James Tour lies again, 3'

More James Tour

Following my chat with Bill Ludlow, and the resulting creationist spams of pain and outrage, I was going to next post on James Tour's lame whine about "homochiral" everything. But, this seems to be a more obvious next step.

In James Tour’s “letter to John West” where he tried to deflect his many lies and slanders, Tour flatteringly wrote;

“The superb work by Professor Sutherland shows the enormous intellectual prowess of some of the top synthetic chemists in the world, restricting themselves to the reagents that might be found on a prebiotic earth, and yet cleverly making some key intermediates and then finally to a racemic nucleotide. That intellectual effort is something that a mindless prebiotic earth would be lacking. Sutherland and his team should be commended for first rate synthetic work. I wish I were as good a synthetic chemist as is John Sutherland.”

We will see this is a 180 degree spin from Tour’s Disco’tute lie fest to 1,000 Baptist preachers.
Just after James Tour lied about, and slandered Nobelist Jack Szostak, he trash talked Cambridge University Professor John Sutherland.

46:54, Slide: Patel, B.H., Percivalle, C., Ritson, D.J., Duffy, C.D. and Sutherland, J.D., 2015. Common origins of RNA, protein and lipid precursors ina cyanosulfidic protometabolism. Nature chemistry, 7(4), p. 301.


Tour's Commentary on his Lie Fest;
47:27
“He makes a little bit of it, and it is a bunch of junk.” “Then he says, we’ll just use synthetic organic techniques – real techniques – to make more – just to simplify handling procedures.”
47:37
“Come on, because you could only make a like a fraction of it and you wanted to carry it on but it was just a bunch of junk. It was just a peak in ah … “
47:46
It’s not real. And even with all your synthetic prowess … And these are just for intermediaries, not even the real compounds. (Next Slide) 

47:54 New Slide
48:54 New Slide
49:07 New slide

Tour posts a slide supposedly with Patel et al quoted on the slide, and follows “Then he (Sutherland) even goes so far as to say, “All the cellular subsystems could have arisen simultaneously through common chemistry.”

49:15
“That is crazy! Man! I’ll tell you, if you work in the area of nanotechnology you try to build systems, you take molecules to build into a system that functioned. He (Sutherland) says they, “could have arisen simultaneously through common chemistry?”

49:30
"That is a lie! And it is accepted in the best of journals! This is crazy!"

All he made was a couple of precursors and he is going into the assembly of all substance – Show me! If it could have happened, show me? He’ll never show you.”

So, James Tour keeps on lying even about how he lies. In his effort to save face from lying about Harvard Professor Jack Szostak, he lies about how he similarly treated Cambridge University Professor John Sutherland.

James Tour also has claimed to be an expert on the work of John Sutherland and sugars;  

“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: http://inference-review.com/article/animadversions-of-a-synthetic-chemist . And that 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.”

The paper that James Tour linked to was “Animadversions of a Synthetic Chemist, Why is everyone here lying? — Fyodor Dostoevsky “ James Tour, Inference: International Review of Science May 19, 2016 in Volume 2, Issue 2. And, as the editors clearly stated, “Inference is not a peer-reviewed journal.”

And what were the papers co-authored by Sutherland that Tour had “extensively studied … and critiqued?”

Matthew Powner, Béatrice Gerland, and John Sutherland, “Synthesis of Activated Pyrimidine Ribonucleotides in Prebiotically Plausible Conditions,” Nature 459 (2009): 239–42.

http://hoffman.cm.utexas.edu/courses/nature_prebiotic_rna.pdf

Patel, B.H., Percivalle, C., Ritson, D.J., Duffy, C.D. and Sutherland, J.D., 2015. Common origins of RNA, protein and lipid precursors in a cyanosulfidic protometabolism. Nature chemistry, 7(4), p.301.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4568310/

These had nothing at all to do with “Prebiotic synthesis of simple sugars by photoredox systems chemistry” Ritson, D. and Sutherland, J.D., 2012 Nature chemistry, 4(11), p.895. That paper was the exact citation that Dr. Ali, "the poor misled professor of psychiatry", had suggested James Tour should read. And then in Tour’s self adulation, and self excuse, he goes on and on about Patel et al, 2015. Sugars are mentioned, but in the confused reading by James Tour, he is avoiding the real point of that paper. The extensive mapping of the chemical reactions in Patel (2015) was descriptive. It was not prescriptive.

I must conclude that this is a common thread through all of James Tour’s failed reading of Origin of Life research. In his religion driven mania he must see all things as a “Divine Plan,” with a Divine Being needing to interfere periodically. There is nothing merely descriptive “this is just what happened.”

For more of Tour's and John West's supporting lies exposed, see; "Prof. James Tour and the Disco’Tutes: Still Lying, Part 3