A Chemist Who Thinks He Understands Biology Better Than Biologists Do.

James Tour is a synthetic organic chemist at Rice University.  His work  primarily involves building nanotechnology from organic chemicals.  He is by all accounts very good at the work he does, and is widely published.  Unfortunately, he has also gained a reputation on the internet for being a prominent denier of the theory of evolution and has recently become affiliated (though not necessarily in an official capacity) with the creationist Discovery Institute (DI).  You can read more about some of his thoughts and opinions on evolution in this article from Larry Moran’s Sandwalk blog.

In recent months it appears that Tour has been investing increasing amounts of time and effort criticizing what he believes to be misleading and false biological research published regarding evolution and the origin of life.  This video, from a conference organized by the DI, has been widely circulated by creationists:

It’s an hour long and I don’t expect you to watch the whole thing, but I was particularly troubled by the segment that begins at 43:00, where Tour accuses the Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak  of “lying” in some of his publications on origin of life research.  I was not the only one who was unimpressed by Tour’s accusations. Bill Ludlow and Gary Hurd, two longtime veterans of the evolution vs creationism “debate”, created a video in which they dissected Tour’s claims and demonstrated that it was not Szostak who should be accused of lying:

It appears that Tour himself had some misgivings about the language he used in his speech to refer to his peers and issued an apology of sorts.  However, in this statement he continues to double down on the accusations he makes against Szostak and other researchers of misleading the public, and provides this anecdote: 

A professor of psychiatry from a Canadian university even wrote to me last week saying that I was wrong in my Dallas lecture since Sutherland has shown that those simple compounds can lead to the nucleotides, and accusing me of not being familiar with a 2012 paper by Sutherland. Little did he know that I had extensively studied Sutherland’s work and critiqued it in 2016…. (T)hat poor psychiatrist had been misled by Szostak to believe that all this chemistry is worked out and simply heat and light can work this magic. How misled even professors can become from these writings in Nature. The academy is led astray.

Well, you may be able to guess who that poor misled Canadian psychiatrist was.  That’s right, it was yours truly.  I had sent Szostak an email just to bring the video to his attention (he responded with a brief message saying he might consider responding to Tour), and then I decided I might as well message Tour as well. This led to an exchange of several emails between April 21 and 29, 2019.  It did not end well, with Tour making a complaint to the administration of my department (In fairness, I’ll admit that by the end my tone was not as collegial or courteous as it should have been.)

I was thinking of writing a more detailed response on this blog, but as it happens Gary Hurd is already in the midst of a series about Tour, so I will instead refer readers there, rather than try reinvent the wheel.  If I have any more to add to what Gary ends up writing, I will post it here.

I will conclude with some remarks on Tour’s latest video volley in this ongoing discussion:

Now, it is a longstanding practice of creationists to tout the feigned authority of non-biologists when discussing biological topics such as the theory of evolution. However, Tour here seems to be trying to take this to another level, and claiming that on the biological subject of the origin of life, we should ignore the work of biologists, and instead just listen to chemists. The title of that video should evoke a response along the lines of “Tell us something we don’t know, Captain Obvious.” Of course the origin of life has not been solved. This is one of the most complicated and difficult questions currently subject to scientific research. The Jack Szostak article that so raised Tour’s ire was included in a special issue of Nature (intended for a general audience and not part of the “primary literature, as Tour claimed) entitled The Biggest Questions in Science. Among these were “What is dark matter?” and “What is consciousness?” If some professor of pharmacology had made a video entitled “We don’t have the cure for cancer,” would anyone pay attention to it? Of course we don’t have the cure for cancer. That’s why the research continues. The same applies to origin of life research.

The difference between the two, however, is that everyone wants a cure for cancer to be found, and hopes it will be found. I doubt OOL researchers are unaware of the questions that Tour raises in that video. However, where Tour sees these as insurmountable obstacles, OOL researchers see them a challenges to be overcome. I can only speculate on Tour’s motivation for belittling this research, but I do not think it is an accident that the Discovery Institute is so enthusiastically championing him. They want to promote the idea that the origin of life is a mystery that cannot be solved thru “materialist” science, because life can only be created by God. The progress that is being made in elucidating the processes by which life arose is a direct challenge to this claim, which is why this progress must be denied.