR: Well, my pondering of God was much more simple to begin with. I mean, I came to know the Lord at the age of 18. So I wasn’t thinking much about cellular structure and things like that. I was actually thinking a lot about women actually at that time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep, I remember.

JAMES TOUR: But I had an experience and, you know, I come from a secular Jewish home. Somebody gave me a presentation of the gospel and it hit me. Something hit me. And especially what hit me was when he had me read a verse that says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” And I said, I’m not a sinner, I’m not a sinner. I said, I never killed anybody. I never robbed a bank. Which is very secular Jewish. You know, we don’t look at little things like sin. It’s not like Christians, like, I’ve sinned every second. I mean, we’re not blissfully unaware of these things.

And then he turned to Matthew 5:28, and it says, “I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.” And I was deeply impacted by that. Deeply impacted. And you say, why? I don’t know why. But I know that when Jesus is speaking to somebody, his words have enormous power. And it just stopped me.

I was addicted to pornography at that time in my life. There was no Internet. This was 1977. And I just found these magazines when I was working in gas stations along the highway outside New York City. And my job was to clean restrooms and parking lots. So I’ve been there, I’ve done that. And I was addicted to pornography. And so I was immediately convicted of my sin.

A Life-Changing Encounter

And then he took me through the gospel message, and I was thinking about that all the time. A couple months later, I was alone in my room. I got down on my knees and I’m not even sure why. Jews, we stand when we pray. I never got on my knees as a Jew. Christians, I had seen, they sit when they pray. I got down on my knees and said, “Lord, forgive me because I’m a sinner. Forgive me.”

And it was like this peace of God just dropped on me. And my life, just this burden of sin that I was carrying just lifted. Just lifted. And then all of a sudden, to my right, Jesus is standing. Jesus is standing. And I turned toward him. I was already on my knees. I put my face to the ground and uncontrollable weeping, because love was pouring out upon me, just pouring on me.

There was no judgment. You’d think he’d judged me for my sin. No judgment. There was no condemnation. There was no threat. There was nothing but love. I never had a day like that before. I never had a day like that after. That was November 7, 1977. And that day was unique in my life. I don’t even know how long I was there. I got up, I wiped my tears from my eyes, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Jesus. Here’s this Jewish kid thinking about Jesus.

I had this recurring dream. Night after night, I’m telling people about Jesus in my dream, this Jewish kid telling people about Jesus in his dream. It’s very odd. And I didn’t know that that was a prophetic dream. That was prophetic. God was showing me what my life was going to become. I’d be telling everybody about Jesus.

If I go a week without leading somebody to Jesus, without leading them to faith in Christ and faith in his resurrection from the dead, that’s a wasted week for me. Just through a one on one conversation, if I go a week, that’s my whole life, is telling people about Jesus. He gave me that in a dream when I was 18.

Breaking Free from Addiction

I didn’t tell anybody. I mean, imagine telling somebody, they’d think I’m crazy. I didn’t tell anybody what happened. Two weeks later, the guy who had shared with me several months before, he says, “Jim, have you received Jesus in your heart?” I said, I think I have. Why do you ask? He said, you haven’t stopped smiling for weeks. You’re always smiling now. You look different. Something’s different about you.

I said, I feel different. I said, how can I stay close to God? I’ve never felt like this before. I was never like this as a Jew. I was a secular Jew, I mean, and I never felt close to God before. He said, if you read your Bible every day, you’ll stay close to God. If you don’t, you won’t.

And I’ve read the Bible every day for 47 years. Started reading a little Gideon’s green New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs. And then a couple years later, I got a regular Bible and I started reading that. I read it from Genesis to Revelation. I’m done. I start again. I’m in no hurry. I just can spend an entire several days reading in just a few paragraphs if I feel the Lord speaking to me and just love it. I love this word.

The whole addiction to pornography, it broke that day. I had a lot of other problems that I still have, but that one, he used to show me my sin. That one, he used to break it to show me his power and deliverance. He broke that. When we are delivered from sin, there’s nothing like it. There’s nothing like it. I mean, we’re always crying out to God, do this in my life, do that. But there’s nothing like the deliverance from sin. Nothing like the deliverance from sin. So people can try to explain that one away. And I know what happened in my life as a result.

Family Reactions

TUCKER CARLSON: What does your family say?

JAMES TOUR: Well, my family’s Jewish. And I told them. I told them right away. I told them what happened. And my parents didn’t say much. I learned much later that of course they weren’t happy, but they thought it, my parents told me they thought it was a fad. It’ll pass. I have an older brother, older sister. They had gotten into things and they thought, it’ll pass. But it didn’t pass. It didn’t pass.

My mother, and then a year and a half later, I moved into a house with nine other Christian guys. And it was owned by the pastor of a church there, the evangelical chaplain of the university. And she came, she wanted to see what’s going on, what is this happening? And I remember I took her to church and she was weeping the whole time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really?

JAMES TOUR: Yeah. And I said, you were really touched by this? She said, why do you think I said I was touched? I said, you were weeping the whole time. She said, I’m weeping for you. I’m weeping for you. This New York Jewish mother, I’m weeping for you. I said, why are you weeping for me? She says that you’re here. I said, well, where should I be on a Sunday afternoon? She said, how about the beach like any normal human being? That’s a mother.

TUCKER CARLSON: She sounds pretty open minded though. I mean, she went with you.

JAMES TOUR: She went with me. And I said, why don’t you read the New Testament and see what I’m into? And she did. My mother was always a big reader. She devoured books. If you saw my mother sitting in her home, she was always reading a book. She loved books. She loved books and she’d mark them and she’d very careful reader. She read the entire New Testament, something most Christians have never done.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, from the beginning.

His Mother’s Journey

JAMES TOUR: And she read it. What she thinks, she said, I don’t blame them for killing Jesus. Who does he think he is? This guy, this young guy going around, 30 year old guy going around and telling people that “your whitewashed tombs,” these people are devoting their lives to helping other people. And he’s telling people that “your whitewashed tombs” and opposing them, these people are helping everybody and he’s opposing them. She says, of course you’re going to get yourself killed for this.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, she’s actually getting to something deep and true.

JAMES TOUR: Yeah, you get yourself killed for speaking up. Isn’t that what we’re talking about today? And then I said, okay, read the Old Testament, because most Jews have never read the Old Testament. You think that? No, they’re like Christians, they’ve never read their own word.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JAMES TOUR: And so she read the entire Old Testament from beginning to end. That’s amazing. And I said, what did you think of that? She said, he warned us over and over again. He warned us and he told us this would happen to us. It’s just like he told us over and over again. And she said, we deserved it, we deserved it.

Now my Jewish friends, they can’t take this. I’m just telling you what she said. I didn’t say it. I’m just the messenger of what she said. Now she’s gone now, so you can’t come against her. That’s what she said. She said we deserved it. She said, he told us, warned us over.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the prophets are very tough on their own people. I mean, they are very tough. Very tough. Like, way tougher than.

JAMES TOUR: And that’s why they were killed.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

Jesus and the Prophets

JAMES TOUR: That’s why they were killed. Yeah. And Jesus said, you know, when the, in Luke, chapter 11, it said, the lawyers came to Jesus. And he says, when you speak this way about the Pharisees, you offend us too. You offend us. I mean, it was, you know, offense is a big thing. You offend us. And Jesus didn’t say, gee, I’m sorry about that. You know, really, the worst thing I could have done was offend. You know, he says, “You lawyers, you lawyers, you are responsible for the deaths of all the prophets. From Abel to Zechariah.”

This is like us saying from Genesis to Revelation. Yeah, this is because the way they order their books, this is the encompassing way. And he says, you’re responsible for all of their deaths. All of them. And so that’s the way Jesus handled this. Yeah, and he says, which one of them didn’t you kill? Yeah, he wasn’t sucking up. Yeah, he wasn’t sucking up.

So that was her response. But then she told me, she said, you know, you’re going to have a lot of trouble with your children. You know, you teach them all these things and it’s so religious and everything. You’re going to have a lot of trouble.

His Mother’s Conversion

And my kids grew up, and my daughter, my oldest daughter was 15, and she came to visit with my dad, and she went up to my daughter’s room and talked to her for two hours. You know, my mother used to do a lot of volunteer work at the Mental Health Association. She was very good at talking to people, particularly young people. Young people used to love to talk to my mom.

She came out after two hours. She said, that’s some daughter you’ve got. And she started reading the Bible again. And she started reading the Bible. And she was reading the Bible, the Case for Christ, and a devotional from the InterVarsity, which I don’t know where she got those.

She called me one morning. We used to speak every Sunday. She called me and she said, “Jimmy, you wouldn’t believe what happened.” I said, what happened? She says, “I believe Jesus is the son of God.” I said, what? She said, “He’s the son of God. I was reading about the crucifixion.” She said, “This has to be God. Only God could go through something like this. Not as a normal person. Jesus had to have been the son of God.” And, you know, she was really moved.

And then the next week, she calls me. She said, “Jimmy, you can find any damn thing in the Bible.” I said, what is it you found? She said, “It says, husbands love the wife of your youth.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it’s the best.

JAMES TOUR: That’s the best. And I said, well, tell that to dad. She had it on speakerphone. That’s how my parents would only speak on speakerphone, you know. And you know, this is a Jewish New York father. And I said, well, tell that to dad. You know you can. And I hear him in the background saying, “I know all that already. I know all that.” So she came to the Lord. My dad used to take her to church. She got baptized. She went to church.

TUCKER CARLSON: Your dad took her to church?

JAMES TOUR: Yes, he used to take her to church. He loved his wife. He loved his wife.

TUCKER CARLSON: Very open minded parents.

A Father’s Journey to Faith

Very open-minded. They were good parents. Very good parents. And he took her to church. Sometimes he’d sit with her in church, sometimes he’d drop her off and then he’d come to pick her up. And she got baptized in the Atlantic Ocean.

And then what did her friends think?

JAMES TOUR: She told everybody. She didn’t hide this thing. She was quite open. I mean, I told everybody. I mean, what are they going to think? I remember I told my cousin, he says, “You can’t do that. You’re Jewish. You’re Jewish.” I never thought about that. Am I allowed to do this? That’s too funny.

But 45 years I prayed for my dad. I told him the gospel so many times. I read to him the entire Gospel of John over a period of about five days. And he only fell asleep, like twice while I was reading it to him. He was a good guy. He just listened to me. He’d fall asleep sometimes and wake up and I’d begin again.

But on his deathbed, I said, “Dad,” you knew he was dying. His mind was all there. His body was just failing him at the age of 94. And I said, “Can I tell you again, tell you again why this means so much to me?”

TUCKER CARLSON: My faith?

JAMES TOUR: He says, “I really don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear it.” He was being nice.

That night, a Jamaican night nurse came in. We hired a nurse just to sit with him all night long. She started sharing with him. She said, “You know, there’s the picture of your wife. You want to be with her, you can be with her. You can receive Jesus right now.” She said, “Do you want it?” She said he nodded. She said, “Yes.”

So she called in another nurse. They all held hands and they prayed with him. And she said he extended both hands to the heavens, and the whole room changed. And he came to the Lord right there, and the whole attitude about his life changed. And my sister saw this, and she was amazed. She was amazed. And he died four days later. He died in the Lord. For 45 years, I prayed for that man. He came to know the Lord.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s incredible.

The Power of the Gospel

JAMES TOUR: Nobody can tell me this doesn’t work. I mean, the gospel message is not a sham. I see this over and over again. I told you, every week I see somebody come to the Lord and I get involved in daily reading of the scriptures, starting in the Gospel according to John. Slowly, pensively, I teach them how to read. Slowly, each verse twice. Then break it up. Think about that.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Stop. Read it again. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Now break it up into parts. In the beginning. In the beginning, just ponder that. That means before there was time, before there was anything.

In the beginning was the Word. Word is information. Everything starts with information. You cannot build a cell without the informational code. Everything has to have information. There was informational code, DNA that from the acorn that started this tree, that made this table. Information. You have to have information. Pre. Pre. Is a prerequisite to everything.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That Word was God. The next verse says, “He was in the beginning with God.” Puts a pronoun. He was in the beginning. He. The Word is a he. This is an individual.

You get to verse 14, it blows your mind. “The Word, that Word that was with God and was with the Word, became flesh and dwelt among us. And we saw his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” We saw him. We saw Him. He became flesh. That Word, that information that was God, took on human flesh.

I mean, you see this and what happens is the Bible says that God, no man can approach God and live. No man. Which makes sense. You look out and you see this whole universe. Look out through the James Webb telescope. You see colors everywhere. Each one of those is a galaxy that God created the entire molecular level for us to have life, and then the atomic level from which the molecules are made from, and then the subatomic for each one of those atoms, everything, that whole dimensional difference, he created the whole thing.

It’s no wonder why we cannot approach him. He dwells in a light that we could never be near. But he says, “I want to be with them.” The Bible tells us in Hebrews, chapter two, he took on flesh and blood because his children are of flesh and blood. That’s an amazing thing. He took on flesh and blood because we are of flesh and blood.

God in Solidarity With Us

You know, we have cancer patients stay in our home sometimes because we live right near a big cancer center. And you can’t, it’s too expensive to stay in a hotel for three months, six months treatment. And so sometimes a child is getting treatment and they will lose their hair just like an adult loses their hair. And so the mother or the father will shave their head in solidarity with that child. And the child is different. They’re like, “None of us ever. We’re all together. We’re all together.”

This is what Jesus does. He took on flesh and blood because we have flesh and blood in solidarity with us. And he says, “If they come as an adult, they’ll fear me. I’ll be born among them.” When one is born among us, we’re not intimidated by them. We’re not afraid of them. They’re born among us, and he’s born among us.

And he teaches us how to have relationship with God. He says, “This is how you do it. You don’t have to be a monk and go up on a mountain. Just live among your own people. Just wake up early in the morning, go off and enjoy God. Just enjoy God.” And how he loved the scriptures, how he quoted the scriptures over and over again. He demonstrated it for us.

This is not a sham. I see lives change all the time. I see people come to the Lord. When I get them in this, their marriages change, their children change. I see them writing to me. After a year, two years, “I’m back together with my wife. My kids are turned around.”

A guy just wrote to me this week, “I’m getting baptized with my son. You led me to the Lord one year ago.” He says, “Now my 13-year-old who was sitting in the same room when you talked to me over the Zoom conversation, he’s getting baptized with me.”

It changes lives over and over again. The Gospel is not a sham. This is real. This is real. It is true. Every word in the scriptures is true, and I am a public testimony of this. Over and over again, I see this thing being borne out.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you feel like something is happening in this country or world where this is accelerating? There’s more awareness of this, of God?

A Growing Awareness of God

JAMES TOUR: More awareness of God? Yeah, yeah, I think there’s more awareness of God. I see something accelerating toward God. People are becoming more aware of this.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JAMES TOUR: Yeah, I do see that. People say, you know, “What’s it like working with students today?” I went to the campus when I was 18, right after my 18th birth, and I’ve never left. I’ve been on college campuses since I was 18. So for almost 50 years, this is where I am. And I’ve seen students all of this time, and I see the gospel works the same on students today as it ever did.

And I see people, I mean, there’s a lot of mess in the world, but there’s always been a lot of mess in the world.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, that’s right.

JAMES TOUR: Ask the Koreans. Ask what it was like 50 years, 70 years ago in Korea. I mean, things were a real mess. I mean, and the world has been a mess over and over again. But, yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of discussion about God, and I think even science is pointing us more and more to God.

I mean, look at this. Look at the creatures that we are. How do you build one of these? How do you do this? How do you pull this thing off? And now we know so much more. This is not, it used to be a cell was a bunch of protoplasm. Now it’s like this. It’s this factory. It’s this factory with all these levels of systems level engineering in every cell. How do you do this? This is amazing.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the more you know, the less you know, and the more it points you toward a creator.

JAMES TOUR: Yeah, I think that’s certainly true. The more you know, the less, the more you realize you don’t know.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

The Complexity of Creation

JAMES TOUR: And for me, it points me toward a creator over and over again. I’m, I’m looking at this. I mean, this is all I do. I sit in my office and I just go through chemistry. I mean, over and over again, I’m just doing chemistry, reading papers and writing proposals. I mean, you stare at this. You say, “God, how do you do this?”

I remember my son, whom you’ve met. He was three years old. He came running toward me. We were building a molecular brain. We were building this synthetic brain where we were taking molecules in the disoriented array, and you’d give voltage pulses from the outside, you couldn’t map the thing, but we’d just give voltage pulses from the outside to program it to do the function that we wanted it to do. And we could just get little tiny things and, and gate an or gate, little simple things.

And then one day I’m sitting at the kitchen table thinking about how we’re going to build this. And he comes running toward me and I said, “Lord, how do you do this? How do you build one of these? How do you do this?” There’s all this motion, all this action and all this comprehension and all this awareness and all this consciousness. And I’m trying to build a little or gate, and I can’t do it. And it’s all this, how do you do this?

We don’t know the Internet connect pattern of the molecules in our brain or of the neurons in our brain, but we use it all the time. I mean, with a computer chip, you know where every device is. Everything is perfectly placed. You better know where everything is. And here we use our brains. We don’t have a map of it, and we use it all the time. It’s extraordinary.

And I look at life. I’m like this. This is amazing. Amazing. And then I used to just purposely sit outside and just wait for mosquitoes to come because they’re flying. Tiny little, tiny little brain. And there’s all this coordinated flight. And I’m emitting something that’s calling them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JAMES TOUR: And now as soon as they sting, they fly away. And then more. He’s called his friends, you know, “Here’s a hunk of meat.” And they’re coming right back to the same place. They’re coming right back. They know where to come. And so he’s signaling them. So there’s all these sensors from very small amounts of these pheromones, very small amount of these small organic molecules have been emitted. And they have these amazing sensors that then they converge on you.

How, how do you do that? How do you pull this thing off? I mean, you need code, you need genetic code, you need information for every one of these things. You can’t tell me there is no God. You can’t tell me. I mean, who should understand this better than me, really? I mean, I’m not trying to speak this proudly. It’s just that I understand the molecular level as good as anyone else in the world. As good as anyone else in the world. So if anybody should be able to understand it, I should understand it.

This is amazing, just amazing. This world, this creation. And so I see God and I say, “God, you are amazing. This is extraordinary.” I mean, how you pull this thing off. And he allows us as scientists to explore in this little nano domain of his creation and just get excited about it. I can’t believe you teach at a university. It’s amazing.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s wonderful. It’s such a great sign.

Teaching the Wonder of Chemistry

JAMES TOUR: Oh, I love teaching. I love it. I love teaching, even introductory organic chemistry. I like to take them just right from the beginning. It’s like I take somebody to the Grand Canyon and I’ve seen it many times, but they’re seeing it for the first time. I just want to look at them and see like, wow.

That’s what it’s like teaching organic chemistry for the first time. Let me show you what these organic molecules can do. Let me show you how they do this, how you can look at a structure and predict what’s going to happen when you take two molecules and put them together and why they do what they do and why the reaction takes place and why it’s fast or it’s slow. Is it explosive or do you have to heat it up? They learn all this.

Why does deodorant work the way it does? Why do these chemicals do what they do? I mean, how is it? Why does wood have the structure that it has? Why do fabrics? Why do you walk across a carpet and the fibers spring right back? What made them spring back? Why don’t they stay down when you stepped on them?

I love to be able to explain this and just open up the world to them and show them this. This to me is really exciting.

TUCKER CARLSON: Professor Jim Tour, thank you very much.

JAMES TOUR: Thank you.

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