Are you being serious here? You think the average ID’er or other creationist will see that video as damaging to Tour, without the other collateral information? Or even with it?
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Really?! I thought it was a sign of how amazingly awesome that video was, since it didn’t get a single solitary negative comment. 
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Gary is accusing John West of the same thing that Tour accused Szostak. This implies that this type of accusation is ok or fair game. Is it fair game?
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That’s absurd. The ethical thing to do is to put the retraction up in the description of the video.
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I have to agree with you here Bill, I feel it would be hypocritical to have a problem with Tour saying of Szostak he’s lying, yet be okay with accusing Tour of lying. I don’t think either of them are lying. I think Tour is misguided, but I don’t believe he’s deliberately stating things he really knows to be false.
It is possible to be wrong and sincere about it and I think that’s what most of us are when we are wrong.
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Actually, I think Tour can be shown to be willfully and with prior knowledge to be lying.
This is a conclusion assuming he is neither demented, nor psychotic. I am certain he is not ignorant about basic chemistry. He claims to have expert knowledge of the abiogenesis AKA origin of life literature. If that is true, then he lies. Actually, maybe he just lied about his reading of the OOL literature. Then all his other related falsehoods are based on that ignorance.
Nah. I won’t buy that either.
For example, at the 8:50 mark Tour shows a slide of the minimal life - a cell. It is an “amazing machine.” And if that eucaryote in the slide is the minimal cell, neither archaea, nor bacteria are alive. And they are the bulk of all life on Earth. You have more bacteria living in, and on you than your “personal” cells.
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Gary I’m certain you are familiar with the concept of Morton’s Demon.
Confirmation bias can be an amazing filter of information. The simple fact is the human psyche is forked up.
The basic reason I can say this is that James Tour started using the word, “lies,” “liars,” and “lying” to describe scientists started almost as soon as he stopped talking about himself. Scientists are also “deceptive,” and know that OOL research is a failure eg. “They all know that!” “They won’t admit it.” “It is too hard. Nobody knows.”
His first applause line was that scientists lie to the “ever gullible press.”
That was all in the first 20 minutes after he stopped blathering about nano truck races.
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Who had post #30 in the “origin of the eukaryotic cell” Bill Cole pool? 
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The evolution of the eucaryotes is not associated with the origin of life. That is the point that Tour lied about to his audience. It is associated with the evolution of multicellular specialization.
For a quick look at how it started, see;
Bacteria can respond to environmental change and develop cell specialization;
Claessen, D., Rozen, D.E., Kuipers, O.P., Søgaard-Andersen, L. and Van Wezel, G.P., 2014. Bacterial solutions to multicellularity: a tale of biofilms, filaments and fruiting bodies. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 12(2), p.115.
Now Google “endosymbiosis.”
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The evolution of eukaryotic cells is begging the question. Endosymbiosis is speculation and only a partial solution if it is true. The correct discussion is the origin of eukaryotic cells.
You are accusing Tour of lying and don’t have any better case than we asked Tour to apologize for. To show lying you need to prove intent. I think you owe Jim an apology.
Tour used a very evolved, and complex cell as the visual example of “minimal life.”
He lied.
It is that simple.
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If I made the claim that the origin of life was a eukaryotic cell and the prokaryotic cell devolved from it how would you challenge that claim?
Gary, all these cells are complex. There is no simple forms of life we have ever observed. Tours claim is accurate.
You are trying to say the Jim intended to deceive. We called on Tour not to make a claim of intent when he did not have a case of intent. You don’t either.
No, it’s an established fact. No other hypothesis comes close in terms of explanatory power and scope.
Endosymbiosis is speculation
It has literally been observed in real time, so no.
and only a partial solution if it is true.
That depends on what exactly it’s called upon to explain, but all of this is off topic in this thread. Make another one if you want to argue about this for the twenty millionth time.
The correct discussion is the origin of eukaryotic cells.
Not in this thread though.
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It straightforwardly contradicts all the evidence from phylogenetics. So there’s no evidence for your claim, and only evidence against it.
Gary, all these cells are complex.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t substantial differences in degree.
Eukaryotic cells are generally much more complex than bacteria, so in comparison to Eukaryotes, prokaryotes are much simpler. Does that mean they are “simple” instead of “complex”? Well since you don’t have a measure of complexity, and no scale where the different degrees are named “simple”, or “complex”, then your point is completely meaningless.
There is no simple forms of life we have ever observed.
How simple is “simple”? How complex is “complex”?
Tours claim is accurate.
No, it isn’t. Life did not begin with Eukaryotes, there’s zero evidence for that claim and mountains of evidence against it.
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Your atheist friend is accusing Tour of lying based on assertion and stuff he really does not understand and you are trying to support his claim with bald assertions.
Do you really want to double down and support this hypocrisy? It is really not at all in the spirit of this site.
My atheist friend?
is accusing Tour of lying
Which I have already said I don’t agree with.
based on assertion
No he did actually give examples of things Tour calls a “minimal cell” which is then an Eukaryote. Not exactly a minimal cell by any stretch, since any known prokaryote is simpler by almost any sensible measure of degree of organismal complexity. Be it protein coding gene count, genome size, number of organelles, gene structure, average size of proteins and so on.
and stuff he really does not understand
No evidence has been provided that Gary doesn’t understand these things. Rather it is as usual you who is completely clueless.
and you are trying to support his claim with bald assertions.
I’m responding to your bald assertions with my own. The difference between us is I can back mine up.
You are as usual stuck in this completely irrational mindset where you just brainlessly declare things and then you believe your own declarations hard, and then you want others to disprove your baseless declarations.
Do you really want to double down and support this hypocrisy?
Don’t ever even pretend to lecture me on hypocricy. I don’t have to agree with everything Gary does, but I will agree with him when I think he’s right. He’s right when he says Eukaryotes are not good examples of a “minimal cell”. Whatever failings you perceive in Gary’s output, this is not among it.
It is possible for me to simultaneously oppose Gary calling James Tour a liar, but agree with Gary that Tour calling an eukaryote a “minimal cell” is very wrong and misleading.
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Let’s end with this common ground and stop accusing each other of lying.
This point is fine yet Tour used it as an example of a cells complexity as a visual. The audience if sophisticated knew this was not an example of the simplest cell. If they were not sophisticated the visual gave the impression of complexity yet nothing more. There was no clear intent to deceive here.
If you decided to make a picture of a minimum cell and show all the necessary metabolic pathways it is visually very complex. The picture that Tour picked was simply available in the public domain.