Transcription
Hey everyone. Remember James Tour, the creationist chemist who desperately wishes he never engaged me on origin of life research? After our live debate where he behaved like a raving lunatic, and some other embarrassing events that followed, you’d think he’d be eager to keep his mouth shut for the rest of his life, but you’d be wrong. Let’s see what he’s been up to lately, shall we?
Now, it's been about a year and a half since we’ve checked in on James, since he did actually lay low for a while, undoubtedly licking his wounds after becoming the laughing stock of the entire internet. But earlier this year he started making some noise again. A lot of it is just interviews with the same roster of idiot apologists and pointless lectures where he regurgitates the same pathetic script that’s been debunked a thousand times, even right to his dumb face. MR. FARINA!!! But there are a few interesting developments from wee little Jimmy, so we’re going to need several videos to cover everything. Later we will check out his most recent personal attacks on yours truly, since he clearly hasn’t learned his lesson yet, and then we will hit some other fun moments featuring a very familiar cast of sad characters. But we have something more pressing to dig into first.
Now if you’ll recall, I’ve made fun of James for years about never having the balls to try and publish a paper pertaining to origin of life research. If he’s such a super genius who understands the topic better than all those dumb experts in the field, then how come all he does is make crappy YouTube videos full of lies? Other people have critiqued the field in the past, so why can’t he? If you had a leg to stand on you would publish your critiques, not in Inference review, but in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, like the scientist you pretend to be, instead of reducing yourself to a Kent Hovind level creationist troll.
Then during our debate, one of the best questions from the audience, and one of the most humiliating moments for James, went like this. "Dr. Tour, given the significance of criticisms that you have on current research in the origin of life field, and given your prolific history of publishing, my question is: why aren’t you publishing your critiques in reputable journals? Why are you denying the scientific community the benefit of your expertise? Why are you limiting your critiques to Discovery Institute publications and YouTube that the researchers you’re talking about don’t look at?"
30 seconds is over. "First of all, it’s very hard for me to publish a critique that is negative, because it has to get through peer review. But that’s not the main reason. There have been many critiques like this. So Bob Shapiro wrote critiques. Cairns Smith wrote a whole book on his critique of this. Clement Richer has more recently written his critiques, all of them speaking the same types of things that I am saying. These guys continue on as if it were never written. I am not trying to reach the origin of life researchers. I am trying to reach the masses. And there is something called social medium that is allowing me to reach the masses that never read the primary literature. I’m not trying to convince the origin of life researchers. I am trying to show the masses that there is another way of looking at this data. I am going after the people that do not read the scientific literature. That to me is what I want to do."
Just so that you know, I’m not a YouTube guy like this guy is. I sit in my office and I work very hard. You make a lot of YouTube videos for not being a YouTube guy, buddy. My camera is on and I forgot to have the sound turned on properly. It takes me hundreds of hours to do a series like that. I can certainly write articles in that amount of time. So the translation of this is I can’t publish my critiques because they’re full of lies, so I’ll lie to the publish instead. Look at that pathetic little troll squirm.
It’s true, James should never be taken seriously on the topic of origin of life research, ever. He’s never done an ounce of research pertaining to the topic, he demonstrates time and time again that he does not understand it, and he deliberately distorts the tiny fraction he attempts to talk about. This must have kept James up at night for years, until he and his handlers at Discovery Institute realized they had to do something about it to try and get some credibility. What did they come up with?
Now I’m an author on an origin of life paper that is in a peer-reviewed journal that shows the difficulties with origin of life. If it were RNA, for the whole RNA world hypothesis, it only lasts hours, so time is your enemy. The very thing that I was showing you. And this looks at the statistical chances of having a molecule survive under certain conditions. So for example, if you had a 600-mer of RNA, how long would that survive when you only have one molecule? So this was work with M C Parker and Chris Jeynes, together we have solved this in two ways. One was using probability, because we’re just dealing with one molecule, and we substantiated this using a thermodynamic argument as well, showing that even with proteins you just have a few days. So molecules don’t last very long. This is what I’ve been telling you. Even if a molecule that had the right sequence to form… Holy smokes, he wrote a paper about RNA! In a journal and everything! Way to go, Jimbo! You show those stupid atheists what you can do! And from the looks of this manipulative YouTube short, it must be good. I mean why would he put this dramatic movie soundtrack in there otherwise? And check out the animations! DNA is evaporating into little bubbles! That’s not the molecule the paper is about and it’s not a thing that can happen, but it looks so cool! And look, a trilobite, which has absolutely nothing to do with the origin of life! And there’s even math in the paper! Who could ever be wrong that uses math, you guys? Plus all these flying Z’s and P’s, who knows what the fuck that’s supposed to be, but stock footage is awesome and it makes lies true. Everyone knows that.
James can blame this pile of horse manure on the editor from the DI, but the problem is that the paper itself is also a steaming pile of horse manure, as absolutely anyone who is familiar with Tour’s antics could easily have predicted, and in this video we’re going to tear through every section of it to show you precisely how bad it is. The title of the paper is: “Thermodynamic limitations on the natural emergence of long-chain molecules: implications for origin of life”, published in BioCosmos.
Before explaining in extreme detail how much it sucks, let’s talk about the journal and his co-authors. So who are these guys that he wrote the paper with? Chris Jeynes is a retired professor of physics, with no specific background in any area related to abiogenesis. He is a prolific Christian scholar, as his website demonstrates, and has authored the book “Science and Creation”. That’s a red flag. Creationist, no knowledge of the field, it’s a big miss. Michael Parker is a Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, where he works on thermodynamics as pertaining to nuclear decay rates and things of that nature. Again, zero experience with abiogenesis. So none of the three of them have any experience with the field, and Tour is a known lying fraud. Not a great start.
How about the journal, though? What the hell is BioCosmos? I’ve read hundreds of papers in this area and I’ve never heard of it before. Let’s do a little digging. Well from the website, it looks like the journal was started in 2021, and its papers are refereed. From the description of its scope: “The journal aims to present a wide variety of novel perspectives on the origins and nature of life that go beyond the standard neo-Darwinian paradigm of biological evolution.” Uh oh, that’s another red flag. So right off the bat, it’s clear that this is not a serious scientific publication. In fact, in 2021, the journal published only two papers: an editorial statement, and a paper by Sy Garte, a well-known intelligent design proponent. In the following years, the journal has progressed to publishing 3-5 articles per year. You heard that correctly. Per year. We can already conclude that this is not a real journal, but rather a propaganda outlet for pushing intelligent design and related pseudoscience.
But let’s dig some more just to be thorough. Who is the editor-in-chief of this barely active journal? There are two. The first is Anthony Futerman, Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Biochemistry, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Hmm, another red flag. Futerman seems to be well acquainted with Tour, because he has been a contributor to the infamous Inference Review, the pseudoscience outlet operated by Peter Thiel that published Tour’s pathetic blog posts which he tried to pass off as real papers. He even wrote an article attempting to corroborate Tour’s ramblings on origin of life research. Futerman is also very active in religious publishing, having written books like “Love the Lord your God with all your mind”, and “Defending the Messianic Faith with honesty, humility and integrity.” We are just collecting red flags at this point. The guy is a creationist, and can therefore be disregarded at face value, because creationists will always place their baseless religious ideology over empirical science, and even admit point blank that they do that, as James frequently does. For example, in his review of Stephen Meyer’s pathetic book “The God Hypothesis”, he states: “Meyer masterfully summarizes the current evidence from cosmology, physics and biology showing that the more we learn about the universe and nature, the more relevant the ‘God hypothesis’ becomes.” Yeah, the only thing Meyer does masterfully is a Dwight Schrute impression. His entire purpose in life is to lie about science to push a regressive theocratic agenda. At this point, Futerman’s claim of “honesty, humility, and integrity” sounds more like satire than anything else.
The other editor-in-chief is Siegfried Scherer, who works in Munich, researching pathogens in food using genetic engineering. From Wikipedia: “Scherer is one of the most prominent German critics of evolutionary theory. Until 2006, he presided at the Studiengemeinschaft Wort und Wissen, an evangelical association of German creationists and critics of evolutionary theory. Together with Reinhard Junker he authored the textbook Evolution – ein kritisches Lehrbuch, which presents evolution theory from a creationist perspective.” So, in a nutshell, this journal is just more of the same shit we’ve come to expect from Discovery Institute, which is directly behind Tour’s every move in this propaganda campaign, as always. It’s a fake journal run exclusively by Christian creationists, dedicated to attacking evolutionary biology and related concepts that contradict religious scripture, and publishing next to nothing year after year. In other words, useless trash.
Well Jimbo, you sure are quite a disappointment. You finally send out a cute little paper for review that has something to do with origin of life research, and this is the journal you choose? You couldn’t do something in Nature, or Science, or literally any real journal that publishes on this topic? Even though you’ve published in all those journals before? I wonder why that might be? So I’m sorry, but despite this new flashy development, it remains the case that you have never published a real paper on this topic.
Of course, it’s not enough to point out that the journal is nothing but propaganda. What if there’s something insightful in the paper? What do you suppose are the odds of that? ZERO!!! Yeah, you all know as well as I do that this is going to be a fucking disaster. But as always, I’m going to explain precisely how and why it sucks in as much detail as possible, for posterity, and because dunking on piece of shit frauds while learning new knowledge is super fun, isn’t it?
Ok, so the paper is in two parts. There’s the introduction, clearly written by James, full of his well-known script of lies he’s vomiting up for the thousandth time, and then there’s the bulk of the paper, the mathematical part, written by his collaborators, which I would imagine he doesn’t understand in the slightest. One giveaway as to this distribution of labor is that Tour writes “polymerization” with a Z, and the co-authors write “behaviour” with a U. A wild mix of English and American spelling, which means that each wrote their own part without even reading the rest of the paper. The bulk of it is mathematical, and many of the topics discussed don’t seem to have anything to do with the central theme of the paper, which claims that biopolymers, like nucleic acids and polypeptides, are too unstable to have arisen spontaneously at the origin of life. This is a favorite talking point for James, and many of his videos repeat this crap ad nauseam, even though I’ve debunked it six ways to Sunday. But this time, he’s got two theoreticians to make his bullshit seem more substantive.
First let’s analyze Tour’s section of the paper, to highlight for the hundredth time his profound intellectual dishonesty and incompetence. Again, the topic of the paper is the instability of natural biomolecules, and most importantly the alleged low stability of RNA, which is very relevant to the RNA world hypothesis. If life started with RNA, it must have been stable enough to exert some function, for example replication, but RNA can be somewhat unstable in water, and this presents a challenge to the predominant model for the origin of life. Of course, thousands of papers have been written on this topic, and it’s not a real problem in the field. But the idiots who take James seriously don’t know that, so he’s here to disregard all the actual literature in the area and make up some bullshit.
James starts, like every fucking creationist does every goddamn time they discuss this topic, by citing the famous Miller-Urey experiment of 1952, in which some biomolecular building blocks were formed from simple gaseous molecules. He claims: “many thought that the laboratory creation of life would occur rapidly after that seminal experiment.” Nope. No scientist worth a dime thought that. James is lying, and indeed there is no citation to corroborate this blatant lie. Who thought that, James? Got a name? Just one? If some simpleton reading about the experiment in the National Enquirer thought the creation of life in the lab was newly imminent, nobody cares. In the science world, scientists thought this was quite interesting, and possibly one of the early steps in the emergence of life, but they all knew there were hundreds of further steps to elucidate. He continues: “Moreover, through that demonstration, a well-grounded proposal was expected to emerge to explain how life might have arisen upon an early Earth, shortly after the cooling following the late heavy bombardment. But after more than 70 years, no such proposal has arisen.” Actually, dumbass, origin of life research has boomed incredibly over the last 70 years, in particular the last 20, and many such proposals have emerged, the most successful being the RNA world, the thing you are attempting to debunk in this piece of shit paper, along with the thousands of experiments demonstrating autocatalytic behavior and ribozymes evolving by natural selection. If nothing had happened in all that time, you’d have no science to rage against, genius. You debunk yourself in the introduction of your own paper. Astounding.
He goes on to state the obvious, which will be familiar from his garbage YouTube videos. In water, synthesis of biopolymers is uphill in terms of free energy, and therefore energy has to be supplied to the system. This has been addressed a million times and is not a problem. In fact, I explained a lot of this science to him in our debate, citing all kinds of prebiotically plausible chemical activators that do the job, while he just shrieked like a toddler and played with chalk. For anyone who wants to know more about this area, check out this paper by Jack Szostak called “The eightfold path to non-enzymatic RNA replication”.
Then, this moron goes on to explain his own version of RNA prebiotic synthesis. Yes, he ignores the overwhelming mountain of literature that already exists on this topic, and takes a crack at it with his own dumb brain. In his supreme ignorance, James thinks that random forces have to aim for a segment of RNA containing “specified information”, which means taking a highly conserved sequence in extant cells and calculating the probability that random forces will create exactly that specific sequence. This is a well-known trick used by creationists to impress their brainwashed flock. You know, big scary numbers. In reality, there are no specific sequences that nature is aiming for, since nature is not sentient. It just forms random sequences, some percentage of which are functional. But let’s follow Tour’s dogshit logic. Naturally, the longer the sequence, the lower the probability that precise sequence will form. So for a fairly long RNA strand, the numbers are astronomical. Big brain James posits that over billions of years, one such sequence may magically evolve with the exact specified information to be successfully incorporated into a working protocell. But that RNA will fall apart in a matter of a few days, you sillypants scientists! So the two time scales are incompatible! The RNA would never have time to transfer its information and therefore lead to life!
A few things here. First, we have to point out that “specified information” is not a thing. This is not a term that real scientists use. It was made up by Bill Dembski of Discovery Institute to push this exact propaganda James is spewing here. And don’t worry, his debunk is forthcoming. James knows he can’t reference Dembski, since he’s a clown, so instead he refers to Leslie Orgel, one of the founders of the field. The related but distinct term “specified complexity” was indeed originally coined by Orgel in his 1973 book The Origins of Life: Molecules and Natural Selection, which proposed that RNA could have evolved through Darwinian natural selection. Orgel used the phrase in discussing the differences between life and non-living structures: “In brief, living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures that are complex but not specified. The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; the mixtures of polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity.”
Again, the phrase “specified complexity” is not equivalent with “specified information”. The dishonesty of Tour’s argument is obvious to anyone who is familiar with this topic. We need specific information for a specific living organism to reproduce. That’s true. A bacterium can give rise to a nearly identical bacterium by reproducing the information in its genome, which is specified by a particular sequence. But this sequence is the end result of an evolutionary process, just like the bacterium itself. James wants us to believe that some “specified information” would have to arise randomly from scratch for the RNA world hypothesis to be valid. That’s insane. At the beginning of the whole process, the level of information was much lower and not specified at all. It only required some function, any function, meaning any ability to catalyze some chemical process, including in some cases, its own replication. Indeed, in correct scientific terminology this is called “functional information”. A random RNA sequence has to arise which can exert some catalytic function, leading to self-replication or the replication of complementary molecules. There is no “specified information” magically endowed with life-giving properties that a random strand has to strive to achieve. Self-replication, the fundamental property of life, is the prerequisite. Given that nature can produce trillions upon quadrillions of sequences very rapidly, even if only one in a billion have some function, that’s still plenty to choose from, and given that we have seen ribozymes evolve by natural selection in the lab, it’s very easy to put the pieces together. An enormous variety of random sequences yielded some small proportion of functional sequences, which proliferated in a statistically significant way due to self-amplification, and were subsequently refined by mutation and natural selection. This has been well-understood for decades by anyone with any interest in this topic who isn’t hiding under a rock.
Of course it gets much worse. James the hopeless laboratory chemist imagines that RNA formation has to proceed by adding one monomer after the other to a strand, and each monomer has to be enantiomerically pure, chemically ultrapure, and the reaction has to proceed in >99.5% yield. He takes these conditions from a generic polymerization paper which has absolutely nothing to do with this problem, but rather analyzes the occurrence of trace impurities in polymerization reactions. He’s pretending that nature has to operate like a laboratory chemist. It doesn’t. And this is the most idiotic thing that James whines about in this fake paper. Nobody with any understanding of origin of life research would propose what James is suggesting here, because it cannot have happened. We can easily accept that the early polymerization of nucleotides was a messy process, with many side products, dynamic degradation occurring as buildup proceeded, leading to billions of different polymers. That’s the entire point, actually. The overwhelming variety of products, and the resulting overwhelming probability of yielding something functional. The hypothesis he is misrepresenting says that one or more of these strands acquired function and therefore gave rise to a process of growth and selection. This is what makes this paper such a sad joke. To critique the RNA world hypothesis, James would have to read and understand the literature in the field. He would have to address what real scientists in this field actually propose. His entire position attacks a strawman, an obscene caricature of the science. And although we all know James is a lying fraud, I think he also is genuinely just too stupid to understand this chemistry. Remember, I gave him all of this information in our debate. The papers by Szostak, Joyce, all of it. He just shat his pants repeatedly, shouted “nuh uh”, ran to the chalkboard for his pre-planned stunt, and has now spent the last two years continuing to pretend that none of this research exists.
Ok, so that covers Tour’s bit, and we already knew that he’s a fucking moron. But what about the rest of the paper? James had quite the agenda. He wanted his co-authors to show that biomolecules, especially RNA, are too unstable to form spontaneously at the beginning of life. Of course, we don’t know the precise rate of hydrolysis of these molecules under prebiotic conditions, nor can we possibly know the rate of duplication under such conditions. Given the lack of data, the theoretician’s work is therefore reduced to a guessing game and a whole shitload of filler. The mathematical treatment starts by calculating the probability that a single bond in a biopolymer may be cleaved. It is quite perplexing that a chemistry paper would talk about “probability” in this context. The rate of hydrolysis is a pseudo-first order process with a specific kinetic constant, and one would calculate the decrease of the concentration of the polymer vs. time. This yields an exponential curve. The probabilistic analysis leads to the same exponential curve, but the puzzle remains as to why any chemist would use this approach, unless they’re idiots who don’t understand basic kinetics.
Now the key assumption here is that all bonds in a biopolymer are cleaved at the same rate, or to use the bizarre language of the paper, with the same probability, and therefore the half-life of an N-mer is the half-life of a single bond divided by N. This is a fucking wild assumption and it is objectively incorrect. The idea that a protein, for example, is more unstable than a dipeptide, and by many orders of magnitude no less, is demonstrably false. Some structural proteins are completely stable to hydrolysis even in boiling water, whereas dipeptides can quickly fall apart. This is due to protein folding. Proteins are not just perfectly straight chains where water molecules have access to every residue equally. They fold up into shapes such that water doesn’t have access to most of the residues. I would assume James knows this, since 9th grade biology students know this. We know this to be true of RNA as well. RNA can have secondary and tertiary structure just like proteins, and even quaternary structure in multimolecular complexes. For example, mRNA strands degrade quickly after translation by necessity, whereas other types of RNA, like tRNA, are quite stable. The point is that persistent RNA must have had considerable secondary structure to have increased stability, and also to act as a catalyst, in this case a ribozyme. And that doesn’t even begin to address the even further enhanced stability that results when RNA strands interact with certain mineral surfaces, the very same ones that can catalyze their formation. So for several different reasons at once, the entire assumption of the paper is incorrect. I will repeat for emphasis. The core assumption of the entire paper, the claim that biopolymers are increasingly unstable as a function of increasing length, is objectively and provably false using information that is taught to high school students. If you want to know more, check out this paper by Grabow and Andrews, “On the nature and origin of biological information: the curious case of RNA.” It talks about RNA folding and its relation to functional information of biopolymers.
Unfortunately it gets even worse. If we have an RNA molecule that can self-replicate, it does not suffice to simply look at the rate of degradation. Because that’s not the only thing that can happen. It can also replicate. You have to compare the rates of degradation and replication. If the latter happens faster, guess what? It’ll fucking replicate. The replication half-life of biomolecules, which will depend closely on concentration of monomers and the copying machinery, is still unknown. But all we need to do is provide plausible hypotheses confirmed by suitable experiments.
James actually attempts to acknowledge that RNA can potentially be stabilized. But he cites only its double-stranded configuration as stabilizing, and he follows up with the statement that the annealing of two strands would block the replication process. No shit, James. But that’s not the stabilizing factor in question. It’s the secondary and tertiary structures you don’t seem to know about, as well as interaction with mineral surfaces. As for the topic of switching between single-stranded and double-stranded, which would be necessary since one strand serves as a template for the other but then the two would have to separate in order to continue replicating further, this is obviously well known by all origin of life chemists, who have proposed a variety of solutions. These are ignored top to bottom by James, either due to dishonesty, or because he doesn’t even know the papers exist in the first place, since he hides from science that hurts his feelings. These solutions are highlighted in the recent paper: “Trinucleotide substrates under pH-freeze thaw cycles enable open-ended exponential RNA replication by a polymerase ribozyme”, by James Attwater, who I have interviewed in previous content debunking James. This paper follows up on a rather recent hypothesis which has gained a lot of ground: the idea that RNA replication may have occurred via a triplet polymerase ribozyme, which has been shown to be able to incorporate triplets quite efficiently. Triplets have also been shown to block reannealing at sub-molar concentrations.
Now, we don’t need to dwell too heavily on the specifics. But the central theme is clear. James does not understand this literature. He hasn’t read it, he’s probably not smart enough to get it, and he will go to his grave hiding from all of it. If he wanted to approach this topic in good faith, he would speak with actual experts in this niche subfield. James Attwater talked to me, I’m sure he would be willing to talk to James too, and help him understand all this stuff. Who does James talk to instead? Fucking Rob Stadler, a complete asshat non-scientist creationist, who also does not understand these papers in the slightest, and who we’ve debunked to smithereens in several videos on precisely this topic. This is the top mind he recruits to pretend he has any clue what he’s talking about.
The bottom line is this. A lot of progress has been made in proposing new mechanisms by which RNA can be stabilized enough to sustain self-replication, and new mechanisms of self-replication are being proposed and studied in the lab. Tour’s pseudoanalysis ignores the literature and tries to add a mathematical dimension by recruiting theoreticians who also do not understand the problem they’re trying to address. Much of their contribution is just irrelevant word salad, or at best mental gymnastics that has nothing to do with the topic. Here’s an example: “We…note that the discussion of stability in terms of a ‘half-life’ (with its logarithmic behaviour) is itself indicative of the hyperbolic nature of the temporal aspect of spacetime geometry. That the natural clock of physical phenomena (including radioactivity, or chemical reactions) is measured using a half-life suggests the universal hyperbolic nature of the passage of time. In addition, this hyperbolic nature of spacetime geometry is also attested by the fractal self-similarity of the double logarithmic spiral (instanced by spiral galaxies, hurricanes, cyclones, and also living organisms such as the nautilus shell, sunflower heads, or Romanescu broccoli). Indeed, helical molecular structures are therefore also seen to be a favoured geometry in QGT, and this might therefore also have a constructive bearing on the statistical probabilities of certain molecular configurations.” Holy guacamole, Batman. That’s a whole lot of horseshit. Spacetime geometry? This is chemistry, not astrophysics. You don’t need a PhD or 700 publications to see how vacuous and irrelevant all of this really is. You just need to know what half-life means in the context a unimolecular chemical reaction. It means the time needed to cut the initial concentration of substrate in half, which for unimolecular reactions, is independent of the initial concentration. That’s it. There is no need to get philosophical and invoke the hyperbolic nature of spacetime or Romanescu broccoli. This is Eric Weinstein level obfuscation and pseudo-intellectualization. End of story.
So this is Tour’s attempt to enter the world of abiogenesis research. Pretty embarrassing, no? But it’s peer-reviewed, you guys! By who, I wonder? Definitely not anyone with even a vague background in origin of life research, since I’m not an expert and would be unqualified to serve in such a role, and I just tore this steaming piece of shit to smithereens. No, it was clearly reviewed by one or more of the creationist assholes at Discovery Institute, rubber stamped with a crucifix, and thrown onto the internet to make it seem like James isn’t stupid. Done and done.
Tour’s dishonesty shines as brightly as ever in his appalling conclusion: “Currently proposed mechanisms for the origin of life’s essential molecules do not take such short expected lifetimes for organic condensation polymers into account. We have demonstrated fundamental thermodynamic limitations on the time available for the abiotic processes needed to precede the emergence of life.” In other words, nobody before James has thought about the thermodynamic stability of single-stranded RNA and therefore this is a revolutionary contribution to the abiogenesis problem. Again, if someone familiar with the field had refereed the paper, this conclusion would not have been allowed, because it is an obvious, shameful, monumental lie. Next time, Jimbo, try harder and challenge yourself. Submit to Nature or PNAS. Stop hiding behind the fake publications of team Jesus. Every time you pretend to be doing science, and it’s revealed that you’re just circle jerking with all the other creationist frauds, it proves more and more conclusively that you’re a pointless charlatan pushing a religious agenda. Of course that doesn’t matter to your gullible audience, since a quick scroll through any comments section shows that your religious agenda is the only reason they’re there. They have no fucking clue what you’re talking about and couldn’t pass a middle school chemistry quiz. It’s all white noise to them. That’s why not a single comment says anything scientific whatsoever, and just sucks you off for being a super awesome Jesus man. Pretty interesting how you continue to pretend that you aren’t religiously motivated in your attacks on science, and yet the only people who support you are brainwashed science illiterate morons, huh? Something to think about.
Anyway, that’s it for the paper. But it’s worth taking a moment to further contextualize how fundamentally wrong Tour’s entire worldview is. He “knows” that god created life precisely as it is today. He’s a creationist. He “knows” this because his scripture tells him so, and that’s the ultimate authority on truth, according to his little pea brain. This means that any empirical science which contradicts this supreme truth must be wrong, and he will undergo a series of mental backflips to try and find ways to delegitimize any science that threatens his worldview. This is fascinating to watch in the realm of chemistry, because his strategy is to try and pretend that the way he does chemistry in the lab is the only way chemistry can happen. Which of course, is batshit insane. In the lab, we do chemistry a certain way. Tour’s syntheses are trivial, and that’s why he regards the synthesis of biomolecules as daunting. They require protections, deprotections and many purifications. It is common in the lab to purify after each step. But this is done because we need to characterize what we have. We need to know what we got by getting an NMR spectrum, so that we can be sure that we’ve done the chemistry correctly and can move on to the next step. If you naively presume that life is just synthetic chemistry, you might then think it has to work the same as it does in the lab. That’s why James the idiot thinks a strand of RNA should arise more or less like how we work in the lab, step by step, everything in high purity and selectivity. But that’s obviously impossible, because nature doesn’t have protecting groups and doesn’t deal with purified building blocks. Therefore, selectivity is likely to be poor, and the reactions are not as clean as in the lab, but rather very messy. Nature can’t separate and purify, so it gets messier over time, and none of it makes any sense to wee little Jimmy.
Here’s the thing, there are even areas of laboratory chemistry which deal with complex mixtures, he just has no experience with them. Look at combinatorial chemistry as it was done as recently as the 90s. You would create a library of compounds by starting with a number of starting materials anchored to a polymer, let’s say amino acids. If you combine all 20 amino acids in three iterations you get a mixture of 8,000 tripeptides. This mixture can be deconvoluted in a number of ways. Most simply, you can pass this mixture through an immobilized receptor and find out which ones bind the most tightly. Most will wash away, but a few will bind. Then you amplify them, meaning you find out what they are and make more, testing further until you find a lead for drug research. Of course, drugs are usually not peptides. But we can do this using any series of chemical building blocks. But the point is that even in the lab we can make a messy mixture and then wash away the stuff we don’t want with a simple filter. This has some parallels to what nature does. It makes a horrible mess similar to a combinatorial library. It then has a screening and selection mechanism similar to our screen, except that in our case chemists do the selection, whereas nature applies natural selection, which is a blind process rooted in statistical dynamics. In the end, one compound emerges as the most active from this totally random screening. Nature is a random screener, a medicinal chemist, and not a synthetic chemist in the modern sense, because nature does not have a target like a synthetic chemist does. Nature does not know what it is making, it combines randomly and selects, just like drug researchers. Beyond the blatant dishonesty and perpetual misrepresentation of the field he rages against, this is one of the reasons Tour genuinely does not understand this field. He thinks about synthesis in the classical way and cannot conceive of making something useful by random combinations. Drug discovery has come up with many drugs by precisely this method, with a selection criterion in mind but no synthetic plan. Of course, if you tell him this, he’ll say it’s different because human intervention blah blah blah. That’s not the fucking point. It’s the principle being applied. But the bottom line is that chemistry can be useful even if you make a mixture of a billion compounds. This has been proven even in the lab, so it sure as hell can work for nature too. I’ve been trying to explain this to James for five years now, and he just can’t seem to get it through his thick skull, so I’ll just have to keep making this content for all of you, so that you can correct his idiot fans when they try to pretend that James is some kind of genius in the field, when in fact he’s a clueless toddler that doesn’t understand the first thing about it. And by all means, don’t be bashful about telling them that.
So that’s it for James Tour and his adorable attempt at writing a paper. Apart from this sad stunt, he’s really been mouthing off a lot lately, with much of it directed squarely at me, since he never recovered from being humiliated in our debate. So stay tuned, and we’ll cover some of these more recent disgraceful attacks, so that we can humiliate him even more than ever before. Until next time.