That’s fine, I realize scientists know what this means. My point is that most people don’t, and thus it’s a misleading term. As I have heard, most people believe scientists have created life in the lab! I wonder why. No, I actually don’t wonder why…
No, semi-permeable membranes are not ion channels! They are not selective, and are therefore useless, or even dangerous. And if on the other hand, the membrane is such that nothing comes in or goes out, such proto-cells are not anything like a cell, they don’t deserve the proto-cell label. Call them a vesicle if you like, but in such a tiny, static environment, it’s not evident how any progress or development can occur.
Complaining? Or informing? It seems Tour never had the least expectation that the challenge could be met.
.. therefore refuted and of no value.
LMAO. Tell me you know literally nothing about his subject without telling me, the quintessential post.
Fatty acid (and related molecules) membranes have been directly experimentally demonstrated to have selective permeability. That’s why they’re classified as semi-permeable rather than just …permeable.
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I stand corrected. But my (Tour’s!) point still stands, that a cell of any type requires ion channels, they are not optional, and pointing to semipermeable membranes doesn’t address this. If the ion channels fail, the ion concentration gets off, and the cell explodes.
I repeat that such membranes are not selective like ion channels are. How can you say that semipermeable membranes can replace them? That’s absurd. A cell without them dies, and any self-respecting proto-cell should die too. Otherwise, as I mentioned, let’s call them just vesicles.
Cool assertion bro. I guess the entire field of origin of life research just has to stop thinking that isn’t right. Tour says so and that just.. stands.
You’re probably describing something like osmolysis, where the ion channel failing means it fails to transport ions and water back out, and therefore the cell maintains a concentration that is too high compared to the extracellular environment. The cell then takes in too much water by osmosis, internal pressure builds, and the membrane eventually ruptures.
But what if the membrane is leaky to small molecules and water? Then the natural tendency for concentrations to equilibrate between the inside and outside (basic diffusion) automatically relieves any such tension in case there is any difference in concentration between the inside and outside of the protocell. In other words, the very leakiness of a fatty acid membrane is what enables it as a plausible precursor of a modern phospholipid membrane, but whout the advanced transport machinery.
Gee it’s almost like the people who work in this field have reasons for positing the models they do.
I’m not saying that. In fact the models being pursued posit the reverse history of that. That it was the fatty acid membranes that got replaced by modern cell membranes.
The fatty acid membranes were certainly less capable than modern membranes that have transport proteins, and therefore could not replace modern membranes upon which extant cells now depend (a modern cell could not live with a fatty acid membrane). But the idea is they were good enough for more primitive, less capable cells. Protocells.
I’m sure lots of things you know nothing about sound incomprehensible when you’ve had them taught to you by James Tour.
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What obligates them to do so, instead of publishing in the primary literature that you don’t read?
Lots. I’m asking how YOU determined that there has been none. It seems that you lack the integrity to look before making claims.
He is, but so what? What does synthesis have to do with it?
Sure. I’m fascinated by your apparent fear of challenging my qualifications.
Your claim, your evidentiary burden. So are you tacitly admitting to violating the Ninth Commandment?
It’s stupid. It’s not how science is done.
Your lack of response speaks volumes.
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How can that be, when you offered your false claim to support that point?
How honest is that? Do you get all of your information about Tour and his challenge from the Peaceful Science crowd? Have you listened to him? Even when he met with Lee Cronin at Harvard, the one OOL guy who replied to his challenge? Could Tour’s view be more nearly the opposite of what you suggest his view is?
There was a line in an email to Bruce Lipshutz (one of the 10) where Tour says, “I cannot as a scientist say that we will never solve this problem by naturalistic terms. I cannot, as a scientist, I can’t say that. I cannot say what could never be done. Maybe in a few hundred years or in a thousand years, people will have figured this out. But what I can say is that we’re nowhere close to figuring it out. And you might say, how do you know we’re nowhere close? Because the more we learn about a cell the more complex it becomes like this interactome thing.”
The sentiment of that last sentence is evident in many, many fields. It is described here with no theist/atheist inuendo. https://youtu.be/_WQDFjv2ikA?si=vFpsxRz2pauyp4b0&t=427
Yes. That’s how we know that life’s impossibility really is the take-home message.
Before we go on, let me ask you this question: Do you think science will find a naturalistic solution to the origin of life? Let’s just say within a million years from now, will science have found a good natural explanation for the origin of life?
How about you @lee_merrill, do you think that science will solve the origin of life and find a naturalistic explanation for the emergence of the first living cell? Do you consider that even remotely plausible?
I think I know what you’re going to say, and I think the same thing about Sam here. I think you’ve watched Tour’s presentations and you got the message just fine. He didn’t have to say the literal words for the both of you to get his message.
And you cite that in Tour’s defense? That passage show exactly the sort of confusion between abiogenesis and evolution that one would expect from the most ignorant Young Earth Creationist.
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I don’t think you are accurately understanding what that guy is saying. I am sure, if you asked him, he would agree that, by learning of the Peranakans, his knowledge of SE Asian cultures was increased and, if his goal was to learn as much as he could about that topic, he was now closer to achieving that goal. You disagree?
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One problem, though, this posits that the outside concentrations are fine inside the cell. That’s not the case in real cells, that’s why ion channels are also called ion pumps. So again, let’s stop calling them protocells, a leaky membrane cannot be “good enough for more primitive, less capable cells.” Another thought, the scenario for protocells, as I understand it, is that a lipid layer enclosed some stuff, so no need for transport to equilibrium, it enclosed the surrounding fluid.
But there are further problems, what is the point of ion channels? To maintain an ion gradient, keeping the cell from exploding is important, but it’s not the main reason to have them. And why is an ion gradient needed? To make ATP. And why is ATP needed? To have energy for the cell machinery to work. So all this is missing in “protocells”. It’s like I say to you I have made a “protocar.” Only it doesn’t have an engine, it doesn’t have a gas tank or fuel. It does have a control box! Like the RNA molecule we hope got subsumed in the protocell. But it’s not connected to anything, it doesn’t actually do any controlling. You can get in it and out of it, and it can roll down a hill. But it’s not something on the way to being a car.
Certainly they are not obligated to respond, but it does indicate that they cannot answer Tour’s challenge. The fact that no one here has volunteered a response also indicates that.
James Tour has looked, he’s qualified to read their papers, and he did so, that’s what got him started speaking out, as I recall.
A lot! When people start investigating how organic structures could have formed by natural processes, we can look into what reactions might be plausible. Such as the formose reaction for sugar, Tour was saying for years that it doesn’t do the job, and recently an OOL researcher confirmed this.
If you made a claim, and you did, you need to support it, is my point.
I don’t rule it out, people used to think that powered flight was impossible, or that no one could travel to the moon. But OOL researchers are not doing themselves credit, by their unsupported claims of progress, when the end task, making a cell (as Sam said, confirmed by Tour) is being seen to be more and more difficult.
But how do you get an initial cell without an interactome? This is a matter for abiogenesis, how can you say it is not? That’s why Tour’s fifth challenge was “assembly of a living cell”. That is, let’s give you all the components of a cell, can you put them together and have it work? That’s going to require solving the interactome problem…
How remarkably open-minded of you. So you don’t think the subject is of any apologetic value, and is, to you, unrelated to the question of God’s existence?
Notice what just happened. I asked @AllenWitmerMiller whether he had listened to Tour. A different participant answered for him, speaking in the collective — “we know” — and in doing so simply repeated the same factual error: attributing to Tour a claim of impossibility that he explicitly and repeatedly denies in his own words.
What is striking is not that this happened, but how predictable it was. A clear, easily verifiable correction was offered, yet instead of anyone on Allen’s side (team) acknowledging it or even inviting him to correct his misstatement, the group closed ranks and doubled down. That behavior stands in obvious tension with the stated goals of this forum — charitable reading, accuracy, and genuine inquiry.
The follow-up question about my personal expectations for the future of science is a red herring. Whether I think the origin of life will be explained within a million years has no bearing on whether Tour argues impossibility — which he explicitly denies. That issue needs to be resolved first.
If correcting an ally’s plainly incorrect summary is considered too transparent or too honest, then the problem on display is not scientific uncertainty but the dynamics of alignment within the discussion.
Great, thank you. I will make sure to inform the field of abiogenesis research that some random internet creationis has insisted a leaky membrane cannot be good enough.
Your understanding isn’t correct I’m sorry to say.
The machinery that uses ATP, yes. But not all metabolic processes require ATP.
Btw the fatty acid membrane is permeable to ATP. That molecule is small enough to cross the membrane. There are various models of early cells.
In some of them the monomers of RNA and proteins (NTPs, amino acids) are synthesized outside cells by the environment, but can cross through he fatty acid membrane (they can in fact do that, this part has been empirically demonstrated), and are used up in polymerization reactions inside the protocells.
So is the machinery that depends on using ATP as an energy currency. At least initially. That’s the model.
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