James Tour and the Origin of Life

[thoughtful (Valerie (non-scientist))]

@Rumraket

But Tour likes to give this extremely misleading view of the field as some sort of uncritical circle-jerk where assertions aren’t challenged or questioned, and people just uncritically accept dubious assertions about plausibility.

From my POV who sees the evolutionary history of origins now that I’ve studied it more as ludicrous, I actually agree with him. They’re not willing to examine an option that doesn’t fit their model. I actually thought that the evolutionary model had more power before I’ve learned here.

@Rumraket

And in fact we know that it didn’t , we know this from those very same phylogenetic methods I just spoke about, which tells us life used to be A LOT simpler than any life we presently see on Earth. Here we are far outside of Tour’s area of competence (Tour’s knowledge of chemical principles are simply useless when we are trying to reconstruct early periods in cellular evolution), and his comments and criticism honestly look, well, embarrassing , to borrow a term from you.

Note what I quoted from an OoL researcher and the interviewer here:

@thoughtful

around 1:18:00 - 1:22:00
“A huge gap”…“we have no idea how big it is”
It’s not simple to find something simple - it’s either complex or dead ends

He said he’s unable so far to find anything simple. Even worse he was talking about how simplicity had to be universal. They can’t find either.