3 posts were merged into an existing topic: The Argument Clinic
To be honest, I was concerned about that too. I was very interested in seeing the Narcum study and tried to find it on Google Scholar, etc and could not. I eventually found out it was in prepublication after talking to Dr Tour. While I don’t have any reason to doubt the results a priori, it would certainly help if the methodology was peer-reviewed.
As I mentioned above, the Center For Inquiry (which Dave Farina has represented in the past) is an example. Their website states:
The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit organization dedicated to defending science and critical thinking in examining religion. CFI’s vision is a world in which evidence, science, and compassion—rather than superstition, pseudoscience, or prejudice—guide public policy…The Center for Inquiry (CFI) strives to foster a society free of the dogmatic influence of religion and pseudoscience
They have both a political agenda and an activist one, and are tied to secular humanist organizations. Another critic of ID is Jerry Coyne, who runs the website “Why Evolution is True,” also a critic of religion, who has recieved awards from the Freedom from Religion Foundation and The Richard Dawkins Award for “exemplifying secularism.”
Keep in mind CFI was founded by Paul Kurtz, who also was the “father” of secular humanism. The link between skepticism, secular humanism, anti-religious attitudes, and metaphysical naturalism has a historical and political basis (that can probably be traced all the way back to David Hume). They also with help from TH Huxley’s “The X Club” which pushed for naturalism and Darwinism. Steven Bond (a “former skeptic”) has written about this too.
Well students do arrive at very different views and answers when studying the Bible and theology. When something is based on reality, like mathematics or scientific medicine, groups of people independently arrive at the same answers. Spot the difference.
“Steven Bond (a “former skeptic”) has written about this too.”
I don’t think Bond, at least, is supporting your claim here. I can see P Z Myers agreeing with everything he said.
You and Roy had not been talking about students; you had been talking about scholars, i.e., the professors and researchers who teach the students. And you made a generalization about those scholars, a generalization that was both uncharitable and false. You can’t duck the challenge by switching the topic to what “students” think.
We all know you don’t like the Bible and the religious traditions inspired by it, but that doesn’t justify saying false things about the way academic research on the Bible is carried out.
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This is at least something. However, this still misses several marks of my point.
- While the CFI clearly does have a political agenda (that’s one check point)… it’s not one that explicitly motivated by (borrowing your words) “metaphysical naturalism or the desire to maintain scientific orthodoxy”. None of that is present what the CFI say here. Being against dogmatic religion is not the same as pushing for metaphysical naturalism. Then again, you could argue that you can’t naively take CFI on their words and stated principles. They can say what they stand for, but their actions speak louder. They will simply call anything that disagrees with their metaphysical naturalistic world view as “dogmatic religion” or “pseudoscience”. Fair enough. However, that would still be an inference that one has to make, which is unlike the case with the Wedge document. That’s pretty explicit in their goal to (quoting verbatim) “To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.” That’s not to say that I do not have issues with the CFI (or with the Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, and David Farina in particular). I have heard about… some glaring issues with was has been dubbed the ‘skeptic movement’… and I have read that blog post by Steven Bond, who also mentions that and more, and I pretty much agree with him.
- More importantly, the CFI is not a representative of “ID detractors”. It’s again the same issue I pointed out when you said that David Farina’s attacks supports the claim that ID is being unfairly excluded from scientific journal. There are a lot more “ID detractors” outside CFI. A whole lot more. We are talking about the entire scientific community (with very few exceptions). Regardless what you want to say about the CFI, there remains the scientific community that does not buy the claims of ID. In contrast, the Discovery Institute and “Intelligent Design Proponents” are two circles that overlap with each other with near perfection. The Discovery Institute begat ID, they remain ID’s main defenders, and (as pointed out before several times) the Discovery Institute has been explicit in their motivations for pushing ID into the sphere of public influence.
Thus, ID and its detractors are not simply two sides of the same coin.
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Alright, here goes a couple of examples.
Note: Because the exchange between Tour and Farina go back over several consecutive response videos (and they now have many hours of content responding to each other) in many cases it’s getting rather laborious trying to piece together who said what, in what context they said it, and what they were trying to get across, so don’t count on me going through every single point of dispute on every single claim, paper, or statement they had.
I’m just going to go over a couple of examples from Dave’s videos to analyze whether Dave gives any substantive rebuttals to Tour, to show that he really did offer valid responses that have real substance behind them in terms of our knowledge of biology, chemistry, and physics.
One example I already mentioned in my previous post, is when James Tour complains about use of the word ‘spontaneously’, he says “Nothing arises spontaneously, there’s no selectors and there’s no spontaneous arising. Nothing arises spontaneously, chemistry is not like that” as an example, and declares that when we use the word it’s “code word for we have no idea”.
Dave responds to this in his video Response to James Tour: 700 Papers and Still Clueless (Part 2 of 2) beginning at 43:34, by explaining how that is unambiguously wrong. Obviously anything that happens at all, when it happens, happens spontaneously when the conditions are right.
Just to make my own analogy, imagine that a weight hangs in a chain that rusts slowly over time, and at some point it cracks spontaneously because it can no longer support the weight as most of the load-bearing metal has converted to rust. This isn’t some mysterious use of language. As far as I can see everything Dave says in response to this is completely correct and on point. Sure, he throws a few snipes in there against Tour’s religiosity, but that’s besides the point that he really does explain substantively how Tour is just wrong to complain about the use of that word.
Trying to steelman Tour on this point is difficult because I really don’t know what the problem is here. It’s made worse on account of Tour himself having used the word in his own primary literature chemistry publications to describe certain chemical reactions. If there is some deeper issue behind this he’s bad at expressing himself. Perhaps he means to suggest it’s used too much in speculative scenarios that are missing chemical/physical details he’d be interested in? Then he should have said that instead.
Dave continues in that same video to discuss Tour’s problems with the synthesis of fatty acids under prebiotic conditions, where Tour highlights a section out of the paper McCollom & Seewald 2007 (here in this video), wherein the authors write that not all aspects that control when and where fatty acid synthesis can occur are fully understood (in some experiments it works and fatty acids are produced, in others it doesn’t, and researchers don’t always know why).
Again Tour declares that fatty acid synthesis doesn’t occur spontaneously (what does he mean by that? It does occur spontaneously when the conditions are right, we just don’t fully understand all the relevant factors that control that reactionm and why it occurs in some experiments and not in others.)
Tour’s overall point seems to be that it is hard to figure out how to get fatty acids prebiotically, and that it isn’t clear—when scientists detect fatty acids in the ocean coming out of hydrothermal vents—whether they’re produced nonbiologically or they are just derived from former living organisms.
Dave responds, again it seems to me entirely substantively, by referencing the paper (McCollom et al. 1998 Lipid synthesis under hydrothermal conditions by Fischer Tropsch-type reactions.) As far as I can see that’s a substantive response. Fatty acid synthesis has been demonstrated experimentally under hydrothermal conditions. Whether Tour would be satisfied with that experiment I can’t say, but again, Dave’s response is substantive and on point. He’s not deflecting or just calling Tour an idiot or a liar. He’s giving a reference and explaining why he thinks Tour is wrong.
This brings me to another issue. Does Tour have to agree with Dave’s points, for Dave’s points to be substantive, rather than just rhetorical? Of course he doesn’t. Heck, he doesn’t even have to be right in what he says for his responses to be substantive. To actually deal with the scientific subject matter. People can argue about facts substantively, with one part being wrong and the other being right, and yet it still be a substantive argument.
Watching both Dave’s and Tour’s videos it’s rather clear to me that both of them make lots of both substantive and rhetorical points. I have to wonder a bit how you can have missed that Dave has made lots of substantive responses. Perhaps you had some other idea in mind here, like Dave responded with something that proved Tour wrong and made him concede this or something? That seems like a very high bar if so. Every time Dave quotes Tour addressing him, or speaking of the contents of a paper, and then Dave himself addresses the contents of that paper or brings up other papers, or displays figures or animations to explain concepts, that’s a substantive response.
Yet another example that I recall is an issue I myself have had with some of Tour’s statements. For example that he will pick attributes of eukaryotic cells (or modern prokaryotes) and say these attributes need to be explained at the origins of life, or he will assert that because some feature of eukaryotic cells is critical to their functions, he asserts you can’t have life without that feature. Some of these attributes are attributes that evolved long, some times billions of years, after life’s origins. We already know they’re not required for functional cells, and in some cases at least we know there are plausible prebiotic systems that could do a similar job.
Again on multiple occasions Dave points this out, in my opinion both correctly and substantively. To Tour’s credit I have also seen him accept some of these corrections by saying something along the lines “okay we can forget about eukaryotes but then what about X” speaking of something in prokaryotic cells. I assume Tour is conceding the point on the attribute of a eukaryote because he implicitly agrees it was a substantive response by Dave.
Maybe you really dislike watching Dave’s video because of the way he addresses Tour, which would be fair enough I suppose, but even if you don’t agree the things Dave says addresses, refutes, or disproves all the things Tour says or wants explanations for, I think you’re severely mistaken if you think Dave has not responded substantively to Tour.
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Just to add a side note to this, if anyone is interested. This analogy may be more relevant at first glance. A crack that spontaneously forms is an example of a phase transition, and one of my favorite commentators on origin of life Eric Smith (I already linked to one of his presentations here) argues that the origins of life involved a series of non-equilibrium phase transitions. These occur “spontaneously”. Not in the sense that these will occur in short time frames (but many of them do). They occur spontaneously in the sense that the phase change occurs because the matter is reorganized to a more favorable and stable state. Dynamically stable in the case of non-equilibrium systems.
Here is a shorter video where he covers phase transitions.
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No reactions at the beginning of what most would define as life would have had to go quickly. There would have been zero competition.
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Yes. All that would be required in terms of speed is that the rate of synthesis is at least slightly higher than the rate of degradation (so you can get some build-up of product until an equilibrium point is reached).
Creationists like Tour often make a point of saying “time is the enemy” and they point out that chemical bond X in some biomolecule, has some Y half-life in water at whatever temperature.
Tour never says what the rate of production is, he just waves his hands in the direction of the half-life of some chemical bond. Peptide bonds have some half-life X, so if you produce some Y amount of peptides and then just let them sit in water, after X time half of the bonds will have hydrolyzed.
What does that tell us? NOTHING. Without a rate of synthesis he can’t claim the rate of degradation is a problem. And a further problem (which is even worse) is this strange idea he has, that it’s all produced in a sort of large bulk in a single event, and then it just sits around waiting for other stuff to happen to it while it slowly decays away.
No, geological and atmospheric chemical processes are not these all-at-once-and-then-stop events his issue portrays them as. They are continuous processes that run for hundreds to thousands of millenia.
Molecules in the oceans, the atmosphere, and in lakes and streams, hydrothermal systems etc. are being continuously produced and released into the surroundings. Their concentrations in whatever local reservoirs then build up over time and collect in rock pores, on shores of tidal systems, pools, lakes, and then they reach some equilibrium point where the rate of new incoming material matches the rate of degradation. The equilibrium concentration. It doesn’t just get produced in one go and then decays away in a few years.
That means there would be a steady supply of new material for as long as those geological and atmospheric processes persist. What that equilibrium concentration is, is a reflection of the rate of production and rate of degradation. Things wouldn’t “run out.” Then there are ways of further concentrating things above the equilibrium concentration, such as wet-dry cycles of small pools, on shores of tidal lakes, thermophoresis in rock pores, etc.
I am amazed how many PhD chemist creationists never seem to get this. No we just get this silly rhetorical quip that “time is the enemy.”
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These ridiculous assumptions underlie his strawman version of current abiogenesis research. As a chemist, he should be embarrassed by them.
Oh yeah I forgot. Some other points where Tour is just painfully and unambiguously wrong—for whatever reason—and Dave has in fact accurately refuted Tour on substance. In this video ( Debunking James Tour’s Latest Pathetic Series (Part 3 of 4)), starting at 34:42, Dave addresses Tour’s complaints with an experiment showing that RNA monomers in an aqueous solution can polymerize on different types of mafic rock surfaces.
At one point in Tour’s video he asserts that in the methods of the paper (Catalytic Synthesis of Polyribonucleic Acid on Prebiotic Rock Glasses) the researchers synthetically removed magnesium (Mg2+) ions by washing their minerals in hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and ultra-pure water because—he seems to be implying—the researchers are aware the metal ions would destroy RNA. So he asks sort of rhetorically where in the prebiotic environment the hydrogen peroxide and ultrapure water to wash away Mg2+ ions would come from?
Dave points out, completely correctly, that the wash is done to remove modern contaminants from the mineral. To ensure that the environment is a faithful facsimile of an environment without remnants of extant microorganisms or other modern organic pollutants that can affect the result. It is a step in the preparation of an experiment. To make it pre-biotic.
To make matters worse Tour is doubly wrong to think the researchers are doing it because they’re somehow either deceptively aware that Mg2+ ions would destroy the experiment, or incompetently unaware that their wash is presumed to not improperly remove metal ions that would render their experiment invalid.
The mineral the researchers are washing to remove contaminants is a type of mafic rock glass(a type of volcanic glass), which is high in magnesium and known to readily release ions into solution. These ions is the primary constituent of the glass. They can’t be “washed away” in a way that leaves a pristine rock behind without any metal ions in/on it that will further dissolve into water when the experiment begins.
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Part of the problem here is Tour can continue to nitpick each paper Dave brings up for not being prebiotically relevant, not being realistic, involving chemical processes not available on an early earth, etc. of course, this nitpicking does not really help (or even support his claim substantially). However his main point is a strong one: until scientists can create life experimentally under controlled conditions in a lab, demonstrating even the possibility of doing this, an early earth (an assumed no intelligent designer or pristine lab environment) will have even more trouble. How can we claim we have a clue how life started on an early earth if we cannot even demonstrate abiogenesis under any circumstances?
Once this is demonstrated, Tour can be fairly accused of moving goalposts if he keeps clamping X or Y reaction isn’t prebiotically relevant
As I mentioned, I disagree with Tour’s use of the word “clueless” but perhaps I’d concede “essentially clueless.” I do believe Tour is right to point out we have a lot of speculation and not as much substance. These problems are no fault of OOL researchers - rather we don’t have much knowledge (at least now) about the conditions of an early earth when life was assumed to have developed to be able to narrow down things.
Thank you for your reply, and apologies for the delay (I had some research of my own I needed to submit). I want to be clear that in no way to I question Farina’s ability to read, understand, or communicate the primary literature. If I implied this at any point I apologize. And I also do agree with your point that both Farina and Tour have rhetorical and points referencing the research.
Rather, what I meant by a “substantive” response is one that undermines a key part of the argument presented. I do not intend to shift goalposts or anything. I would agree that there are times Farina has brought up research that shows Tour was mistaken about points (though I would also add Tour has done the same thing to Farina). The difficulty here is (my interpretation of) Tour’s main point isn’t easily contradicted by Farina bringing up papers showing possible reactions, or even showing Tour has been mistaken about some things. Rather Tour’s point is:
- Life is hard and complex
- OOL is filled with speculations and extrapolations
- We haven’t been able to create life in a lab (despite what researchers are saying) and likely won’t for some time
A substantive response to this would therefore be displaying a paper that does synthesize life in lab or showing a possible mechanism for creating life backed by experimental support at every step (which I’d argue we aren’t there yet, even if such a thing is possible). Farina can claim the process is “easy” and “not a problem” (at one point, he even claims that there are so too many possible pathways we don’t know which one to choose, which I’d argue is misleading because many of these have serious challenges which is in part why there are so many of them).
In other words, the question Dave needs to answer is if all of this was so easy and not a problem, why have researchers been struggling to create life in a lab? Why have OOL researchers been claiming we would have life in x years and all of these predictions been false? What experiment or new process do we have now that makes the next such prediction more trustworthy?
You believe the Big Bang occurred, right? Can you tell me which scientists have duplicated that in a lab? Because I have never heard of that being done.
Seriously? Those are his arguments? Well, duh, does anyone disagree with that? And, sorry, but exactly why is he so offended and upset by people researching hard and complex subjects, and speculating about possible answers to the questions involved? Isn’t that what the best scientists are supposed to do?
I also dispute the suggestion that researchers are saying they have created life in a lab. Can you quote a single OOL researcher who has ever said this?
Maybe it is Tour who needs to answer the question “Why do you misrepresent honest scientists by claiming they say OOL research is easy?”
Or maybe you and Tour need to realize that creating life in a lab is not the goal of OOL research, and is not likely something we will ever do, anymore than we had to re-create the solar system in order to figure out its origin.
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Agreed. Of course as you state below, part of the issue is we have so little data about the conditions of the early Earth, so speculations about how it was like and what could have happened are essentially unavoidable. We don’t have a time machine, so when it comes to trying to construct a scenario for what could have happened all we can do is make best-guess estimates that will have to involve assumptions we can’t prove.
You can of course say this will always leave some space for doubt, but at some point we also have to wonder what reasons we would have for doubting some of these assumptions in the first place. Is it really outside the realm of reasonable guesses that some hypothetical geological setting once existed?
This is a common objection from creationists but I think there are multiple issues with that sort of reasoning.
First of all there are things we can’t control because they are simply outside of our abilities in terms of technology and resources. The simplest example I can think of is how hard a time we have creating the conditions for sustainable nuclear fusion. We are mocked every day by the giant yellow ball in the sky having performed this act with literally no thought or foresight, no controlling the conditions, and zero conscious effort for the last 5 billion years. Clearly nuclear fusion is possible, and nature is enormously better at it than we are.
So at the least there is a problem of scale, including time, involved. And we can’t just pretend those factors don’t matter (nor do I think Tour’s whole “time is the enemy” retort actually works, for reasons I explained in a previous post.) It certainly matters how large the system is, and for how long it persists, and how many (say) wet-dry cycles it goes through. And so on and so forth.
Second we simply cannot say that we cannot demonstrate abiogenesis under any circumstances. When it comes to actual attempts to really try to do that, there have been essentially no work done like that since Pasteur. And of course he only tested one circumstance. It’s the sealed-off, pasteurized rotting meat experiment. Does life spontaneously arise in rotting meat? Nope. That isn’t even an experiment in abiogenesis, since meat is derived from living organisms.
Basically all other experiments have involved something way more limited in scope(trying to see if certain chemical reactions or physical interactions can occur), and ultimately rather unrealistic exactly because the settings were small in scale and very much controlled.
The number of possible ways the conditions of the early Earth could combine into some novel environmental setting is exponentially large(trillions of ways to combine different settings of pH, minerals types present, salts, their concentrations, water/light cycles, including their spatial structure and the chronological order by which they interact) it is just senseless to start blindly doing one experiment after another where you adjust one parameter at a time. Such a research program could proceed until the end of time. Like trying to just blindly guess a really long random password.
So scientists are trying something much more clever and less wasteful in terms of time and resources, but also much more limited in scope. They’re trying to find deeper physical and chemical principles that can explain how certain chemical reactions or physical processes could proceed. Most of the time this doesn’t involve experiments anyone thinks have even a possibility of creating life. It involves seeing if some factor could coax some reaction into occurring that is assumed to be relevant to the origin of life(usually an attempt to create a plausible gelogical setting that can produce a smaller set of the molecules known from life). The fact that such experiments doesn’t yield living organisms isn’t a failed attempt to create life, any more than me just chopping up tomatoes is a failure to create tomato soup. Nobody is under any illusions that it’s going to require more than that.
So far, nobody has really tried to “put it all together” in a single grand experiment(which could last decades, or worse it could take longer). Until someone goes ahead and actually does that we can’t really say we “can’t do it”, much less under any circumstance.
I don’t think his objections to the prebiotic relevance of certain proposed chemical reactions are necessarily examples of him moving the goalposts. Some times there’s a point to such objections, sometimes less so (like when he complained about researchers using ultrapure water to wash minerals before an experiment).
However I think he can be accused of that more appropriately when in certain contexts he asks, for example, how you get X, and then when someone gives an paper proposing of how we can get X if we have A and B, he just starts asking for how we get A and B.
That doesn’t mean that isn’t also a legitimate question to ask, but it does seem more like a rhetorical exercise to keep asking for the explanation for the next thing, as basically everyone agrees there is still much we are ignorant about.
Well I think that might be overselling it a bit, in the same way Tour would complain that some origin of life scientists are overselling the significance of their experiments in the popular press, or in the discussions and introductions to their papers.
There isn’t really an objective measure of “essentially” in relation to the degree of cluelessness so one could quibble about that endlessly.
I’d just say we have very few clues, a small handful(though I think a few of the ones we have are important in that they do allow us a small amount of narrowing the scope of possible settings, and significant in their implications in that they point to stages of life much simpler and more primitive than even the simplest synthetic cell), and that so far the rest is at the stage of hypotheses that could ultimately turn out to be wrong.
Agreed.
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Why?
Researchers have some advantages - access to refined chemicals, ability to focus on specific processes, use of controlled environments.
But they also have disadvantages - considerably shorter timescales, considerably smaller volumes of materials, necessity of preventing contamination from extant life.
Whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages is not obvious.
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Impassioned “Can’t do it” advocates who reserve particular phenomena to divine agency alone should reflect upon the work of Friedrich Wöhler. (Synthetic urea, anyone?)
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I agree, I don’t think we can ever say we “can’t do it.” On the other hand, the claim that we “can do it” isn’t proven until someone actually does do it. Of course, something had to happen (because we are here), but how this “something” happened seems to be what is debated.
The issue Tour and Farina seem to be dancing around is the current adequacy of naturalistic explanations for the possibility (or probability) of such a process. Tour is clear to state he doesn’t rule them out (he has said this multiple times). Still, these sorts of questions go beyond science and into philosophy:
- At what point does a naturalistic explanation become so improbable that we should dismiss it as highly implausible (is there a probability cutoff we can make)?
- Where can alternative theories come from, if not from science?
- When (if ever) can an “argument to the best explanation” claim supernatural intervention?
- Does the existence of a naturalistic explanation undermine a supernatural explanation?
These are hardcore problems that lie around the intersection of philosophy of science and epistemology (areas I admittedly know next to nothing about). Still, if science is limited in its scope due to a priori methodological, ontological, or epistemic assumptions, we should be asking philosophers and not necessarily scientists.