And it’s not just this thread, it has been ongoing for ~20 years, and that’s just since I got involved. I first encountered Lee Merrill about 20 years ago too.
I can say with some confidence that everyone participating enjoys this kind of exchange at some level. People keep coming back to these same discussions no matter how many times it has been done before. There are new developments on the science side, and learning about that science from others is interesting, even exciting. Explaining it to others is a good way to improve one’s own understanding too.
On the other side of things, there has been remarkable success in the dumbing-down of our culture and promoting a general distrust in science. The culture wars that started with debates over evolution have blossomed into widespread science denialism, with spillover into nationalism. The debate over evolution has never been about science; it’s about control and what people can be made to believe.
The dynamics of the discussion here reflect what is happing in the culture at large. People are disputing facts, even disputing (gaslighting) what were claimed to be challenges to the facts (ie: Tour’s challenges). The skills we have developed for these smaller debates have some trouble translating to the larger debates, but there are useful parallels. What I find most helpful is the ability to recognize when someone is baiting others into a fact-based discussion of a subjective topic.
But that has nothing to do with Tour’s challenge, it’s not about cells evolving, it’s about whether life can be created in the lab.
Um, where does Tour invoke Levinthal’s paradox in any of his challenges?
But I was being told that if you reassemble a cell, you’ll get interactions. Presumably, one of this set of possible interactions. Some interaction certainly will occur, you’re denying the obvious. And who said this number is some sort of physically real quantity? It’s a total, you can’t pick it up and examine it like it was a toaster or something. And not all interactions are healthy, was my argument, and if you tell me that most any old interaction will do, well, that’s going to take some defending to be convincing, in the face of this huge number.
But you were saying the ATP was being incorporated like a nucleotide, with other molecules. Nucleotides don’t change to some other molecule when they are incorporated.
I’ve addressed this already, Tour is not saying this happened at the origin of life, he pointing out that no one can generate a working interactome, even given the components of a real cell. The claim being challenged is that we are close to creating life in the lab, sorry, we’re not.
But moving genes doesn’t create a new interactome.
But getting the interactome started requires that the critical interactions are happening, that is the challenge. Poking a new protein into a working cell (GFP seems it gets ignored) is not the same thing.
But the plasmid is already acceptable to the source it comes from! So it’s not like a never-before-encountered gene.
Same thing here, it’s fine in a source cell, so it’s not likely to overthrow the receiving cell. And all these counterexamples of new material are incidental, the problem is to take a living cell apart, put it back together and get it going again, get the critical, needed interactions going again. Saying new molecules are not bothersome does not show that the needed interactions are somehow, likely to start up, after assembly.
What is silly is the claim that hydrothermal vents are a good place for life to emerge! “Alkaline hydrothermal vents are among the most plausible environments for the emergence of life”. Not so. Here is video where Ed Pelzer talks with James Tour about this subject, Pelzer is a retired deep-sea researcher who knows about this area.
I’ll take that as an “I don’t know”, but it seems you were claiming that whatever interactions started up would be fine.
No, my view is that the parts, the proteins, for instance, will interact in some way, and not just any way will do.
I’ve never heard of such an ID claim, surely ID people know that if you put lots of proteins together, you’ll get many interactions, that’s how the cell operates, you need them.
But the interactome is not about interacting genes, primarily, but rather about interactions among small molecules such as proteins. Thus Tour’s quoting of the number of possible protein-protein interactions in a yeast cell.
But Tour’s fifth challenge is not about new function arising, nor about cells assembling on their own, it is about researchers reassembling a cell that has been taken about, and getting the needed interactome started, so the cell is a living cell again.
I don’t claim to know how rare functional interactomes might be, I point to disease due to interactome problems as evidence that there is fragility there.
No, but the term “disease” implies we don’t have just another type of cell.
I’m sure Tour would be glad to hear of people at work on the interactome, could you give examples?
But I don’t see what this has to do with generating an interactome…
We have been discussing Douglas Axe’s response to Art Hunt’s initial comments on Panda’s Thumb, in the thread about this topic. And I made some comments to Art Hunt about what he said were his central concerns, that had gone unaddressed, and he dropped the conversation after a few exchanges.
So we must not take a simpler approach, when we see that would be adequate? It’s fine if you want to tie your shoes with a bowline knot, but you don’t need to…
Tour says that’s how he got motivated to point out that the claims were false! He read the papers, and saw that what they were claiming was not what they were doing. He goes through some of the papers in some of his videos, and remarks that ordinary people are not going to be able to do this, but he can, and does.
We see from numerous examples of genetic editing, gene knockouts, mitochondrial transplants, etc., that these “new parts” get along just fine without any need to create any new interactome to go along with them.
You have never heard the ID claim that randomly assembled part are unlikely to produce any function at all? Sorry, but you have got to be pulling my leg.
… surely ID people know that if you put lots of proteins together, you’ll get many interactions, that’s how the cell operates, you need them.
This part is true. We also see numerous examples of cell modifications that produce a new kind of cell and does not disrupt cell function, without any effort toward creating an “interactome”.
I’m sure we could find examples of such experiments that didn’t work out too. Tour challenge about the interactome is a plausible problem, but the evidence shows that it is not the Show Stopper that Tour claims it to be.
Um … Lee … You know that proteins are made by transcribing DNA/RNA, right? I again suspect you are being disingenuous.
Proteins interactions are functions. The Interactome is a function too (more than one!). We see numerous examples of modified living cells that live and reproduce without any new “interactome” functions being purposefully added. Whatever it is that Tour is looking for (and you don’t seem to know either), it hasn’t prevented scientists from assembling functional cells from given parts.
Well you’ve gone both ways on this now, but it is a nuanced question. There could be fragility if the assembled part interfere with each other, that’s probably a failed experiment. My point is the numerous examples where cells function just fine.
You introduced “disease” to the discussion, but it just doesn’t seem to be relevant. I suppose some mad (yet well funded) scientist could intentionally create a diseased cell, but why? … wait … that happens all the time in knockout experiments … … I’ll start again.
In the normal course of research, an experiment that didn’t work out and produced a “diseased” cell would be a failed experiment. Possibly this is a dead-end, OR it might be successful experiment in the stepwise process that produces a final result. Either way, a new sort of cell is produced.
I really do no see how Tour could not know this.
I should defer to one of the biochemists for examples, and @Rumraket gave some above. More in my area is cancer research, which is full of interactions gone wrong from the human viewpoint (or interactions gone right from the tumor’s viewpoint). OR you might Google it. Protein/protein interactions are a hot topic these days, and AI is fast becoming an important tools is this research.
Here is the first example that popped up in a search on “journals dedicated to protein/protein interactions”. Notably I did not include the term “interactome”.
Given my level of expertise and familiarity with the primary literature, why, precisely, should I care at all what Ed Pelzer and Tour think about anything pertaining to abiogenesis?
And given your lack of expertise and complete unfamiliarity with the primary literature, why should you?
… I’ll start again.