At about 27 minutes into his rant, James Tour goes off on the “fact” that amino acids cannot spontaneously polymerize. (A repeated CHON molecule is a “mer” and a string of them is a polymer).
It turns out he is unwittingly repeating a fraud I was first interested in nearly 20 years ago. The creationist chemist Jonathan Sarfati of the original Answers in Genesis crowd wrote that an experimental result was a fake.
I wrote a response for the Australian webpage opposing the “Answers in Genesis” called “No Answers in Genesis.”
"Boiled Creationist with a Side of Hexiglycine"
Much more results are available today. For examples;
Jayanta Nanda, et al 2017 “Emergence of native peptide sequences in prebiotic replication networks” Nature Communications volume 8, Article number: 434 (2017)
Gibard, Clémentine et al 2017 “Phosphorylation, oligomerization and self-assembly in water under potential prebiotic conditions” Nature Chemistry 2017/11/06/online http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nchem.2878
From their abstract;
“Here, we demonstrate that diamidophosphate (DAP)—a plausible prebiotic agent produced from trimetaphosphate—efficiently (amido)phosphorylates a wide variety of (pre)biological building blocks (nucleosides/tides, amino acids and lipid precursors) under aqueous (solution/paste) conditions, without the need for a condensing agent. Significantly, higher-order structures (oligonucleotides, peptides and liposomes) are formed under the same phosphorylation reaction conditions. This plausible prebiotic phosphorylation process under similar reaction conditions could enable the systems chemistry of the three classes of (pre)biologically relevant molecules and their oligomers, in a single-pot aqueous environment.”
Neme, R., Amador, C., Yildirim, B., McConnell, E. and Tautz, D., 2017 “Random sequences are an abundant source of bioactive RNAs or peptides” Nature ecology & evolution, 1(6), p.0127.
This is not all that new. Here are 2 early examples;
Somporn Saetia, Klaus R. Liedl, Artur H. Eder and Bernd M. Rode 1993 “Evaporation cycle experiments — A simulation of salt-induced peptide synthesis under possible prebiotic conditions” Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, Volume 23, Number 3, 1993 167-176, DOI: 10.1007/BF01581836
Yuttana Suwannachot and Bernd M. Rode 1999 “Mutual Amino Acid Catalysis in Salt-Induced Peptide Formation Supports this Mechanism’s Role in Prebiotic Peptide Evolution” Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres Volume 29, Number 5, 463-471