James Tour: The Mystery of the Origin of Life

Here's a talk by one of the world’s top synthetic organic chemists offering a blunt assessment of the current state of origin of life research: [VIDEO]

From the first comment: > "amino acids don't hook together by themselves" [VIDEO] This is a very weird remark considering that the article posted here is about how amino acids hook together by themselves, and which amino acids hook in the correct way and which hook in the incorrect way. --- It's a long talk (1h). Which are the main points? I only skimmed, so I hope I have a not very unfair selection: * We don't know the details about how life begun. I agree. I think we all agree. * Most press articles (and many research article) are overhyped. I agree. Can I get a bot to post that in every scientific post in HN? * The recipes to build organic molecules are complex, with many steps that are not posible to find in the wild (somewhat like [VIDEO] , and many slides with technical details after that) I agree. The problem is that the recipe for the natural formation of some compounds is something like "Get a big pool like the Mediterranean, kill all the bacterias so they don't eat the mix of chemical compounds, wait a million years. And then you will get only an efficiency of 0.0000001." And probably nobody is sure that it is the correct recipe, perhaps it need some metal as catalyzer, perhaps light, perhaps darkness, perhaps lack of oxygen, ... So the recipes he show in the slides are about how to get the same compounds in a lab, preferably in some flask that you can put over a table, waiting only a few hour, with something like a 10% or 1% of efficiency. So you must use weird con

Oh, well the 'current' argument is that it's unlikely for a bunch of reasons. - cambrian explosion of life is seen as unlikely given that changing random genes or dna mutations has such a low success rate in generating new life, that an explosion of life happening all at once seems out of step with the math. - we don't know how to create life at all. adding up bits and pieces of molecules into cells and onwards can be screwed up at any point in the process and has to start over from square one to succeed. people in the lab can't even get it right and they can write down their progress and adapt unlike nature. - self-organizing molecules and natural forces guided towards life haven't been seen yet to exist in nature, it has no expressed intent or will to self-organize into life. randomness and infinite time just isn't enough I don't see the evidence that local minima and maxima changes in body shape, size, ect, act to completely change the species of an animal. There's a long debate running from the 1980s on this stuff, it's just getting views on youtube more recently and becoming properly structured and scientific arguments instead of just conjecture. The stephen meyer 'intelligent design', david berlinski 'doubting darwin', ect arguments. The hoover institute did a piece a few years ago on youtube. James Tour has a great series on origin of life that shows in the hard tasks of applying biology we are way off knowing how any of this works. [VIDEO] The counter arguments to ste

> Afaik we are very close to artificially creating living cells. This is one recent example [1]. I beg to differ. It may look impressive on the surface, just like GPT-3 looks impressive on the surface, but is far from the real thing. It is just another extension of the ladder to the Moon. The effort described in the article is nowhere near a living cell. It lacks protein building and DNA/RNA mechanisms. They basically describe a group of nanomotors. I can recommend watching James Tour on this very topic [1] and Stephen Meyer on the related topic of intelligent design [2]. Those two lectures were eye-opening for me learning more about this field. Note: both of them are self-confessed theist scientists which to me did not represent a problem (my viewes are agnostic, and it only made it more interesting as you rarely get to hear different views about these matters than pop-sci). > The consciousness part is similar to AGI. It is not clear what you mean by that. One thing is to build computer code and then have it manifest 'intelligence'. Whole another thing is doing same with organic matter that can not be 'programmed', even if we knew how to do it (let alone there is no evidence that 'programming' is responsible for consciousness at all to begin with). This is also known as 'hard problem of consciousness' and David Chalmers is considered one of the leading experts in the field [3]. Basically smartest scientists in the world are clueless about this and do not know even where to b