That’s an obvious violation of the Ninth Commandment. You can’t possibly know whether he has looked, particularly at everything relevant. From my expert perspective, he has either barely looked or is lying or both.
You lack the expertise to know if he is qualified and you can’t possibly know which papers he has read or not read. That’s two violations of the Ninth Commandment in a single phrase!
How would YOU know?
Plausible where? In the lab or in nature? Synthesizing traces or grams of a relatively pure compound?
Tour’s experience utterly fails to translate.
So, what makes you think that progress stopped in 1953?
IOW, Tour thinks abiogenesis involves all the components of a present-day cell, in their present-day forms, being formed individually, and then coming together to form a functioning cell.
Again, that’s the sort of “understanding” I’d expect from the stupidest YEC’s. I don’t undersand why, if Tour is as smart as creationists keep saying he is, he would believe the same thing.
My mistake. But one being passive versus one being active would not be “very different”, they both do the same sort of job, one passively, one actively,
I do believe every designer faces constraints, but I’m not one to speculate on whether the constraints on an agent who designed living things would be the same as the constraints a human designer would face.
We might paraphrase a major criticism of ID as a failure to identify ANY constraints which the Intelligent Design would face. In other words, they have no testable hypothesis for ID.
The 2022 review paper Lee linked above cites 383 previous publications. If only 10% of those turn out to be useful, then we still have nearly 40 examples of “incremental progress”. It seems reasonable that Tour could have used Google Scholar to verify his own claims of “no progress” at some point in the last ~20 years.
I don’t think that’s Tour’s view, actually, I think it was his way of challenging OOL researchers to address the problem of the interactome.
Can you pick the best paper, please? I looked at the paper “UNC-Chapel Hill researchers create artificial cells that act like living cells”, what they did was modify DNA to act like a cytoskeleton. Talk about an overstatement in the title! They didn’t create artificial cells, they modified DNA, the cells don’t act like living cells, they are given specific purposes, different than normal cells. There’s got to be a better example of what you are saying, in this list.
The point is, the techniques for moving bits in (or out) of cells are well developed, and there are numerous demonstrations of this being done. The earliest IIRC was Craig Venture inserting artificial DNA into a cell. Mitochondrial transplant is now a thing too. Tour’s 5th challenge is no longer a technical challenge (how long ago did he make the challenge?).
I don’t think Bill Gates was question-begging when he called DNA analogous to computer code, only far beyond any coding we have done.
Don’t be silly, you have I’m sure heard of inventors, who can improve on their inventions, or just try a different way to make something. Gauss as I have heard was fond of proving a theorem in various ways, just because he liked doing this
.That’s not actually a matter on which I have an opinion, as shown in my previous comment.
But I don’t think I’m confused, don’t people point to shared features as evidence for common descent, and thus evidence for evolution? But the design conclusion is based on assigning a result to the best known cause, as in DNA. And I see no reason to multiply designers, referring to my comment about inventors above.
I’m not one to speculate on the motives of any given designer, but I do say we should choose the best explanation for an observation.
But that was not a bare assertion, you were implying, or even stating, that leaky membranes were to establish equilibrium. My comment above was after I disputed this point, pointing out that this is not good for real cells, and questioning why leaky membranes can be “good enough for protocells”, implying they do a job real cells need.
I agree, and cell machinery that needs ATP is simply not present in the protocells researchers produce.
Seriously? What notable function is within a protocell, I mean a real protocell someone has made?
Tour’s point exactly, there are no good answers to this problem, nor are there answers to any of his challenges. We’re making progress in this discussion!
I think you get my point, though, that “Crucial elements are missing, people would find my statement that I had made a “protocar”, absurd.”
This should be common knowledge in this forum, as in the discussion on ATP above.
Well, how is an ion channel or pump not essential to a real cell?
But we’re talking about cells, and what is needed in each one. Not about worms and vertebrates.
But I also pointed out that just any interactions won’t do, faulty interactions lead to disease in real organisms.
You are begging the question that protocells must have the same level of function as modern “real” cells. No one thinks that. A protocell might have a lower level of a given function; it would not be diseased, but fully functional in its environment.
The question in my mind is not how protocells with simple cell membranes could survive in the modern environment, but in what environment could protocells lacking active ion pumps survive?
Not that I can answer either question myself, but I think if we google the OoL research, we are likely to find suggestions about what that environment might be (ie: Black Smokers).
I note you have not answered my question. It should be easy to answer for an expert, if real progress has been made since Miller-Urey. And James Tour has said he believed the OOL researchers and their claims, until he investigated and read their papers for himself.
Well, he’s a member of the National Academy of Engineers, and a professor at Rice, and so on. And I don’t claim to know what papers he has read.
Abiogenesis is about synthesis of organic structures from non-organic materials, this is not an obscure point.
People in OOL research try and produce in the lab what they deem likely to have happened in nature. Again, not an obscure point. And they’re trying to produce compounds (sugars, amino acids, etc.) as well as structures (protocells, etc.).
This discussion, for one! No one, not you, not anyone else, has offered an example of good progress.
No so! The 2022 review paper you cited, and then hoped we would ignore, cites 383 prior publications in the field. You seem unwilling or unable to consider any sort of progress, good or bad, and are simply echoing Tour’s claims that “no progress has been made.”
So here is my counter-claim: at least ten of those 383 papers will have been cited by ten other research publications or textbooks (excluding the 2022 review and any self-cites), and this level of citation is a reasonable indication of a useful contribution and “good” progress.
I wrote that before I had actually looked at any of the papers. Care to guess what I find?
First paper, 29 cites (total)
2nd paper , 776 cites
3rd, 76 cites
4th, 133 cites
5th, 305 cites
6th, 52,
7th, 495
8th, 195
9th, 741
10th, 402
… and I’ll stop there because it’s late.
Maybe James Tour doesn’t think this is progress, but LOTS of other researchers are referencing OoL work nonetheless. This makes perfect sense to me, as a lot of OoL work is basic science which ends up contributing (progress!) to all sorts of things downstream.
I notice you did not respond to my comments about the inflated claims in the UNC paper. You did say the papers demonstrated an answer to Tour’s challenge, so you must have seen that in some paper. So asking you to point it out, is asking you to produce your work, not to do work for me.
But Tour’s challenge is not about moving bits in and out of living cells, it’s about starting up a cell from its components, that’s quite different.
