James Tour and the Origin of Life

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James Tour is by all accounts an excellent synthetic organic chemist, and in general I would trust his judgements about experimental and technical aspects of chemistry research, even including particular reactions conjectured to be relevant to origin of life research.

I find that in many cases, I actually agree with criticisms offered by James Tour concerning particular experiments done in origin of life research. But here’s where we run into a problem, because where his criticisms are valid and sensible, these same criticisms can be found within the field already, offered by different origin of life researchers, articulated just as well if not better. 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.

It gets worse when we get to Tour’s mistreatment of the relationships between evolutionary biology and the origin of life, and how early evolutionary history informs origin of life research. Tour likes to blather out this line while pointing to some extant attribute of (hilariously) eukaryotic cells, and then declare “Nobody knows how that came about”. And in several cases that’s both flat out false, and completely irrelevant to the origin of life because life did not begin with eukaryotic cells.
Tour is basically completely ignorant about evolutionary biology and the extremely powerful cladistic and phylogenetic methods evolutionary biologists use to reconstruct ancient periods in life’s history that occurred (relatively speaking) close to the origin of life. Research into early evolution, and the early evolutionary history of cells and various cellular attributes, using ancestor state reconstruction, has the potential to tell us about the compositons and functions of some of the earliest cells. With such methods scientists can obtain knowledge about the environment and the constituents of the earliest cells, and with this might be able to infer something about how these cells would have come about in the first place, which can inform research into the origin of life.

Tour likes to present examples of extant organisms, things that live now today with four thousand million year evolutionary histories since the origin of life (if you don’t like this timescale, take it up with James Tour, who as far as I am aware is not a young Earth creationist), and then pretend that we have to explain how abiotic geochemistry could have constructed E. coli, or Saccharomyces cerevisiae. But nobody thinks it did. 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.

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This is uncivil in very important ways, I encourage you to look at his website to see how he has made positive statements about evolutionary science.

[edit: removed untrue]

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So that’s a no they haven’t done anything but put molecules together?

I really don’t want to take a cue from you because you’re not answering my questions. Which parts of the necessary requirements of life have they been able to produce?

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I’ve listened to his talks, and I stand by my characterization. Do you want concrete examples?

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When you talk about Tour so contemptuously you mainly succeed in damaging your own credibility, even if you are technically correct on important points. I don’t agree with Tour on everything either, but he is too accomplished a scientist to talk down to in this way. Your points would be more easy understood if you were careful to address him with respect and explain where you (and most other scientists) disagree with him.

Also, he holds a very nuanced position on evolution. In important ways, you should view him as a critically important ally. Though this page is already out of date on his position, I encourage you to read it very closely, looking to identify serveral points of important common ground.

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Wait. This is a double standard. I thought you were a uniformitarian by default since you believe in evolution. So are you saying something different? Are you saying that what we evidence today should not inform the past? If yes, then your scientific approach has completely changed.

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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.

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

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.

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Well, this paragraph taken from that essay has some pretty serious problems, wouldn’t you say?

But even with that evidence supporting common descent, others find common descent insufficient to explain some parts of the data. For example, humans have ~20,000 protein-coding genes, which is only ~1.5% of DNA in the entire human genome, and it is within that 1.5% that common descent studies are primarily (though not exclusively) focused. A large-scale project instituted in 2003 by the US National Human Genome Research Institute, called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) (ENCODE - Wikipedia), seeks to determine the role of the remaining 98.5% of the genome that was formerly poorly called “junk DNA,” but better called “intergenic regions. There is ENCODE evidence that part or even much of the intergenic regions have regulatory elements that can affect gene transcription (building of RNA and then construction of enzymes that regulate or build the biological system). Also, work on orphan genes (also called ORFans, Orphan gene - Wikipedia) casts new light on the uniqueness of some genetic information; orphan genes are considered unique to a narrow taxon, generally a species. So some interpret ENCODE data and orphan genes as markers for uncommonness . Even further, some argue that biological similarities between modern humans and other hominids, for example, can be considered as common design parameters and need not require a common descent model.”

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Except we seriously considered other options several times at Peaceful Science…

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I’m willing to look at them, but your link just goes to the main page.

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Why is it invalid? I also heard Jeanson argue something similar - we’ve studied only 1% of the genome and everyone saying the rest is junk is wrong.

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This is just trivially and verifiably false.

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You have said on numerous occasions you don’t understand the science. So why do you continue to say outrageous things like this?

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I’m repeating what others have said. I can take time to find the quote if you want - I’m probably not repeating it correctly.

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This is a scientific paper but is actually pretty readable for a layperson, IMHO, and summarizes the positive evidence for junk DNA. It is not an argument from ignorance, despite the fact that many try portray it as such:

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I very much doubt that even Jeanson would say something that obviously wrong.

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I can’t even begin to tell you how many things I find objectionable already in the beginning of that article. The very first sentence is mealy-mouthed politician speak that appears to have been designed simply to constitute a reflection of Tour’s own personal ignorance.

He doesn’t want to be pulled into defending intelligent design, but he clearly also doesn’t want to give an impression of actually opposing it. He says he’s sympathetic to it and finds it intriguing. He says he doesn’t know how to “prove” intelligent design, so now we have to waste time wondering what he means by “prove”? Is he aware that nothing is proven in science? He must be, so why does he waste time talking about proof?

Moving on to his statement on OOL research, take this sentence:

Those who think scientists understand the issues of prebiotic chemistry are wholly misinformed. Nobody understands them.

This is plain false. No ifs or buts about it. It’s a demonstable and laughable falsehood, and my credibility is fully intact thank you.

Scientists studying the origin of life know ALL TOO WELL the issues plaguing research in prebiotic chemistry. There’s names for these issues. The concentration problem. The chirality problem. The energy problem. The asphalt problem. The hydrolysis problem. The combinatorial explosion problem. The purity problem. I can find you dusins of articles discussing each of these problems at length in relation to different models. Do I need to go on?

So now we are forced to wonder, if this is not what Tour means by “not understanding the issues of prebiotic chemistry”, what did he mean? Perhaps he meant to say something like “Scientists still don’t know how to solve all these questions”, but then I have to wonder why he didn’t just say that instead?

Going to his sections on evolution and commend descent, he declares nobody understands the mechanisms that result in macroevolutionary change. Which, too, is patently ridiculous. His statements on the origin of information in DNA is even worse, to the point of being hard to characterize as anything but confused at best.

Even his supposed “praise” for the field of evolutionary biology is essentially double-speak:

I can understand why those fluent in the field of genetics would be convinced by that theory; there is an impressive quantity and insightfulness to the work.

We can all put the [but I am not myself convinced], and [mere quantity is can just reflect industriousness of those doing the work] and [insightfulness just means they’re clever at constructing arguments or spinning results] into those sentences and it would not contradict anything he said. It would not alter the fundamental message of his essay at all. Notice how you can do this for basically anything he says throughout the entire article. “yeah it’s pretty work” is basically his most encouraging statement about evolutionary biology. “But it might all be bullshit” might aswell be his very next.

His following treatment of the common descent debate can be accurately summarized as “one camp says X, another camp says Y, I don’t know who’s right”. Leaving the impression that he doesn’t actually see any good reason to think common descent is a well supported theory at all.

I can’t be bothered going over his entire article, which I’ve read before. Suffice it to say I think your respect for the man is misplaced in it’s degree, and to me you are losing credibility by continuing to defend and extend to him this undeserved credibility. Nothing he says sounds informed to me at all, and he likes to play both sides on numerous topics.

He’s much too smart to be so bad a communicator as the impression I get from reading this article makes him appear, if he does not intend to communicate the impression it leaves me with. No, he knows exactly what he’s saying and doing with this article, and with every talk and interview he’s given. He’s making it all extremely clear, and I see no reason why I have to continue to suppress how obvious it all is. Here’s how to understand James Tour perfectly well: Ask his audience what they think. Find 20 different people who’ve watched James Tour’s presentations what their impression is of James Tour’s view of the origin of life and evolutionary biology.

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Thank you for saying that. You have correctly understood James Tour’s message. I’ve understood it too. Everyone who reads his articles and watches his talks can see it perfectly well. Except @swamidass.

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I think getting it right would be helpful. :slight_smile:

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I kind of like the way that paragraph sounds.

Please explain your take on the above claim. Or @swamidass 's take.

Is this true?

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