Is it? If you really think that describes his position accurately, please point me to where he addresses metabolism-first OoL hypotheses.
I am paraphrasing what I have heard in his discussions, I could be stating it incorrectly. It seems very personal to everyone, I just noticed that the language was unnecessarily harsh, I’ll stay out of it now…
I think you are stating it correctly because he doesn’t address metabolism-first hypotheses.
Tour, like all creationists, ignores most of the evidence. Would you like some suggestions for learning more about the reality of OoL research?
This is not entirely accurate. There is a great overlap between biochemistry and organic chemistry. Virtually all biological molecules are carbon-based compounds and operate via many chemical mechanisms known to organic chemists.
If we use this sort of reasoning, then all of science is false, because there are no experiments that perfectly racapitulate naturally occurring phenomena.
There’s a word for the chemistry of life, and you used it: biochemistry.
The term ‘organic chemistry’ was historically taken from the chemistry of living things, since as you note so much of biochemistry is organic, but the reverse does not apply: vast stretches of organic chemistry have nothing to do with biochemistry.
Including the bits James Tour has specialised in all of his working career.
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I can attest to that. The first year of my undergraduate course in biochemistry was largely a course in chemistry provided by the chemistry department and included physical, inorganic, analytical as well as organic chemistry. Biological molecules were not included as far as I can recall. There was quite a gulf between the departments of chemistry and biochemistry (and not just by being in separate buildings).
(This was 50 years ago so maybe things have changed)
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I agree with him on this part. If scientists are setting up a very implausible synthetic environment that there is no good reason to think would have existed on the early Earth, then they have in effect “cheated”. And he’s also right that there’s a large problem with misleading spin of such research in the popular press done in collaboration between universities, popular press journals, and the scientists themselves. In a very competitive environment where everyone is incentivized to advertise for their institutions and departments, combined with the terrible click-bait culture that has emerged on the internet, this is the sad result.
The problem is that Tour makes it seem like this is what all OOL research amounts to (or that the problem is unique to the OOL field), and that nobody within the field are making similar criticisms. That’s extremely misleading of him to do, because there are many within the field who levy such criticisms of each other.
And then another problem is he seem to completely ignore the parts of OOL research where people really do try to the best of their ability to correctly represent early Earth microenvironments in their experiments. Here his criticisms simply fall flat because they don’t apply.
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If this is in reference to the unique interplay between biochemical processes, then yes, biochemistry has nothing to do with organic chemistry.
In contrast, when studying features like the chemical reactivity of individual biomolecules, organic chemistry has a lot to do with biochemistry. Organic chemists study the chemical properties of amino acids, carbohydrates, lipids, purines and pyrimidines all of which are important to biochemists.
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I have to agree that people are making too big a deal of the difference between organic chemistry and biochemistry. The underlying principles governing synthetic organic chemistry and biochemistry are the same. We are dealing primarily with intra and intermolecular electrostatic interactions between valence-bond electrons, and nuclear protons, in HCNO-containing compounds.
And the putative involvement of genuine protein chemistry at the very origin of life is dubious at best, and hence whatever little Tour may or may not know about protein biochemistry is likely irrelevant, because we simply don’t know at what stage in life’s origin the first proteins emerged.
Work is being done in the field concerning extremely early periods of protein evolution, but we still don’t even know the context in which this evolution occurred. Is it before life itself? Before or after the emergence of cells or something we would designate a protocell? Nobody knows. There are good reasons to think, based on phylogenetics, that small peptides could be traced back to life’s origin, but we simply can’t tell what kind of entity these peptides would be part of. Were they part of a cell? Some sort of network of chemical interactions enclosed in some inorganic compartment? In some pond? Nobody including James Tour knows the answer to these questions.
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Sounds like pride is the problem (perhaps on both sides), and probably money behind that…thanks for the clarification.