James Tour “is an American chemist and nanotechnologist. He is a Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science, and Nanoengineering, and Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas.” He also makes an excellent case for how rare “life” is!
It’s controversial because Tour also believes in intelligent design, so take that with you as you watch what follows.
And while we are surrounded by life, it is abundant; Tour challenges the effort to duplicate the idea that all of this just happened at random in some goo because it seems so incredibly unlikely.
He makes a good case. So much so that I did something I rarely do. I sat through an entire hour of something to which I had to pay at least moderate attention. That’s uncommon – and should be noted if you like to send me stuff “to watch.” If it’s more than ten or twelve minutes – except in rare instances – I won’t, sorry. My days are full, and time is a rare commodity – though not as rare, I’d gather, as life forming at random (or even in a controlled clean room lab with pure chemicals in the hands of brilliant scientists, which still hasn’t happened).
It’s a fun video to watch. James Tour is very animated.
Anyway, as I said, I found this fascinating, and no hurt feelings if you look at it and go, nope. But Tour lays out the chemistry of life in a way that makes its existence at random a complete mystery.
I’ve also included links to a criticism of this presentation (blog page here) and his response (here -pdf). I have skimmed both, and there is a lot of chemistry that you’ll need a chemist to verify (that’s not me). I will note that the linked criticism calls James Tour’s lies” as Trumpian, which I tried to ignore in measuring the value of the critique.
Here’s the presentation (2019 -Per-COVID). Ignore the German subtitles unless you speak German, I suppose.
