James Tour accuses origin of life researchers of lying

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no one showed that Tour was incorrect of accusing Jack Szostak

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Tour hysterically accused Szostak of “lying” for not using chemically correct diagrams of sugars in a cartoon illustration aimed at laymen. What would you prefer our response be?

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Dude, you are just way too biased and emotional to have any real conversation with. Tour’s behavior here is ridiculous. Just admit it. Just like we do when evo bios act out of line. Just stop.

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How many Nobel Prizes?

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Incorrect. I did. Just above.

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Nobel Prize is politics, not a scientific measure

Jack Szostak has 289 research publications with 32520 citations, with h-index: 85
if you measure scientifically Jack Szostak has achieved only half of the achievements of James Tour

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Dude. Seriously.

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Lol I bet if Tour had one you’d be flaunting it. You are so freaking clueless.

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Acussing James Tour, one of the TOP chemists in the world ‘as self-proclaimed expert ’ is unbiased view, OK,

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Which creationist was it who kept making a big deal about rumours that Tour might have been considered for a Nobel?

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Don’t recall

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He is not an expert on OOL research. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have to learn about it from a cartoon.

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Just because you’re an expert in one area of chemistry does mean you’re an expert in all of them. Tour being a top chemist doesn’t mean he knows anything about the OOL. Just like me knowing the Tyrannosaur fossil record like the back of my hand doesn’t mean I know jack $h!t about the odonate fossil record.

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How many of Tour’s publications dealt with evolutionary biology, genetics, or Origin-of-Life which is Jack Szostak’s area of research? I count a big fat ZERO.

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@swamidass who are these guys?

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People who know what the hell they are talking about, and who don’t go around slandering colleagues for a fee.

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Guys who are tired of you crying foul over freaking everything and whining like a 13 yr old girl. You have no interest in having any meaningful dialogue. You just want to agrue. Which leads you to saying idiotic things like you have this thread. I rarely get frustrated so that tells you how tired I am of it. If you don’t go soon I’m going. You have almost single handedly brought down the quality of this forum. I don’t even start threads anymore because I know soon they will be ambushed by you and Robert saying stupid things. Or by ashwin telling me to define the stupidest of words or by Eddie writing a stupid freaking novel when it could’ve been done in a freaking sentence.

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I must say, this is the first time I have had the pleasure of making @Edgar_Tamarian’s acquaintance. I hope he wasn’t avoiding me.

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Lying implies intent and there is no way James knows that someone is lying or made an honest error from a single paper. You have a relationship with him so I think it would be good if you could let him know this is an error and turning people off.

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For the non-scientists in the forum I feel like I should point out that comparing the number of citations that researchers in different fields have isn’t particularly meaningful. Different fields of study are different in size, in terms of the numbers of scientists working in them, the number of papers they publish, and the level of overlap that would justify citations.

For example, I know world-leading palaeontologists with only around 4000-6000 citations, and even the most highly cited of all rarely have more than 10,000. Compare that to a field like cancer biology, where the most highly-cited researchers have hundreds of thousands of citations. The most highly-cited cancer biologist isn’t necessarily “more accomplished” than the most highly-cited palaeontologist - the fields are just different.

It’s the same with chemistry/nanotechnology versus origins of life research: the most highly-cited of the latter rarely creep over 10,000 citations, while the former often have hundreds of thousands. Going by citation counts, Jack Szostak is at the absolute pinnacle of his chosen field, while Tour isn’t (in his field or in Szostak’s field). Obviously Tour is accomplished, but not as highly as Szostak.

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