James Tour: The Mystery of the Origin of Life
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended by some as a blunt expert critique of origin-of-life research, while others question its claims and length.
What it is
Synthetic organic chemist James Tour gives a lecture arguing that origin-of-life research is far from explaining how life began. The talk was published by the Discovery Institute and drew sharp criticism.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2019 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec friendlybus · 2020-11 · on “I should have loved biology”
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 see
Strong rec freediver · 2022-04 · on “Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’”
> 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 s
Cites taejavu · 2019-08 · on “A chemical clue to how life started on Earth”
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: [this video]
Critical gus_massa · 2019-08 · on “A chemical clue to how life started on Earth”
From the first comment: > "amino acids don't hook together by themselves" [this 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 n