James Tour and Joshua Swamidass: A Fiery Debate on the Origin of Life

Tour was not “stating myriads of facts in several public articles and presentations mostly from the field of synthetic chemistry”. He was repeating DI talking points. Being a “world renowned expert in synthetic chemistry” doesn’t give one license to badly misrepresent different areas of scientific research.

Well, I’ve done some organic synthesis in my time (including one with many tens milliCuries of tritium). I have published in the field of synthetic biology, which means I am not completely unfamiliar with the issues here. (That paper is not about the OOL, BTW. It is an example of synthetic biology, and how one can use an understanding of feedback regulatory loops to accomplish some interesting things. This sort of concept is relevant to some OOL research.)

One example - when Tour asserts something along the lines that time is the enemy of any sort of natural origin of life (even mentioning how chemicals would need to be stable for millions of years), he in essence is completely ignoring the fact that catalysts factor large in almost any scenario that is the subject of experimental testing. Heck, the involvement of catalysts is one very big reason why the RNA World is such a compelling hypothesis.

And, I will repeat - Tour did not present any - ANY - facts that pertain to the OOL as we see it tested in labs today. DI talking points are not facts.

Once again - Tour did not accurately represent any of “what we know at present”.

4 Likes

As @structureoftruth said, I could see how the incessant interruptions made it very hard for you to take the discussion in more interesting directions.

2 Likes

I question whether or not you are sufficiently credentialed to make, what to me seem to be just assertions of ID talking points (whatever that means) in regards to Tour’s statements concerning either OOL or synthetic chemistry. In light of that I just don’t find what you’re saying very persuasive in the least. And it seems to me that both @swamidass and @Paul.B.Rimmer, who do seem to be sufficiently credentialed, at least to a greater degree than you, to comment on the subject, both seem to agree that Tour is making factual statements regarding synthetic chemistry and that, in fact, many if not most scientists agree with his general criticism of OOL research being nowhere close to understanding how it occurred.

So I’m afraid I can’t take what you’re saying very seriously. Not too long ago there was a thread on this forum where someone who wasn’t really qualified claimed that a particular fact that Tour stated was incorrect. It turned out in fact that Tour was correct and this particular insufficiently qualified person was wrong due to his not having adequate knowledge of the subject.

Here’s one of his more recent articles on the subject. Maybe you should look it over and contact him directly about it and maybe he can help you understand better why what he’s doing is simply presenting facts from his own field of research and why he feels that OOL researchers are misrepresenting how close we are to understanding OOL, and in his opinion, need a whole new approach.

I would certainly not claim I was greater credentialed than @Art…he is a legitimate and successful scientist who has been at this much longer than I.

I think @art agrees with this. That isn’t the part he is saying that Tour misrepresented. He is criticizing what I also criticized, the claim that we have “no clue” and “no progress” has been made. We can agree with Tour that we are no where close to understanding, while at the same time believe that some progress has been made.

You really should take @art seriously. Even if he is wrong, he has earned the right to be taken seriously, much as Tour has too. I am taking both of them seriously.

That is a separate issue altogether. In fact, Tour may be right about this.


Let me break this down:

  1. Are we close to understanding OOL by natural processes?
  2. Have we made any progress in our understanding of how OOL might have happened?
  3. Have OOL researchers misrepresented how much we know to the public and in their scientific papers?
  4. Is the public confused to think much more of OOL is understood than in fact we do?
  5. Do we need a whole new approach to studying OOL?

It seems that this is how it breaks down:

name Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5
Tour No No Yes Yes Yes
@Swamidass No Yes Yes/No? Yes Maybe?
@Art No Yes ? ? ?
@Paul.B.Rimmer No Yes Yes/No? ? ?

I welcome any feedback from @art and @Paul.B.Rimmer on how to fill in their question marks above.

I must say that Q3 is hard to answer generally. It really depends on the specific cases, and Tour was not specific here. I do not think it is helpful to speak generically. It would be better to explain specific examples and see what we think of them.

The key point @jim is that we can agree with Tour on Q1 while still disagreeing with him on other points. You have to be clear about what claim you think is in question.

3 Likes

Same here. I don’t know about @Art, but I know a bit about @swamidass’s career and I have a long way to go to get to where he is. The same must be true about @Art, using the chain rule.

I really like these questions, although I’m going to modify 4 a bit. Also, these are just my opinions, and I’d take them with a grain of salt. What would be much more interesting is to get a bunch of OOL researchers and other biologists/chemists/geologists interested in origins research to answer these questions and compare answers. For example, I suspect I know a Nobel Laureate who would say “yes” to 1..

1. No.
2. Yes.
3. Most of us have. This includes myself. I get excited about conclusions, and oversell them. I try not to, and try to correct when I realize I have been overselling a result. Also, science journalists, even with the best intentions, can easily misinterpret or misunderstand the results, and it can become like a bad game of ‘telephone.’
4. I’m going to change this question to Is the public’s overestimation of OOL progress greater than for other ‘big question’ research projects? I don’t know.
5. Probably at some point (and I really wish I knew what that new approach should be!).

I actually think finding that one next synthesis is a great thing to do right now. So much of chemical parameter space is unexplored, and so little is known about early Earth and early Mars, so there are very few firm constraints. It’s a playground.

This brings up one claim I think Tour is wrong about. Short lifetimes are great for prebiotic chemists. It means that we can explore prebiotic chemistry in the lab. Think about it. If the lifetimes of these species were thousands or millions of years, it would be much more difficult for the reactions to be investigated in a lab, where grad students usually want to finish up within the next century. Because the lifetimes of some of these intermediates is on the order of days or weeks, and this matches up much better with the lifetime of a graduate student or postdoc, investigation is wide open and we can really know when something doesn’t work. That’s such a useful thing to be able to learn.

One thing origins researchers can do beyond total syntheses and pure systems chemistry is find environments where a series of reactions could work, figure out more about what that environment is like, simulate the environment more accurately in the lab, and see if the chemistry gets better, worse, or whether it stays the same. There’s a nice iterative approach here, see Sasselov et al. (2020; https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/6/eaax3419.abstract).

3 Likes
  1. Are we close to understanding OOL by natural processes?
    No.
  2. Have we made any progress in our understanding of how OOL might have happened?
    Absolutely yes.
  3. Have OOL researchers misrepresented how much we know to the public and in their scientific papers?
    No.
  4. Is the public confused to think much more of OOL is understood than in fact we do?
    Yes. But related to other areas of the life sciences? I am not as sure.
  5. Do we need a whole new approach to studying OOL?
    Approach or concept? I don’t know what new approaches would look like, but new technical advances would always be welcome. Concepts? Always needed.
6 Likes

Part of #3 is about university press release hype and science journalist incompetence and laziness. But researchers are also encouraged to hype their research if they want to get into high-impact journals like Science or Nature. It’s hardly a problem unique to OOL or even to biology.

6 Likes

Is that relevant to the point that Tour was making that I believe was how OOL is understood as happening over long periods of time, and that this would hinder, not help the process of development as far as the chemistry is concerned?

I don’t think it’s understood to be taking place over long periods of time. Rather, long periods of time give you a many trials, increasing likelihood.

3 Likes

Oh, OK. Hadn’t thought of that. But even then, that just seems like an implausible situation to me for life to happen considering all of those infinitely complex chemical processes having to come together in a short period of time under exactly the right conditions, not to mention all of the necessary ingredients being available in the right place. No matter how many trials were available, it just doesn’t seem plausible at all in my opinion. Is it possible, maybe. Plausible? I just don’t see it.

This is where you are in effect making an assumption about what would have to happen for first life to originate. If you are saying that for life to happen then “all those infinitely complex chemical processes and ingredients have to come together”, then you’re basically saying that you know that those are all necessary requirements for a form of life to exist. Do you actually know that? No, it’s just an assumption, apparently based on looking at life as we currently see it.

1 Like

But this is completely irrational. If it is unlikely for an event to happen, say generating a particular long sequence of numbers with a random number generator, then the number of trials available directly affects the odds.

If some environment that generates some relevant molecules(like a hydrothermal vent, say) that might combine in the “right” way, but this “right” way is unlikely out of all the ways they could combine instead, then having this environment persist for a long period of time could directly translate into many more opportunities for such rare events to occur.

1 Like

But that get’s the reason why “plausibility” is not a helpful way to think about this. We all agree that the origin of life is very difficult. In any scenario, it is not likely. So the probability P is very very low. However the time T is high, as is the size S of the universe.

So…is P \cdot T \cdot S big or small? There is no way to compute that number sensibly.

Think about it this way. If I told you I had two very very large number, unimaginably large, A and B. Which one is bigger? You can’t answer that question. It is indeterminate. There just isn’t enough information to tell. That is the challenge we are facing with OOL.

2 Likes

Whether life may or may not have been simpler is an assumption either way. And I’m not saying it’s an unreasonable assumption to say that it may have been simpler. But I would say we have to consider what we do know first before we lean on assumptions about what things may or may not have been like.

And based on what we do know, I would say that there’s a limit on how much simpler things could have been. And my guess is that they couldn’t have been simpler enough to make any significant difference.

Just because it’s logically possible that it can happen doesn’t entail physically that it can. That is what I understand is meant by plausible. And going by what we do know, not what we can imagine, by my estimations it seems to be implausible to have happened by any natural processes.

I would say since in this case probability theory seems to get us nowhere, I would argue that we do have more than sufficient information to make a reasonable abductive inference. And going by abductive reasoning, if we follow that evidence where it leads, it seems reasonable to conclude that life couldn’t have arisen by natural processes.

You would argue, but why? We get that your instinct tells you otherwise. Fine. maybe you are right. However other people have different instincts.

Merely restating one’s position back and forth is not terribly interesting.

Oh. OK. Just wasn’t clear to me that my position was understood. In that case, not much more for me to say at the moment. :slight_smile:

But we don’t know it couldn’t have been simpler. You’re effectively just saying you prefer the assumption of the impossibility of simpler life, over the hypothesis that it could be.

An in fact we do have some evidence of life being considerably simpler than it is now.

And what is it we do know here, and what is that limit?

That’s just your guess.

This makes no sense in the context of the kinds of probability arguments that for example Tour makes.

The proposition that something is unlikely is based on real physical and chemical considerations, such as the idea that certain chemical reactions have many physically possible side reactions(which for the case of the formose reaction, for example, he’s right about), and hence are physically unlikely to yield putatively biologically relevant ones out all the other physically possible ones.

We aren’t merely describing logical possibilities when we are assessing (to pick an example), the probability that amino acids will physically polymerize “randomly” into some particular sequence.

Then the number of actual physical trials does physically affect the probability of obtaining an interesting or relevant result.

If your argument here held any water, then it would also undercut the argument that it was unlikely for X to happen, since you’d just be describing a logical improbability. Do you see the problem?

No I don’t. All I’m saying is that though something may be logically possible doesn’t entail that it is physically possible. And by my estimation, going by what we do know, it’s reasonable to infer that it’s not plausible to say that life could have originated by natural processes. Seems pretty straightforward. Others seem to understand it.

No, we don’t all agree on that. Nobody actually has any idea what the probability is. It is indeterminate.

It is (logically) possible there is some environment where the origin of life is inevitable even on geologically speaking relatively short timescales. We simply don’t know this, and we do not have any information (from any branch of science) that allows us to state with any appreciable certainty that this is implausible.

1 Like

I understand what you’re saying perfectly well. I’m trying to explain why that particular prong of your argument doesn’t make sense in this context. Which I did. Try to read it again with a willingness to comprehend it.

Your estimation is not of any value or consequence I’m sorry to have to tell you, because it has zero substance. You have said nothing concrete about the origin of life that lets on that you have relevant knowledge of any appreciable certainty.

Nobody other than me have responded to your logical vs physical possibility argument, so there’s zero indication that others beside me “understand” it. But that doesn’t even matter, because I understand it too. What matters is whether it is a good and valid point to make, and to argue that by appeal to popularity you’d need to establish agreements from others, not merely understanding.

Your logical vs physical possibility would be a fine argument to make provided we didn’t actually know whether some of these probabilistic chemical reactions were even possible. But we DO know that they are(another example is amino acid polymerization of the right type, those really are physically possible). Hence it really does matter for the probability of obtaining a particular polymer sequence how many “trials” are available to get one that might be relevant to the origin of life.