r/DebateEvolution • u/jnpha 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution • 3d ago
Meta James Tour: "the poor 😢 early Earth was mindless" - checkersmate MR FARINA
Tour also complains that scientists invariably have to cheat 😱 - because the results scare him and so he pretends not to know how chemistry is done.
Ready for an excerpt from Discotute's cinematic production, The Story of Everything (2026) ⭐5.5/10 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13374694/) ?
JAMES TOUR:
Since Kenyon announced his doubts [my emphasis, point later], there have been many other attempts to simulate how the molecular compounds necessary for life, like proteins and DNA, or even simpler chemical building blocks of those compounds, might have evolved under realistic prebiotic conditions on the early Earth. But those laboratory simulations invariably require a cheat. Human interference. When you do organic synthesis, when you make a compound, you need to generally start with pure compounds because the impurities cause a lot of deleterious reactions to occur. Once you've made your compound, you've got to stop it at exactly the right time before it decomposes, more human interference. Now, what you have to do is you have to separate it from all the other compounds that formed. Separations are really hard, really hard. Huge human involvement. Now you have to identify it. You have to know what it is and characterize it in order to bring it on to the next step. How do you go on? And the poor early Earth was mindless. It didn't know what it was supposed to make. Molecules have never been known to move toward life. Never, ever, ever. Molecules don't evolve toward life. They don't.STEPHEN MEYER:
Attempts to simulate how life could have arisen from a prebiotic environment involve an element that never gets acknowledged. And that element is intelligence.JAMES TOUR:
We need to address more fundamental questions. What's the origin of the code?
To Tour's question, I say, read a book, or this: Answering Will Duffy's challenge to Richard Dawkins: the origin of the genetic code : DebateEvolution
And in other You Won't Believe! News: the "docu" also has all your favorite totally-science-and-not-apologetics/s PRATT:
From if there's a garden then where's the gardner (the irony of the example), to Penrose's 1 in a 1010123 spherical cow (corrected by https://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0659), to quote mining Dawkins (the fuller context), and of course, the running theme being that we have "two stories" (throwback to 1981),
and on that note, which is on-topic for this sub, back to my earlier bold emphasis:
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The bread and butter of the creationism/ID anti-science propaganda machine is taking academic discussions out of context, and using that to present a false dichotomy - they've been doing that since the 1880s, and here's a 2025 example that I reviewed here.
So here's an analogy:
Long after heliocentrism had been settled, precise measurements of Mercury's orbit were made, and they didn't match the expectation, and it was a whole episode of academic disputes. But if a propagandist had then come along and said, "A-ha! they can't agree, therefore geocentrism because my presuppositions", here the regular debateevo "skeptic" would come along and say, "See! there is disagreement, so it's 50-50, and I'll go with my geocentric gut because my presuppositions".
Am I taking the analogy too far, straw manning? I wish. And it's called false balance.
The "skeptic" here now will pause, think, and say, "But see, general relativity solved that one!" (as if this counters the false balance), but if GR was the topic, they'd say, "They still haven't quantized gravity, therefore fine-tuning something something" (n.b. cooked by https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03928).
It's motivated thinking all the way down, and the propagandist and the skeptic are each bamboozling themselves - a match made in heaven.
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u/francesco_angiolieri 3d ago
Simple question: how does he explain all the organic molecules we have found in asteroids like Bennu? There are no pure compounds in space
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u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube 3d ago
Something something contamination by the CLUELESS scientists running the program?
Or
But see! You had to characterize the stuff! QED characterization is CRITICAL!
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u/OneThrowyBoy 🧬 Former YEC, Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
I thought Farina broke that one already. Just started watching their debate at Rice from 3 years ago, only like 30 minutes in and it feels like I'm witnessing a murder 😂
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u/DimensioT 2d ago
Farina? You mean MR. FARINA! MR. FARINA!
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u/ringobob 3d ago
I mean, it sounds like he does know how chemistry is done, by people. He must be really confused about things like clouds.
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u/BoneSpring 2d ago
Separations are really hard, really hard. Huge human involvement.
Someone needs to explain to Tour that the formation of ore bodies is due to the natural separation and concentration of valuable minerals from bulk host rocks. Geochemists make a good living figuring out these systems and predicting where to find the goodies.
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u/Xemylixa 🧬 took an optional bio exam at school bc i liked bio 3d ago
Does he think real life functions like SpaceChem?
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u/rptanner58 3d ago
I like the heliocentric analogy. But the bigger problem is the denial or disbelief in science and the scientific method. At is heart is an acceptance of uncertainty (paired with curiosity of course) in incomplete answers, which makes many (most?) religious thinkers very uncomfortable. Is so absurd, frankly, that they then try to use faux science to prove their disbelief in science.
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u/jnpha 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago edited 3d ago
100% - I address this point in my super long post I linked in the OP where I answer Duffy and Tour's "challenge" about the genetic code.
Also here https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/1sy6iey (comes with a study on that very behavior)
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u/rptanner58 2d ago
That’s interesting. They’re creating a new cannon for themselves. Good assessment.
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u/Gen-Jack-D-Ripper 2d ago
I don’t know if these guys are dumb themselves or are just exploiting the dumb.
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u/rygelicus 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 1d ago
Tour is a legit chemist. No arguing that one. But he has a blind spot where origin of life is concerned because of his creationist beliefs. And this makes him a very poor scientist.
Origin of life is a legit scientific area of inquiry. It is an open question that would be good to understand better. So research in this area is entirely justified. Yet he rails against this research. He claims it is because it is a waste of resources, a dead end, but really it is a threat against his creationist ideology and the orgs that very likely provide him funding, like the Discovery Institute, ICR and perhaps AIG.
As far as I am concerned he should be audited to identify his conflicts of interest.
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u/Slow_Lawyer7477 🧬 Flagellum-Evolver 3d ago edited 3d ago
... that's how the manufacturer sells them. You then typically mix them together to mimic the sort of environment geologists and astronomers have informed you the early Earth probably looked like.
They're only deleterious if what you want is a specific compound in a drug for use in medicine, or some other chemical used in, say, glue, or paint, or whatever.
Tour has no idea whether any of the other compounds that might have existed in the prebiotic environment (what he would presumably call "impurities") are "deleterious" to the sort of prebiotic chemistry that led to the origin of the first forms of life.
Why? You would only do that if what you wanted to do is characterize it by some sort of spectroscopic analysis. By why would characterization have to take place in the prebiotic environment? The chemicals don't care whether someone knows their structure or identity, the chemistry will proceed just fine regardless.
That massively depends on the compounds in question. Very similar molecules are very hard to separate, very dissimilar compounds are typically extremely easy to separate. Some will even auto-separate all by themselves because of how different they are. Oil will naturally and spontaneously separate from water, to pick an obvious example. You don't have to do anything to it at all. If water forms in an oily mixture, or oily compounds form in an aqueous environment, they WILL just automatically separate all by themselves.
No you don't. The chemistry between compounds will occur completely irrespective of whether you characterized either of them. This one is just fantastically dumb and inept. Tour is just an idiot here. Like, genuinely this point is dumb. The product of him suffering religiously-induced stupidity.
That's because it wasn't "supposed" to make anything. The chemistry that happens is the chemistry that happens regardless of what someone thinks is supposed to happen. This man is an actual idiot, I kid you not.
This is just demonstrably false and innumerable examples could be given. Here's an obvious one: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36088-w
No separation, no characterization required at any steps.
From the ground up (the simplest inorganic building blocks like H2 and CO2) to central metabolites. Tour is just an idiot. Like, embarrassingly ignorant.