There is no other way to take it, because why else would he mention it? He goes on to say that he himself could not get away with saying these things, and really hammers on the fact that this is in nature. His point clearly is that in the origin of life field nonsense you couldn’t get away with anywhere else, can be published in the primary literature, even in a journal as prestigious as nature.
This isn’t a willful misunderstanding, that seems to be his main point.
44:23 the pimary objection here is the word “nudge” which is ill-defined. Allowing this word in the journal Nature was a major oversight.
First of all, again with the journal nature. Why can’t the word “nudge” be used in a pop-sci article that ISN’T part of the primary literature? Speaking colloquially as one is bound to do in an article intended for a lay audience, to say that certain chemical reactions were “nudged” along is really just to say that some environmental factor drove them, as in catalyzed them or made them thermodynamically favorable. That could be UV light, other chemicals in solution, mineral surfaces, and many other things. There’s nothing unusual or problematic going on here that isn’t in some sense a problem with ALL scientific writings intended for a lay audience.
Tour’s claim seems to be that this is a particularly big problem in the origin of life field in a way or to an extend it is not a problem in other fields such as his own (synthetic organic chemistry), that things are published in the primary literature that is unusually egregious, but he doesn’t actually show this is the case.
44:47 “some stages of RNA production are still not well understood” This is misleading insofar as this is not
No, it isn’t. It’s completely correct in every way that sentence could be plausibly understood.
and there is not a disclaimer about combinatorial complexity.
There are a million things there are no disclaimers about, which is to be expected from a pop-sci article intended for a lay audience, as opposed to a 400 page doctoral dissertation in the philosophy and history of science on the origin of life. It simply can’t be expected to fully discuss every imaginable caveat, alternative, speculation, or assumption. Again, there is nothing unusual about this that makes this article stand out compared to millions of other types of science articles on other subjects, of a limited scope intended for a lay audience.
Here the “some stages” is basically all stages, and “not well understood” is not understood at all.
But that’s just wrong. RNA has in fact been synthesized in the lab, and the steps in those syntheses are understood to varying extends. It would be more correct to say that it isn’t actually known whether these synthetic pathways produced in the lab is how RNA actually first originated, but the article is actually totally upfront about the fact that there are origin of life researchers who disagree with the RNA-first proposals. The premise for the graphic is that IF RNA was involved already from the beginning, then these synthetic pathways may have been how it first came about.
In order for a process to get from stage x to stage x+1 some purification of the reaction products is an absolute requirement.
Is it? How do you know?
Without purification the individual reactions do not form a comprehensive chain
What is that, a “comprehensive chain”?
and thus calling them stages is 100% misleading.
Not really. Whether the process is continuous, or broken up into bits, the fact is that any one of these molecules is synthesized by multiple consecutive reactions, each of which can be considered a step. In the same way that the growth of a salt crystal atom by atom could be considered a long chain of “steps” by each atom added to the crystal.
The audience understands this, and that’s why they are laughing.
The audience is clueless and they’re laughing because James Tour is pushing their buttons by in part with body language and his tone of voice, and by tossing dog whistles at them they’ve been indoctrinated to expect by conservative religious upbringing for decades. Among them this rather insidious insinuation that there’s some academic conspiracy by “Darwinists” and atheists at universities engaged in some delusional pursuit of naturalistic explanations out of some combination of fear and hate of God, a final judgement, and because they’re self-deluding liberals who just want to sin bla bla bla bla look at what they’re publishing hahahah.
Don’t ask me to pretend to not understand what the hell is going on here.
45:19 By the time we get to the infamous slide there are already three major objections to the article.
Objections which are egregiously wrong and misleading.
45:59 So, basically, this could be a misunderstanding on dr. Tour’s part, being colorblind. Come to think of it, the graph does resemble the Ishihara test, so I wouldn’t exclude the possibility dr. Tour misunderstanding the graph, in which case YOU’re railing against Him because of a disability he has.
No, we are railing against him because the things he say are wrong and unreasonable. If Tour has a disability that causes him to make these mistakes, then Tour can simply admit that and retract his poor objections and accusations of lying, and all can be forgiven. We all make mistakes. But no, Tour isn’t being railed against merely for having a disability. He’s being railed against for putting on a circus of public confirmation bias and playing to an audience with egregious accusations of lying by origin of life researchers.
How charitable of you. He even says “maybe” a couple of times, which means that he is not 100% sure about this graph.
He’s sure enough to scream HE’S LYING TO YOU, apparently.
46:10 So already, the “he’s lying to you” has been taken out of context, and is irrelevant to the objection dr. Tour actually has with this graph.
Not even forking remotely, buddy.
The graph says that the reaction product is an RNA nucleotide, but the picture shown is not an RNA nucleotide. Could’ve been an oversight on the part of the illustrator.
Then what is it? What are we looking at? It looks to me like the RNA nucleotide Cytosine bound to phosphate through the two 2’ and 3’ -hydroxyl groups of Ribose. What does it look like to you?