No, this isn’t a post about TSZ. It’s about how to get abiogenesis without a designer and how to build a nanocar.
We have no idea how the basic set of molecules, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins, were made and how they could have coupled in proper sequences, and then transformed into the ordered assemblies until there was the construction of a complex biological system, and eventually to that first cell. Nobody has any idea on how this was done when using our commonly understood mechanisms of chemical science. Those that say that they understand are generally wholly uninformed regarding chemical synthesis.
“Those that say oh this is well worked out, they know nothing, nothing, about chemical synthesis. Nothing.”
From a synthetic chemical perspective, neither I nor any of my colleagues can fathom a prebiotic molecular route to construction of a complex system. We cannot even figure out the prebiotic routes to the basic building blocks of life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins. Chemists are collectively bewildered. Hence I say that no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks let alone their assembly into a complex system. That’s how cluelss we are.
“Nobody understand this. So if your professors say it’s all worked out, your teachers say it’s all worked out, they don’t know what they are talking about. It is not worked out.”
Given our current level of knowledge, the claim that life arose by naturalistic means must surely qualify as an extraordinary claim. A claim for which not only is there not extraordinary evidence, but a claim for which there is no objective empirical evidence whatsoever. You may as well claim to believe in magic. Sure, let’s be skeptical. You first.
“…a claim for which there is no objective empirical evidence whatsoever.”
Of course there is. Just Google “origin of life.”
Don’t be obtuse.
The building blocks of life.
1. Carbohydrates
Is this an 84 minute Christian apologetics video?
I see a strong emphasis on the complexity of the system. He is describing it as if there was a specific target, and everything had to be done right to achieve that target. That is to say, typical ID misdirection.
I’m giving up after 18 minutes.
James Tour is a fundamentalist ideologue™ . Hitching your wagon to his star is a lazy way to think.
Try thinking for yourself. You never know where that may lead.
The building blocks of life.
2. More than just sugars
Has James M. Tour ever done any origin of life research? Published anything in the field? Just wondering.
Mung,
By the way, those are by far the worst slides I have ever seen in my life. I’ve seen people just read off their bullet points, but reading off whole giant paragraphs, followed by more giant paragraphs, followed by still more giant paragraphs? That deserves some kind of award.
A whopping 18 minutes. I think that’s a record for you Neil. So you didn’t even get to the part on prebiotic chemistry but already you have an opinion.
You said you watched 18 minutes of it. In the very first minute he makes it clear that there will be no consideration of scientifically unknown entities.
Did you start at the beginning?
Folks who can’t stand to have their blind belief in abiogenesis challenged may want to follow Neil’s shining example.
(I have not yet watched the video, because I am too busy right now. May watch later.)
Just so people can put Tour in context:
James Tour is not an origin-of-life researcher, nor any kind of biologist or biochemist. Just to help see where he fits in here, he is the guy who is the subject of the most popular post ever at Uncommon Descent “A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution”. It has 343,055 views there, more than 10x as many as the next-most-popular post.
He also issued a challenge on his own website:
Nick Matzke accepted, with one proviso, that the exchange be recorded. Tour then backed out.
There has been a long-running private email exchange between them since, parts of which I have seen. It turns out that Tour’s demand for “chemical details” is essential to his requirements — all the chemical reactions involved in macroevolution have to be explained to Tour’s satisfaction. This of course is surpassingly silly, like asking for a detailed quantum-mechanical description of a volcanic eruption.
Mung,
This area of research has created some of the finest “just so” stories in all of science. You and James Tour should be ashamed and Yockey’s 1977 paper on OOL should be censored.
All changes, when doing chemistry, are hard and cannot be done through hand-waving arguments…
– James Tour
Better to strike a match than curse that hard chemistry.
Joe Felsenstein,
A volcanic eruption is something we can observe. Is quantum-mechanics required to understand the cause? Can we really understand the cause of large scale evolutionary changes without understanding the causes of the biochemical changes? Hats off to James for not accepting Nick’s “just so” stories like the one he published on the bacterial flagellum.
I hope that you know every way in which ancient manuscripts were changed, before you assume something like descent with modification for them. Because we certainly don’t, we just note how they’re related and note the changes, while understanding a number of things about humans and how they copy manuscripts. I guess that won’t do, if you’re not interested in following the evidence, but would rather insist on standards that you know can’t be reached given the state of preservation of knowledge.
It may have been magic that changed things in manuscripts, so why use what we know to understand them as far as possible?
Or we could use the same standards that we use for, say, understanding how the Indo-European languages were derived from the common ancestral language, manuscript phylogenies, and DNA derivation from common ancestors. Tour is just casting for excuses to ignore the evidence, not wanting to deal intelligently with it.
Glen Davidson
This is Tour’s own description of his competency in evolutionary biology:
Tour is a YEC who also repeats the usual YEC garbage on his site. He accepts microevolution but not macroevolution, yadda yadda yadda.
No wonder Mung has a hard on for the guy.
I’ve found it useful to ask for a corresponding design narrative with as much detail.
They don’t think they have to match our “pathetic level of detail.”*
Which is all too telling about ID, in fact.
Glen Davidson
*More correctly, they can’t supply any detail/evidence.
In the second minute of the video Tour puts up a slide of a eukaryotic cell which he calls a “simple life form”. He then goes on to say abiogenesis requires all the parts of that cell to appear through chance and assemble simultaneously.
After that bit of YEC nonsense to start the rest of the video wasn’t worth watching.
Tour and Mung make it clear: just knowing that monks copy manuscripts is too vague and handwavy — mere “just so stories”. To have any argument that multiple manuscripts have been copied by monks from common ancestor manuscripts, we need to know the detailed paper chemistry and the complete biochemical description of all chemical reactions that occur in the monks. Hard chemistry, that’s what we need, not all these just-so stories. They’ll believe that monks can copy manuscripts only when they get all the chemical details.
I want to draw attention to what I highlighted there in bold: It’s just false.
On the origin of biochemistry at an alkaline hydrothermal vent.
Martin W1, Russell MJ.
“Abstract
A model for the origin of biochemistry at an alkaline hydrothermal vent has been developed that focuses on the acetyl-CoA (Wood-Ljungdahl) pathway of CO2 fixation and central intermediary metabolism leading to the synthesis of the constituents of purines and pyrimidines. The idea that acetogenesis and methanogenesis were the ancestral forms of energy metabolism among the first free-living eubacteria and archaebacteria, respectively, stands in the foreground. The synthesis of formyl pterins, which are essential intermediates of the Wood-Ljungdahl pathway and purine biosynthesis, is found to confront early metabolic systems with steep bioenergetic demands that would appear to link some, but not all, steps of CO2 reduction to geochemical processes in or on the Earth’s crust. Inorganically catalysed prebiotic analogues of the core biochemical reactions involved in pterin-dependent methyl synthesis of the modern acetyl-CoA pathway are considered. The following compounds appear as probable candidates for central involvement in prebiotic chemistry: metal sulphides, formate, carbon monoxide, methyl sulphide, acetate, formyl phosphate, carboxy phosphate, carbamate, carbamoyl phosphate, acetyl thioesters, acetyl phosphate, possibly carbonyl sulphide and eventually pterins. Carbon might have entered early metabolism via reactions hardly different from those in the modern Wood-Ljungdahl pathway, the pyruvate synthase reaction and the incomplete reverse citric acid cycle. The key energy-rich intermediates were perhaps acetyl thioesters, with acetyl phosphate possibly serving as the universal metabolic energy currency prior to the origin of genes. Nitrogen might have entered metabolism as geochemical NH3 via two routes: the synthesis of carbamoyl phosphate and reductive transaminations of alpha-keto acids. Together with intermediates of methyl synthesis, these two routes of nitrogen assimilation would directly supply all intermediates of modern purine and pyrimidine biosynthesis. Thermodynamic considerations related to formyl pterin synthesis suggest that the ability to harness a naturally pre-existing proton gradient at the vent-ocean interface via an ATPase is older than the ability to generate a proton gradient with chemistry that is specified by genes.”
There are quite a number of publications out there similar to this one with proposals about things mr. Tour claims nobody even has any idea about.
Of course, we don’t know whether this is what actually happened. But to claim that nobody even has any idea for how it could have happened, based on actual chemistry, is just bullshit religious propaganda.
A position can be assessed on the details it asks others and which it itself does not provide.
Given our current level of knowledge, if claim that life arose by naturalistic means qualifies as an extraordinary claim one wonders how Mung would classify the claim that life arose via an Intelligent Designer.
What a totally vacuous statement. What does it mean to say “changes when doing chemistry are hard”? Hard in what way? Hard for what? To whom? Chemistry just takes energy, that’s it. Specific discriminating reactions are promoted by the structures of catalysts. Nothing about any of this is unnatural, supernatural or in need of design. All of it is fundamentally natural and materialistic.
All the chemical reactions that make up life are natural chemical reactions, all the energy that makes them happen are provided by natural entities (mostly the Sun). There is no in principle barrier that prevents them from taking place before a complete modern cell has formed. To this date, all biochemical reactions discovered have, when tried, been successfully replicated in test-tubes. There is no magical or mysterious force making chemical reactions happen just because they take place behind a phospholipid bilayer vesicle.
Abiogenesis, meaning the non-living origin of the living, is the only known to-be-possible solution. There is no other credible alternative. The only resonable inference one can make is that it must have happened at some point because everything we know about the cosmos and life tells us life can’t have always existed. 13.8 billion years ago there were no stars, no planets, and atomic nuclei didn’t even have electrons orbiting them, because it was too hot.
There’s a difference between saying we are reasonably sure life did in fact originate somehow in the past (because life is just a collection of particular natural, materialistic physical and chemical reactions and as explained, can not have always existed), and saying we have mindless faith in some particular theory for how that happened. The latter would be a faith-statment, the first one is a evidentially well-justified inference. Physics and chemistry exists, life is subject to and made of it. There is no principle of physics and chemistry that prevents the origin of life. From the standpoint of statistical physics it is just one among countless other unlikely microstates of matter. But unlikely just means life must be relatively rare, not that it is impossible or cannot naturally originate. On the contrary, statistical physics says that it can.
In contrast, the invisible spook-theory of supernatural origins has zero empirical support. To believe THAT just because we don’t currenly know how it happened naturally, would be the blind-faith position.
Has anyone said it is?
Yeah who the hell claims it’s all worked out? It’s a Tour-de-force of strawmen.
By the way:
Not worked out =/= therefore God.
One would think that goes without saying, but I suspect some people here need a reminder.
Mung,
Well, I have a bit of a problem with the apparent alternative: that atoms were somehow micro-manipulated into an appropriate configuration without actually reacting until the entire system was switched on and ‘current’ (in the form of electron energy flow) began to cycle. I can see how an engineer might think like that, but not a chemist with a decent knowledge of chemical thermodynamics. So … what’s the non-hand-wavy way round this difficulty?
Carbohydrates are detected in space. Not that I believe this is relevant to the origin of life (in fact I’m persuaded by arguments that it is irrelevant), but if Tour thinks carbohydrates are impossible to make outside of life, literally light-years of matter is proving him wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interstellar_and_circumstellar_molecules
Second only to ‘an invisible, immortal, eternal and all-loving, perfectly good, magically divine spirit-mind that somehow can function and live without a physical brain, which permeates and is “present” with it’s immaterial body in all of physical reality, knows everything about everything in the past, present and future and can wish entire universes into existence from literal philosophical non-being’, somehow *spoke* and then it all just appeared.
Apparently Tour’s offer was a fool’s errand and Nick was only too happy to oblige.
Do you have any evidence at all that Tour thinks carbohydrates are impossible to make outside of life? I’m guessing that you haven’t watched the video yet, because if you had, you’d know better.
Do you have any evidence that Tour claims that not worked out == therefore God?
Watch the video. It’s there in gory detail. That’s the point. The world’s best synthetic chemists hard at work.
I’m just trying to follow Patrick’s guide to TSZ skepticism. People here don’t think the naturalistic origin of life is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence?
Does Joe believe that we know the naturalistic origin of life took place the way we know that monks copy manuscripts?
Here is an interesting manuscript worthy of attention:
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/368/1622/20130088
Let me explain bullshit propaganda to you. Tour covers some of the chemistry involved in getting to “here” from “there” and talks about the work of some of the leading OOL chemists. So he is fully aware that people have ideas of how some of these things could have happened based on actual chemistry.
To claim or imply otherwise is just “bullshit religious propaganda.”
Man, you’d think I attacked someone’s religious beliefs.
GlenDavidson,
The causes of biochemical changes are fundamental to understanding OOL and evolution. This is not a trivial detail, it is fundamental to establishing a cause. Not explaining the biochemistry is equivalent to not explaining the content of the manuscript that you discovered.
If we credit Tour’s argument, which Mung seems to accept, then we don’t know the naturalistic origin of life and we also don’t know that monks copy manuscripts. Because, as in the origin of life case, we don’t know all the hard chemical reactions involved in a “monk” “copying” a “manuscript”. I put these in scare-quotes because, if we accept Tour’s argument, the very notion of “monks” who “copy” “manuscripts” is just a squishy just-so story. Try as Mung might, Mung cannot satisfy Tour by defining these entities and that operation in precise chemical terms.
Understanding what evidence of derivation means is crucial to understanding manuscript evolution as well as biologic evolution.
Explaining the biochemistry does and will continue to involve recognizing that life has evolved. Merely dumping on evolution for not explaining everything is the way to avoid understanding the molecular biology, while real science follows the evidence.
Glen Davidson
colewd,
Something of a hyper-reductionist view of ’cause’. Obviously there is a biochemical ’cause’ to a particular mutation. Agragag’s Gene A underwent a rearrangement due to ectopic slippage in meiosis. Agragag’s offspring managed to avoid getting stepped on in the first instance – a cause of not-dying. Over the long run, the change in Gene A rendered the average offspring accruing those of Agragag’s descendants to be fractionally greater than those accruing to other population members lacking the altered gene, leading to elimination of the latter. The fundamental cause of the increase in offspring is that it affected a pathway in the early embryo which increased the levels of a hormone which acted to increase the running speed of the adult organism (some biochemical details skipped).
Now for Gene B …
Is this the kind of level at which you think evolutionary explanations should be pitched? Is there anything equivalent from the Design side?
Well you could refute his claims if you had something to do so. Attacking him isn’t going to do it
Just because you are gullible enough to accept that diatribe doesn’t man everyone is
Recombination is from the design side. Meiosis is from the design side.
Anything else I can help you with?
Joe Felsenstein,
This must be what Joe accepts as THE TRUTH:
GlenDavidson,
If evolution is a theory, then it should have an established cause.If the established caused is suspect then it should be challenged because it misleading to science. Without a validated cause it scientifically does not explain anything, its just a set of observations. I simply don’t think were there yet and I am challenging people who think we are further along than I do. When we find the cause of large scale evolutionary changes then I think the “just so” stories will go away.
Allan Miller,
How did all this result in a new protein that allowed evolution to progress? You assume this is the cause. Is it?
It has established causes.
Why don’t you tell me how evolution is limited, if not by the established causes? If you actually have something to contribute, that would be nice.
That’s right, you have no explanation. None.
How much further along do people think we are than we actually are?
You really don’t know, while real science works on issues.
How do you think we’ll find out, except by paying attention to the limits of evolutionary processes? We pay attention to cause and effect, while I haven’t seen you worrying about it, except to criticize those who do. We don’t discover intelligence making leaps to fix problems, we find incrementalism and very strong derivation via reproductive processes.
Back to the manuscript matter, we don’t even have mutations in biology like some manuscripts reveal, large blocks of new script that did not derive from the earlier manuscripts (we also understand why–intelligence is involved with manuscripts, apparently not with DNA). Or with languages, large transfers of “foreign words” are possible horizontally, while we do not see that in, say, your typical vertebrate.
You seem to have no helpful insights, rather, unsupported claims of “just so stories.”
Glen Davidson
Then what the hell is all that blather about synthetic organic chemists? Tour obviously thinks it takes either design, or designed biology (as he no doubt believes life is), to make molecules used by biology. His “lecture” is an exercise in religious apologetics. If he didn’t think this whole thing was a step in making god-belief more plausible, one wonders why he’d start lecturing on matters outside of his field of expertise. One wonders why he’s so popular on religious fundamentalist websites (Uncommon Descent and others) and one wonders why only religious fundamentalists (you guys) are so interested in his words.
Tour is working hard trying to insinuate that the building blocks of life, and complex life, must either be designed and created by intelligent beings, or made by life (which was itself designed and created by intelligent beings so that it can make the building blocks of life).
Yes, the video itself, his many inane statements about macroevolution, his self-proclaimed fundamentalist christian beliefs and his popularity among ID types and creationists, is all evidence that together strongly implies that conclusion.