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?
Actually, the people arguing against Tour have proposed various papers and results at various times that they claimed answered one of Tour’s challenges. But all so far have proven to be faulty.
I’m first of all interested in intelligent design, which does involve some biology. I’m glad to learn from biologists, but none of their corrections have made an impact on the points Tour raises, or Michael Behe raises, or Gunter Bechly raised. No one has refuted James Tour and his protest that no progress to speak of has been made in the field since Miller-Urey. No one has answered his point that the goal is getting farther away, not closer, the more we find out about the cell. And no one has proposed an answer here to any of Tour’s challenges, and none of the proposed papers here have held up. Even a rube like me can find the problem with OOL papers proposed here and their claims pretty quickly, lots of training in biology is not needed.
But I addressed that, please address my response to this point, and don’t just bring it up again.
But Tour’s challenge was not to put the parts together at random, it was to reassemble the cell, in its proper form, and then get it working. How can you miss that?
Yes, I do know that, but the proteins can’t just be plopped into a cell in any old way, they need to be in proper places at proper times. Per Wikipedia: “In molecular biology, an interactome is the whole set of molecular interactions in a particular cell. The term specifically refers to physical interactions among molecules (such as those among proteins, also known as protein–protein interactions (PPIs); or between small molecules and proteins.[1]) but can also describe sets of indirect interactions among genes (genetic interactions).” Now in Tour’s challenge, the genes in their proper places are a given, the assembly step would include getting the DNA properly set up, so then the PPIs and interactions with small molecules and proteins would be what would be of interest. Hence the relevance of the total number of PPIs in a yeast cell.
And I again refer to my reply, which you need to address, that what needs to be arranged are the interactions needed for life function. Poking other molecules into a cell with a working interactome, which may actually be ignored, or which come from another working cell, does not address this.
But I was addressing the analogy of producing different types of bikes! That’s not at all applicable to what I was saying.
Again and again, this response has nothing to do with starting up the needed functions in an interactome, to get the cell to be a living cell. Nothing about experiments producing different cells, or failed cells, is relevant here. Tour is not stupid, as people here do seem to think.
No, as I recall, he did not, please link them if he did and I missed them.
Well, I did already do this! I do wonder why people think of an idea of something I should do, and then assume I haven’t done it.
Did you leave out a link to the example? I’m not seeing one.
… I’ll start again.