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.
So which one is it? If these are different, then it is Moving the Goalposts as I predicted. If it’s not different, then the answer is just a google away. Here’s one at random.
I notice you did not respond to my comments about the inflated claims in the UNC paper.
I don’t think what Bill Gates says on this topic is of any value or significance.
So there’s no observation that is incompatible with design, because you can always just excuse it with “they just like to try things in a different way.”
You are, and in exactly the way I stated. And yes, evidence for common descent isn’t necessarily also evidence for evolution, though the two subjects are often very much related. But it’s pointless to explain this to you because you’re diametrically opposed to reading for comprehension.
That’s not an answer to me pointing out your double standard at all.
And I explained you’re not showing that anything is better explained on design, you’re just telling stories after the fact. You don’t have a model of design, you can’t tell us what pattern is more or less expected on design.
You also don’t see posts submitted to you in reply, the words they contain, or the meaning implied by their order in the sentences. You seem, in fact, rather challenged in your capacity to perceive much at all.
As such, what you see is just not a good indicator of what is real or true at all. Wasn’t belief in God supposed to guarantee the reliability of reason, and the senses?
That is self-refuting. Directly and in an obvious way. You can’t explain anything on design without speculating on their motives.
Uhm yes, that is a textbook version of a bare assertion. You declare on no basis whatsoever that there can not be such a thing as a more primitive cell for which a leaky membrane is good enough. Since primitive cells are not, by definition, modern cells, your assertion is bare of justification.
Bzzzt, wrong. You wrote “primitive, less capable cells”. Not “real cells”, by which one has to assume you meant modern, more complex cells.
Yeah I’m going to file this under “Lee Merrill’s homeschooling didn’t include sessions on reading comprehension.” Remarkably, you seem unable to parse even the meanings of words that are your own.
That is an astonishing lack of capacity to comprehend the written word. You do not even understand what your own sentences mean.
No wonder we have such trouble communicating. Perhaps you’ve been agreeing with me that I have refuted Douglas Axe in the other thread?! I now seriously have to entertain the possibility that you simply lack the skills to communicate assent.
Granted, the system was put inside the protocell by the researchers to see if in fact, the membrane allowed ATP to cross into the cell and be used up in DNA copying reactions inside (the system was not produced in some simulated prebiotic reaction), but it’s just demonstrably false to claim that such “machinery that needs ATP is simply not present in the protocells researchers produce.”
Let’s read the abstract:
Monnard PA, Deamer DW. Nutrient uptake by protocells: a liposome model system. Orig Life Evol Biosph. 2001 Feb-Apr;31(1-2):147-55. doi: 10.1023/a:1006769503968. PMID: 11296517.
Abstract
Over the past decade, several liposome-based models for protocells have been developed. For example, liposome systems composed of polymerase enzymes encapsulated with their substrates have demonstrated that complex compartmentalized reactions can be carried out under conditions in which polymeric products are protected from degradation by hydrolytic enzymes present in the external medium. However, such systems do not have nutrient uptake mechanisms, which would be essential for primitive cells lacking the highly evolved nutrient transport processes present in all contemporary cells. In this report, we explore passive diffusion of solutes across lipid bilayers as one possible uptake mechanism. We have established conditions under which ionic substrates as large as ATP can permeate bilayers at rates capable of supplying an encapsulated template-dependent RNA polymerase. Furthermore, while allowing the permeation of monomer substrates such as ATP, bilayer vesicles selectively retained polymerization products as small as dimers and as large as a transfer RNA. These observations demonstrate that passive diffusion could be used by the earliest forms of cellular life for transport of important nutrients such as amino acids, phosphate, and phosphorylated organic solutes.
The confidence with which you make your declarations (bare assertions), and the demonstrable falsity of many of them, is quite something to behold.
See above.
If only there was this thing called the internet, and if only you could used something like a search engine, or even a LLM to help you find stuff.
There are no good answers to this problem is another bare assertion.
Your track record of your bare assertions having substance is… below par. But to be fair, I guess this becoming ever more obvious with each post of yours is progress of a kind.
If in fact the elements were crucial. But this is what is being disputed by researchers working in the field. They are operating with models of early cells to which many of the components seen in modern cells are not crucial.
Bare assertions (now also directly demonstrated wrong by experiment) don’t constitute knowledge, common or otherwise.
By the concept of a “real cell” including protocells, to which they aren’t needed. That is how.
And it isn’t clear that ion pumps or channels are needed for the earliest forms of cellular life. In fact we seem to have good evidence that perhaps they are not needed.
Which is why nobody posits that successful protocells had severely faulty interactions.
If you truly wanted the best explanation, you would be reading the scientific literature for yourself with an open mind, not hiding behind Tour’s hearsay and making evidence-free claims about how much of the literature Tour has read.
No I don’t, and as you avoid science and cling to hearsay, you can’t possibly know either.
You would know that if you stopped hiding behind Tour. Tour isn’t God. God is speaking to you through nature and you are ignoring Him.
Others have. I note that you have not disputed that you have violated the Ninth Commandment.
If you had a speck of curiosity, you could easily learn that in addition to many advances in enzymatic RNA, the Miller-Urey experiment itself has been reanalyzed using mass spectroscopy. But that feeds the creationist straw man of nothing after Miller-Urey, doesn’t it?
You don’t know which papers he has read. Please stop bearing false witness. There is a Commandment against that.
How is that a qualification?
So what?
Please stop. You did.
Again, your failure to look at any of this with your own eyes is a forceful demonstration of your lack of faith in your claims.
That’s not how anyone with the most basic familiarity with abiogenesis research thinks it happened, much less active researchers in the field. So it appears that Tour is being incredibly dishonest if he makes that claim.
“They didn’t build that cell completely from scratch. Instead, they started with cells from a very simple type of bacteria called a mycoplasma. They destroyed the DNA in those cells and replaced it with DNA that was designed on a computer and synthesized in a lab.”
So this does not meet Tour’s challenge, “they started with cells from a very simple type of bacteria called a mycoplasma”. They didn’t start with all the components of a cell, and put it together, and have it work.
Well, you were claiming that the papers listed were a counterexample to Tour’s challenge! I expect if my objections could be refuted, you would have been glad to do so.
This leads me to believe that this list of papers is all bogus. Like Tour says, “It’s a scam.”
You didn’t address how this does not address the claim you made of question-begging.
I didn’t say “there’s no observation that is incompatible with design”, I’m saying designers do use different designs. Apparently you can’t refute that?
I responded to this, and you responded by changing the subject.
I pointed to us always concluding an agent when we see text and sentences. Do you dispute that sort of conclusion we make? Do you say it’s invalid? So we can detect design, Axe’s book Undeniable goes into that.
How is this a refutation of what I said? Don’t single inventors vary what they do? Didn’t Gauss like to prove theorems in different ways, just because he liked to do that?
Well, I don’t know the motives of every kid who builds a log house. Proving motives is not required to conclude design.
But you omitted part of what I said, “a leaky membrane cannot be ‘good enough for more primitive, less capable cells.’” I agree that primitive cells are not modern cells, my objection is to calling protocells, “less capable cells”, as if they corresponded to cells in a substantial way. They don’t, and that is actually quite obvious, and not a bare assertion.
I consider a “less capable cell” to still be referring to some sort of real cell. You called it a cell. I have said I don’t mean by “real cell”, only modern, more complex cells.
I meant what I said, and claiming all this is not a refutation.
But this is about molecules moving into a protocell, not about a protocell actually using ATP.
I think that this actually could apply to your comments…
So why have you not answered his challenges? I think that’s good evidence that no one has good answers to them.
Right, and crucial elements that are needed in cells are missing, they are lacking in these “models of early cells.” That is the problem.
That is just the problem, the term protocell is quite misleading, and I believe you said scientists know they mean something quite different than people think, when they use this term. Do you not hold to this?
Speaking of bare assertions? What evidence is there that they are not needed, given (as I mentioned) that they are required for ATP, etc., which is ubiquitous in cells.
This doesn’t refute the point I made, you were saying to put them together and they will interact, as if that’s all that is required. But that is not the case.
I do want the best explanation, and I think John Lennox pointing to the billions-of-letters word in our DNA, and then pointing out that when we see a sentence, we always, without exception, infer an agent, indicates a good explanation. The difficulty of abiogenesis also points to design, Paley’s watchmaker argument applies here. Do you have a good scientific explanation for either, or some good reason for us to expect one? Otherwise, it’s just science-of-the-gaps. I should mention that Tour quotes a number of OOL researchers who predicted some time ago, separately, that they would make a cell in a few years. They missed their deadlines.
I don’t see how this answers my question, though. I don’t know of any alternatives to an initial cell, if you know of them, please tell us what it is.
Have they? How so? How do you or others know that Tour had not substantially read OOL papers? And I believe I am making true statements, and thus not violating the Ninth Commandment.
Have they produced self-replicating RNA yet? As far as I have heard, they only have gotten some partial replication. And they put the RNA together themselves, it is not by some process available on early earth. And yes, they found more amino acids, I acknowledged that, and asked for non-racemic ones. None of this indicates a real advance.
I expect they don’t elect unqualified people.
As I said to someone else, I would expect that this is Tour’s way of getting the researchers to face the problem of the interactome. I’m sure Tour knows people are not proposing that all the components of a cell were in a pile somewhere, and somehow it assembled. So his challenge must mean something else. Really, this is very plain sailing, I don’t know why so much of the posts here feature such silly objections.
