The ones you had in mind when you brought up this point about purified chemicals which you claim could not exist on the primordial Earth, of course. An idea you indicate you got from watching Tour’s videos.
You said it. You think Tour has shown they couldn’t be there. You back it up.
Apparently you did not catch this, from a reply of mine to Evograd above:
You see? I watched the series a few months ago. I did not take notes or mark down timestamps. It would take me hours to go over six to eight of Tour’s videos and try to find the spots.
When I first mentioned the subject of purchased pure chemicals, I was talking not to you, but to Crispr, who claims he viewed the whole series. He seemed to recognize the sort of statements I was talking about in Tour’s videos. He then went on to say that Tour was “lying” when he made those statements, i.e., that Tour was lying when he said the investigators he was criticizing did not make their chemicals from scratch in simulated early earth conditions, but bought them off the shelf from sophisticated modern chemical manufacturers. I asked him to prove that Tour was lying when said those things, i.e., to prove that the investigators did in fact make the reactants in simulated early earth conditions, and that Tour knew they had done so, and lied by saying they had bought the chemicals. He has not returned to the subject again. But if he is so sure that Tour’s statements are “lies”, he surely must know which chemical substances Tour was lying about, so perhaps you should be asking him, not me, your question.
I do not know when I will find time in the near future to listen to hours of video to find the particular reactants in question. (It was in at least two cases that Tour brought up this problem.) So if you don’t want to watch the videos yourself, it may be a few months before I can answer your question. I’m sorry, but that’s the situation. I don’t owe you several hours of my life just to convince you that Tour said something I know he said.
One way of getting the information faster might be the upcoming debate on May 19th (see post 66 above). It is likely or at least possible that Tour will raise the complaint about purchased reactants again, so maybe some specific chemicals will be named there.
In any case, the logic of Tour’s complaint should be plain not only to a person with your scientific training, but to anyone capable of logical reasoning. Suppose I offered a “plausible pathway” for the accidental production of an automobile in the conditions of a pre-biotic earth, and as Step 13 of my reconstruction, I offered: “Using such high heat as might be found in a volcanic vent, I melted 13 kilograms of stainless steel, and then caused it to react with 15 kilograms of pure aluminum, and sure enough, it produced 13.29 kilograms of a metallic alloy of exactly the right strength and flexibility to serve as the body of a car. So a wholly natural, unguided process, i.e., the emission of heat from a volcanic vent acting to join together two metallic substances (and metals are, after all, natural substances), could have produced one of the crucial steps in the unguided production of an automobile”. At that point any rational person, scientist or non-scientist, would then say, “Whoa! Where would you find stainless steel and pure aluminum on a pre-biotic earth?” Did you make those by an unguided process, before you subjected them to the heat to created the alloy?" And suppose the investigator said, “Well, no, actually I bought them, because I didn’t know of any natural process that could produce them, and I knew that if they weren’t of the necessary purity, I wouldn’t have got the result I wanted,” that would be game over for the claim to have found a “plausible unguided prebiotic pathway” to the production of an automobile.
I’m surprised that you can’t see the obvious application of this analogy. Do you deny the existence of chemical substances that have never been observed to occur in anywhere near 100% purity in nature, and have been brought close to that level of purity only by very complex and careful human engineering? Do you think that every conceivable chemical substance could have existed in pure form on a pre-biotic earth? It seems to me that the logic of Tour’s argument is unassailable, and that the only way of refuting it would be to show that natural processes could have produced the purported chemicals in the necessary purity to serve as reactants in the investigators’ hypothetical steps. And as far as I saw in the video debate, Dave never explained where those reactants could have come from. But if anyone watches the debate and finds a place where he replied to Tour on this point – I’m quite willing to listen to his explanation.
I’ve explained to you fully why I cannot give you exact information that you want. If you keep pressing your request, it will be to no useful purpose. So I won’t reply to further demands on this point.
This is beyond lame.
Suppose someone asked Tour whether the earth was flat. Do you think he would respond, "Well, I’m a chemist so I don’t really have an opinion on that. I can’t say for certain. Maybe ask a geologist or an astronomer.
Or if someone says “Hey, Dr. Tour. Who was President during the American Civil War? I think it was Sonny Bono!” Should he respond “I really don’t know for sure. I think most historians say it was Abraham Lincoln. But you know how historians are always changing their minds on things. I don’t really keep up with that literature. So maybe Sonny Bono was the President during the Civil War. And Cher was First Lady.”
Of course not. It is obvious why he equivocates with a mealy mouth on the question of the age of the earth when asked by a YEC, and it has nothing to do with scientific modesty.
The length to which you will go to avoid criticizing any of your ID heroes is truly pathetic.
I will also point out that, while Duff did not make the edit in the video, the specific claim that Tour is making is directly related to his expertise as a chemist. Tour is not just talking about the age of the earth in general. He is talking about the stability of the chemical bonds in red blod cells and collagen molecules, so he is clearly using his authority as a chemist to lend credence to the idea that dinosaurs died out only recently.
The unfortunate thing is what a lost opportunity this was.; As Duff points out - in his measured, scholarly, gentlemanly manner - Tour is ideally positioned to determine whether unfossilized red cells, hemoglobin or collagen has been recovered from dinosaur fossils. This is exactly the sort of question that a chemist would be expected to answer. And, as a scientist who has the trust of creationists, they might actually listen to him if he corrected this blatant falsehood that is permeating the YEC community.
But, no.
I remind you, again, of what you wrote:
Does @eddie really think that people are disagreeing with Tour over the issue of whether OOL researchers buy the chemicals used in their experiments? Is that possible?
It’s highly relevent to your being pathetically gullible, just as you are with Tour. And you defended Meyer’s lie for many months, not hours. And you didn’t retract any of your ancillary falsehoods.
The Nobel for the research that Meyer lied about was in chemistry:
See that word at the end? Perhaps you should straighten out the committee in Stockholm. I’m sure that they will take your claims about walls between disciplines with all the seriousness they deserve.
No, it isn’t anywhere close, as others have shown.
And for amateurs like you, who avoid the empirical side of science.
Wow. That’s pathetic, Eddie. This only confirms your lack of understanding. You are in no position to judge the level of his understanding, but more importantly (and predictably), you are completely ignoring Lane’s overall thesis.
No, it would not, because Tour would just rant on based on his lack of understanding.
Utterly false. The falsehood of Tour’s silly creationist assumption, that every OoL study concerns the entire process, instead of just testing more limited hypotheses about individual steps, requires an understanding of biochemistry that is obviously far beyond yours.
Your question shows (a) that you have not even been trying to listen to what I’ve said and/or (b) that you don’t understand the relevant methodological problem Tour is raising. The latter is not really intellectually forgivable, given that I’m not a synthetic chemist and I saw the problem instantly. But maybe Boston fans are just naturally more perceptive than Montreal fans. 
The roundness (roughly speaking) of the earth no longer requires any argument to establish, since the earth has been observed from space, so one doesn’t need any scientific skill to verify it. Further, even before it was observed from space, there were simple geometrical arguments capable of showing that it was round, not flat, graspable by anyone with high-school geometry, and no training in natural science. On the other hand, establishing the age of the earth involves indirect reasoning making use of various advanced sciences – nuclear physics/chemistry, sedimentology, geochemistry and so on, and it’s quite possible that a synthetic chemist would not have examined that reasoning in precise detail, and therefore might choose to say that he doesn’t know. I suspect that Tour, like myself, has a much more rigorous standard for the use of the word “know” than most of the people posting here. I would agree, however, that he could have said something like, “While I don’t regard it as certain that the earth is somewhere around 4.5 billion years old, I regard it as the most likely conclusion given the general tendency of the evidence.” That is how I would have put it.
I haven’t avoided criticizing him. If you had been listening, instead of just caviling, you would have noticed that I said he was wrong to accept a “fact” about blood cells found in dinosaur fossils from YEC sources without checking. You would also have noticed that I admitted he is sometimes unnecessarily combative and that he was wrong to call some origin of life scientists “liars”. I don’t think anyone is beyond criticism. I’ve read about 50 books by ID proponents now, and I think several of them (all from lesser ID proponents) are quite weak and add little to nothing to the ID case. And even some of the major ID books are not unassailable. I’m sure I’ve somewhere mentioned that I think Behe’s original argument about the blood clotting cascade was unconvincing, as Behe admitted the cascade can work with fewer stages, meaning that it’s complex but not irreducibly complex. I think criticism of ID writers is fair game. What I’m against is unfair criticism of ID proponents – of which there has been plenty here and on numerous other blog sites and in numerous book reviews and other places. But I do not intend to take up that discussion here, as it would be off-topic.
But those later (post-splice) remarks, at least the ones about red blood cells, were predicated on his belief that red blood cells have been found. And if red blood cells had been found, Tour’s chemical expertise would have been relevant, and there would be a problem asserting that the dinosaurs died out tens of millions of years ago – as even Duff admitted. There is no foul in Tour’s reasoning or in his application of his expertise to the subject of blood cells. The foul lay in Tour’s unwise acceptance of an unsubstantiated empirical claim. And I’ve already conceded this. Your attempt to put him further in the wrong adds nothing to what Duff already argued, and merely expresses your dislike of Tour.
It is ridiculous to ask a scientist to verify all claims made by other scientists. If scientists could not take many of the results of other scientists on trust, they would be paralyzed, unable to work. Science could never progress. Tour’s field is making molecules, not studying dinosaur fossils and the residues found in them. He took as reliable a report (which he assumed came from competent scientists) that blood cells had been found, and then reasoned from there. He was never asked by any paleontologist, “Hey, James, we have found what could be red blood cells in a dinosaur fossil; can you come over and examine these residues and tell us if they are really red blood cells, or if they aren’t, what they are made of?” Nor is it likely that any paleontologist, confronted with that find, would say, “We need a person capable of identifying and analyzing biological and chemical residues in fossils, and I think a synthetic chemist best known for making nanocars is the right man for that job, so let’s call James Tour.” There are plenty of other chemists whose work is much closer to the work of a paleontologist who would be called first. So your remarks are just plain silly.
Answering my question with a mere quotation from me, without any contextual discussion by you to explain why you are using that quotation, is non-responsive. I gave you some serious, rational considerations that justify Tour’s concern. You have chosen not to respond to them, not even with so much as a single sentence. My intellectual “obligation” to continue answering you is therefore terminated. Have a nice summer!
Well, then, spell it out for me in itty bitty simple words that I can understand.
Do you think the Flat Earthers have no response to that? Ask one.
And, yet, Tour didn’t. That is the point.
BTW, exactly what “rigorous standard” was he using when he told his audience. “We’re finding red blood cells, and I’m not talking about fossilized stuff, red blood cells from T. rex, that is supposed to have died off 70 million years ago”. He clearly indicates doubt about the 70 million years but, strangely, not about the red blood cells. Odd, no?
You are clearly of the apprehension that certain chemicals would, or could, never be found in some particular state used in some experiment, in nature. And you clearly think that, if this state does not obtain in nature, the chemistry elucidated by the authors Tour are criticizing, can not produce whatever downstream molecule it is they are synthesizing in a state relevant to the origin of life. And you clearly is using Tour as an authority here. You rely on him and his expertise for this view of yours. You’ve watched his videos and they have taught you to think this.
So I want you to contact Tour with one of these chemicals in mind. Pick one. I don’t care which one.
Experimenters are using some chemicals C in a purified form to put into some reaction R and get some product P out.
And then I want the following questions answered:
How do you know this “purified” condition of C could not obtain?
Presumably Tour would speculate that any pathway that led to this C molecule itself, which the researchers intend to use in a reaction R, would have other chemicals Cs produced in side-reactions. He could be right, but [and this is the important part] who knows? I’m asking because I don’t think Tour actually does know that. I think he speculates it. And I think he’s taking a host of assumptions on board to get to there. But even supposing he was right, that just leads to a new question:
How do you know this “purified” condition of C would be necessary? Do all pathways of synthesis of the precursor molecule C in question, necessarily lead to side-products Cs that would interfere with the reaction R the researchers are exploring? How does he know that?
You are clearly of the view that the answer to these questions is Yes: there would be side-reactions in the production of C, and the products of side-reactions Cs would interfere with R such that we do not obtain P in any state that could be relevant to the origin of life.
Those are your views. You think Tour has shown this. Get him to substantiate it.
There is a more pressing question: How do you know the purified condition was required? It was used, because in the sciences we reduce variables, and using anything else would be stupid. That does not imply or suggest it to be required, as Tour dishonestly claims.
Unless Eddie is saying Tour meticulously replicated each experiment with every possible impurity to confirm each prevented the reaction.
More likely, Eddie was too ignorant both of chemistry specifically and science generally to recognize this obvious issue.
It would be necessary to know if Tour is accurately representing the research he is criticizing. Have you read those papers? If not, you cannot have an informed opinion.
You would need to be familiar with the papers Tour is criticizing, though; obviously, you haven’t gone to that minimum depth.
This is a tired creationist trope. Please go back to the original paper and paste the actual hypothesis in here.
That’s not the issue. The issue is whether purity has any importance in this.
Speaking of not grasping the basics, science does not deal in formal proof, so there’s a major misrepresentation right there. OoL research tests hypotheses. Did you read the papers Tour is criticizing, to determine if he is misrepresenting their hypotheses?
No, all of us are pointing out that we know that Tour’s approach is conceptually wrong, something you haven’t addressed.
As soon as I find any of his examples, I will let you know what they are and exactly where he talks about them. And if you aren’t satisfied with his discussion, I will write to Tour and ask him for further reasoning to justify his position. But I’ve told you it might be some months. So if you are in hurry, you should watch the entire video series yourself – you’ll find the specifics faster than if you wait for me. Your call. Best wishes.
Are there actually any serious Flat Earth advocates, as opposed to guys affecting to defend a Flat Earth out of sheer playful contrarianism? I’ve never met or read a serious Flat Earth advocate, but if I did, I’d undertake to explain to him the basics of Euclidean geometry. And if I quickly sensed that I was talking to a fruitcake, I’d exit the discussion.
My analogy about automobiles, provided to Rumraket above, is in “simple words” that anyone with the most minimal acquaintance with science should be able to understand. Nothing technical, just basic common sense. You have more than enough science background to grasp the general argument, if you would only open your mind to something said by Tour, instead of automatically rejecting it because it’s from Tour.
Remember: The whole project of modern origin of life studies works from the assumptions (a) that all stages were entirely natural, relying only on “natural laws” and chance and (b) that all substances alleged to have been involved in the process are known to have been present, or could very easily have been present, on a prebiotic earth. Tour’s objection to the bought, purified chemicals used by modern investigators is relevant to point (b).
Of course Tour is not objecting in general to the use of bought purified chemicals by scientists. Much of scientific research depends on the use of such chemicals. But when some highly refined chemicals are alleged to have been available on the ancient earth, and not a shred of evidence is provided by the origin of life investigators that they were likely to have been available, there is an obvious methodological objection to proposed “unguided chemical evolutionary pathways” relying upon such chemicals. I don’t need to know as much biochemistry as Tour, or as Crispr, or as anyone else here, to see the point here. I just need to be able to know how to reason.
But that doubt was based on science, not theology or religion. Given that he believed that red blood cells had been found, he was quite reasonable as a scientist to wonder whether T. Rex lived so long ago.
Again, you’re not adding anything to the discussion. His error was uncritically accepting some “data” that turned out not to be data. He trusted his sources – as scientists need to do, to operate as scientists. (Doubting all sources would paralyze all scientific work, and there would be no progress.) Unfortunately, he chose to trust an unreliable source.
My instinct, based on long acquaintance with the sort of “evidence” that YECs like to adduce, would have been to suspect “possible uncritical YEC source for this claim”, and to check out the “blood cell” claim before drawing any conclusions from it. Why Tour did not have that instinct in this case, I cannot say, because I have never met or even spoken by e-mail to the man. Whatever the explanation, I agree that he can be faulted for lacking the skeptical instinct in that case. Sound reasoning can lead to false conclusions if one of the premises turns out to be false, and all scientists should remember this before drawing their conclusions.
And you don’t need to be an expert to see the problem with your assertion - you are assuming that such claims are being made without any knowledge that they are. That scientists were buying such chemicals - the original claim - is not an adequate justification for this assumption at all.
As a scientist he should have realised that the age of T. Rex was well established and questioned the finding of red blood cells - at the least admitting that he needed to confirm it before taking a definite stand. If Tour is going to be cautious over the age of the Earth, then surely he should be far more cautious over such a dramatic claim. Not that there is any reasonable likelihood of the Earth being no more than 10,000 years old anyway.
Please quote me saying I was an authority on abiogenesis, and not just better informed than you, or retract this statement.
Please quote me saying Tour was wrong on every point, and not just on a single point, or retract this statement.
“I don’t need to know as much about math as anyone here to see the point that 1+1=5!”
That’s what you sound like.
Well, this guy died trying to prove the earth was flat. So, yeah, I’d say some of them are pretty fucking serious.
That’s exactly what I thought you were saying.
No need for me to pile on. Others have already explained why your reasoning (borrowed from Tour) is fallacious.
Exactly. James Tour believes it is possible that dinosaurs died out only a few thousand years ago. Maybe around the time humans were domesticating the chicken! Who knows? Can’t be certain, can we?
Why would one take such a foolish man as an authority on scientific research he has not conducted himself?
Indeed. But scientists also need to know which sources to consider trustworthy. Can you think of a legitimate scientific source that a professional scientist would use that would claim that red blood cells of T. rex had been found? Please be specific, because I can’t think of one.
If some archaeologist claimed that the Mayan pyramids had been built by Martians because he saw it on an episode of Ancient Aliens, would you consider him to have met the bare minimum standards of his profession in terms of vetting his sources? I wouldn’t, and neither (I suspect) would James Tour, but only because visitations from Martian architects is not a core tenet of his fundamentalist beliefs.
How so? Explain it in gruesome chemical detail.
Hard to tell at times; takes all kinds to make the world go round - or not. There was a YEC / flat earth guy recently on Biologos who seemed to be the real deal. What we are too brainwashed to get is that if there is no firmament dome, the atmosphere would be sucked into the vacuum. His one accurate thing was that he based all his YEC / flat earth views on literal OT verses reflecting ancient ME cosmology. Authentic in a way.
I’m pretty sure that everything is a completely deliberate fabrication on your part.
And what about the two Christians disagreeing with you here?
And what about the fact that no one at all is agreeing with you?
All right, you didn’t say you were an authority on abiogenesis.
All right, you didn’t say he was wrong on every point, but it seems impossible that you thought he was wrong “just on a single point” – the total effect of your many remarks suggests you thought he was wrong on many points. But you can clarify now, since you have (you say) listened to the whole exchange: Was there any point at which you thought either Dave or his scientific sources made a false or misleading claim, and Tour showed that it was false or misleading? If so, can you remember what it was, even if you can’t locate the video or the time?
You also said Tour was lying when he said the scientists bought certain chemicals, and you still have not shown in what the lie consisted. It would help if you would pinpoint the places where he “lied”; you shouldn’t accuse someone of lying if you can’t provide even a single example.
No, they have not. The abstract possibilities that Rumraket relies on may be reasonable cautions in principle against hasty conclusions about what is impossible, but how well they apply to the specific cases dealt with in Tour’s videos is unknown. We can’t get anywhere with any precision until someone finds the exact passages in Tour’s videos. Once those are found, then we can go to the exact passages of the scientific articles Tour is criticizing, and we could in principle contact the scientists and ask them to respond to Tour’s criticism, etc. That would be a useful discussion.
In any case, Rumraket’s presentation puts the onus on the wrong person. It’s not up to Tour to prove that it would impossible for pure chemical substance X to have existed on the prebiotic earth. It’s up to the origin of life theorist who is offering speculative pathways to show that it’s probable, or at least possible, that they could have been there, in the light of our best current knowledge about how that substance can be formed. If the origin of life theorist just assumes their existence at a crucial step in the hypothetical pathway, the origin of life theorist is doing speculative science, not empirical science.
As for Rumraket’s suggestion that other pathways might be found, well of course they might, but Tour, when criticizing particular articles cited by Dave, is responsible for criticizing only the particular pathways offered in those articles. He’s not responsible for criticizing all the pathways an origin of life researcher might have offered, but didn’t.
I am not saying as a certainly that the existence of any particular chemical substance is impossible; I’m saying that the onus is on the person doing the speculating to show that the existence of that substance is probable, or the very least, possible. If I gave Rumraket the impression I was saying something else, I didn’t write clearly enough.
Look, lots of people here have scientific training, but how many of them are chemists who actually make things? How many of them have any depth of experience in the field of synthetic chemistry? If a question is on the table about how probable it is that a certain chemical substance would exist at a certain level of purity on a prebiotic earth, who is most likely to have good judgment about that, someone whose whole professional life has been making chemical substances, or someone whose professional life has been mainly in population genetics or viral mutations? I don’t claim to know which substances are impossible, probable, or improbable to have existed on a prebiotic earth, and maybe even Tour is not an expert on that particular question, but he is certainly more likely to have relevant knowledge than the geneticists etc. posting here.
That doesn’t mean he’s automatically right. But if he’s wrong, the scientists whose papers he is talking about are free to stand up and show where he’s wrong. So what we need here is not a bunch of jackals attacking Tour, but to invite some of the scientists Tour is criticizing to come here and refute him – or put out videos of their own responding to Tour’s specific charges. We could learn something about prebiotic possibilities from them – from the people here, not so much.
The rest of your remarks are just repetitions of the same point you’ve already made several times – Tour shouldn’t have trusted the source on red blood cells. I already agreed. So you seem to be trying to stoke disagreement where there is none.
Sounds like you’ve been saying a lot of falsehoods. What is it we call people who tell untruths, again? I’m sure someone can remember the word.
While I do think he was wrong on many points, I only said he was wrong about a very specific point. Most of what he says isn’t wrong so much as confused and irrelevant. Ideal to flummox the lay viewer. Probably why you were so impressed.
As I watched all of this as it happened, and it happened some time back, I don’t recall anything specific. Farina is sometimes a little fast and loose with his words, but there is nothing in that series that jumped out as dishonest.
That’s not what I said. Review the precise words I selected from the quote. I did it to make the point plain, but it looks like you missed it. Here it is again so you don’t need to go searching.
You might also check my recent reply to @Rumraket. It’s about the same point.