I’d say it’s almost totally irrelevant, because anyone who looks at the diagram and knows anything about organic chemistry, and genetics, can see what it’s supposed to be. I could see it was supposed to be an RNA nucleotide, despite the lacking double bonds, and I don’t have a PhD in organic chemistry.
If you think it’s a “notable blunder” then there is simply no limit to how many notable blunders you can find in pop-sci articles. I gave an example above, from the same journal. All the reaction steps are missing, and both compounds have very unclear or straightforwardly wrong structures, and it’s a diagram detailing some findings of medical research. Much science is simplified when presented to the public, this isn’t uniquely a problem in the origin of life field. Why isn’t James Tour picking on all these other fields of science for how public presentations are simplified?
Looking over your other comments I’m having a hard time following exactly what your general complaint is.
That James Tour is misrepresenting the state of the field for apologetics purposes. He does a lot of work trying to make it seem as if you can get close to any imaginable nonsense published in the origin of life field, but the examples he picks are bad and not actually from the primary literature.
Since they are not actually from the primary literature, but simplifications intended for a lay audience, whatever issues one may find with details being left out or simplified are not at all unique to the OOL field, as the example that took me 5 minutes to find shows.
If you watch his youtube talk for about 30 min. from about 14:00 - 43:00 he talks about all the obstacles that OOL faces from facts established in chemical research. Then for about 7 min. from 43:00 to about 50:00 he talks about the mistakes and misrepresentations that are in print, namely in text books and scientific journals.
I haven’t watched the whole video and I can’t be bothered because then I’d want to respond to it, but since it’s in video form I then have to try to faithfully reproduce what Tour says, but in writing and that’s just more than I can be bothered with. I have responded in another thread to some of Tour’s writings on the origin of life, so if you can find anything Tour says in that video but online in writing I’d be happy to explain to you why the issues he brings up don’t constitute even mildly significant evidence for his central thesis.
Mind you, Tour has claimed in writing that we know from chemistry that life should not exist. I’m not paraphrasing here. See that other thread.
So as far as I can tell, first he’s making his main case for how complex the problems for OOL is in order to show that in his estimation there’s no way that we’re even close to finding a solution.
And already this I would take issue with. I’m guessing he brings up the same perceived problems he’s brought up in his essay previously. One of the biggest problems in Tour’s entire case is that he assumes, without actually knowing whether it is the case, that the first form of life had a level of complexity comparable to modern bacteria and were based on the same molecules.
This assumption then feeds into almost all the issues he raises. Life today uses homochiral polymers, so Tour thinks if the products of some reaction yields a racemic mixture then it couldn’t work in the origin of life. Life today uses phospholipids for the cell membrane, so Tour thinks if those are not produced, or if alternative lipids are not as effective as phospholipids at forming a barrier, then again it couldn’t work, without even knowing if another type of barrier could function. Autotrophic organisms today can biosynthesize all their constituents from simple precursors found in the environment, so Tour thinks the origin of life requires the first stage of life to also be an autotroph capable of biosynthesizing the same large repertoire of molecules that modern cells are based on.
But how does he know that these are actually universal requirements of life? How does he know there isn’t another chemical reaction network possible that involves, or is at least not rendered incompetent by a racemic mix products? He doesn’t actually know that.
How does he know another type of fatty acids can’t yield a functional cell membrane? He doesn’t actually know that.
How does he know that a form of life that lives as an autotroph but gets some of it’s constituents from the nonbiological chemical sources directly (such as amino acids?) instead of having to biosynthesize them up from simpler precursors, is not possible? He doesn’t actually know that.
One could go on and on here. Basically one of the issues is that Tour only considers life as we know it, but has no idea about life as we don’t know it. Earlier life, more primitive and simpler life, life based on different chemistries that later evolved into life as we know it? This is never factored into any of his emphasized problems.
If we don’t join Tour in making the assumption that life began as we know it, using the same compounds and having relatively similar levels of complexity, then most of his problems just become question marks. Are those things actually required for life? We don’t actually know that they are problems and Tour can’t claim to know that they are. Things are like this now =/= they must have always been that way and couldn’t possibly function in another way.
We don’t know enough about the phenomenon of life to be able to claim what forms it can take. But that’s exactly what Tour is doing. He is claiming to know that “life should not exist, this we know from chemistry”, which implicitly assumes that there is no transitional stage between modern life as we know it, and non-life. Either we are looking at rocks and water, or E coli, and there’s nothing in between. But how does he know that?
Then he’s making a briefer related case for how errors and misrepresentations of OOL research are present in publications where, to him, the mistaken impression is given that OOL research is close to finding a solution.
I’d have to see examples of that because it seems to me researchers are always straightforwardly stating that they don’t know how life originated, that they are working on it, and that there are still open questions to be solved and much debate in the field.
The problem is here that Tour claims there is no progress in the field at all, and that’s just not true.
What the main issue of his talk is, and seems to me what needs to be dealt with by those who disagree with him, is the actual established facts from chemical research that he puts forth as evidence for his main claim.
Besides what has been mentioned above, if you want to see some of those putative facts discussed here you’d have to write them down and I’d tell you what (if anything) I think is problematic about it. I don’t want to have to watch his presentation and then write down every sentence or statement I think is problematic.