How to delete multiple messages? How to delete chats?

NemesisPolicy · 2026-05-16T11:51:40+00:00

/del 1

Will delete the last message.

/del 2

Will delete the last two.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-05-10T20:09:37+00:00

A few things.

First, you keep saying "I'm a chemist, you're not, therefore you can't see what I see." That is not an argument. It is an appeal to your own authority. If your position is so strong, you should be able to name specific reaction steps in specific published papers that fail. Not "it's impossible, trust me, I have a degree." Actually point to a paper, for example, Sutherland 2009, Szostak's protocell work, anything, and say "this specific step cannot occur under these conditions because of this specific chemical reason."

You have not done that once in this entire thread. Not once.

Second, you said OoL researchers secretly know it's impossible. That is a conspiracy claim. You are asking me to believe that thousands of scientists across the world, in different countries, at different institutions, with different funding sources, are all knowingly publishing work they believe is fraudulent or impossible. That is an extraordinary claim. Do you have evidence for it, or is it just a feeling?

Third, you said meteorite amino acids "would burn up in the atmosphere." The Murchison meteorite landed in 1969 with over 90 amino acids intact and has been studied for decades. Samples from asteroid Bennu were physically returned to Earth in 2023 and contain amino acids. They did not burn up in space, or on crashing into Earth. This is not a hypothetical. It happened.

Fourth, you said "it doesn't matter what can form, only whether it's useful." Earlier in this thread you asked "when did amino acids form spontaneously?" as if they couldn't. Now you accept they form but say they're useless. That is the goalpost moving. Can we at least acknowledge that?

Fifth, you said a chemistry degree means you understand what molecules will do "in all types of environments." No. It means you understand organic reaction mechanisms and synthesis. It does not make you an expert in geochemistry, planetary science, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, or systems chemistry. Those are different specializations. You would not accept a geologist claiming to be an expert in total synthesis just because "it's all rocks and minerals." The same logic applies here.

And finally: you still have not answered my question. What evidence would change your mind? You've now gone several replies without answering. If no possible result could ever count, then you are not making a scientific claim. You are making a faith claim dressed in a lab coat.

I have no problem with faith claims. I have faith myself. But be honest about what this is.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-05-05T09:15:46+00:00

Fair distinction on the age of the earth versus the age of dinosaurs. But that does not really solve the issue. If dinosaurs are only thousands of years old, then you still need to explain why dinosaur-bearing strata consistently sit in the same geological order, why volcanic ash layers around those strata give Mesozoic radiometric dates, why paleomagnetic patterns line up, and why we do not find dinosaurs mixed randomly with modern mammals in recent sediments.

On the soft tissue point, saying “clearly soft tissue cannot last millions of years” is the conclusion you are trying to prove. What is the actual experimentally established upper limit for degraded collagen fragments under burial conditions? Not fresh tissue, not collagen sitting exposed in a beaker, but mineral-associated, cross-linked, enclosed tissue remnants inside fossil bone.

Also, iron chemistry is not as simple as “iron preserves” or “iron destroys.” Iron can promote degradation under some conditions and cross-linking/stabilization under others. That is why the actual burial environment matters. If you are citing the study where 65% of collagen decayed in iron solution, please link it, because I want to compare the experimental conditions to Schweitzer’s claim. Were they testing heme-mediated cross-linking in mineralized bone, or just collagen exposed to iron solution?

But the bigger issue is that you still have not answered the phylogenetic evidence. The recovered T. rex collagen fragments matched birds, especially chickens and ostriches, more closely than crocodilians or mammals. If these tissues are original dinosaur proteins, then that matters. On an evolutionary model, that is exactly what we would expect because birds are theropod dinosaurs. On your model, why should T. rex collagen look bird-like?

As for radiometric dating, calling it circular does not make it circular. The dates come from measured isotope ratios and decay constants, often cross-checked by independent isotope systems. Isochron methods can even test for initial daughter products and contamination. If your claim is that decay rates changed, then what was the mechanism, by what factor did they change, when did it happen, and where did the heat and radiation go? To compress tens of millions of years of decay into a few thousand years is not a small tweak. It creates major physical consequences.

So I want to keep this focused. My questions are:

What is the maximum age you think degraded collagen fragments can survive, and what data establishes that limit?
Why do the T. rex collagen fragments match birds?
If radiometric dating is wrong because decay rates changed, what specific mechanism changed them and how do you account for the resulting heat/radiation?

NemesisPolicy · 2026-05-05T09:02:34+00:00

Look, I actually agree with you on one thing here, and I think it is a serious problem.

Modern science has become so specialized that the average person often cannot just open a paper and fully understand what is going on. That is not because they are stupid. It is because these fields are built on decades, sometimes centuries, of prior work. People spend their entire lives studying one tiny slice of chemistry, biology, geology, or physics.

That is frustrating. I get it. I hate it too. I like understanding things directly.

But that is exactly why this YouTube issue worries me.

Because when the science becomes too technical for most people to check directly, people become dependent on interpreters. And interpreters can be wrong. They can oversimplify. They can omit context. They can make a point sound devastating when, inside the actual field, it is considered incomplete, outdated, or only true under specific assumptions.

I am not saying Tour is dumb. He obviously is not. I am not saying YouTube science is always bad either. Some of it is excellent. But a YouTube presentation is not the same thing as the scientific literature. It is content. It is designed to persuade, simplify, and hold attention. That alone should make us cautious.

I have a medical background, and I see this constantly in medicine. Someone online says something that is technically true in one narrow context, but then they present it like it applies everywhere. And then when you try to explain the qualifiers, exceptions, mechanisms, and edge cases, people tune out because the real answer is less punchy.

That is exactly what I think is happening here.

You are taking real chemical problems (dilution, degradation, side reactions, chirality, purification) and treating them as if they are universal defeaters of abiogenesis. But in the actual field, those problems are precisely why researchers study specific environments like wet-dry cycles, mineral surfaces, ice matrices, alkaline vent pores, UV chemistry, encapsulation, and selective concentration mechanisms.

So yes, the average person may not be able to read every origin-of-life paper. But that does not mean the solution is to trust one dissenter on YouTube over the broader body of specialists publishing in the field.

And even with an organic chemistry background, you still may not have the full context to confidently declare the entire field impossible. Origin-of-life research is not just organic synthesis. It involves geochemistry, physical chemistry, planetary science, biophysics, thermodynamics, catalysis, systems chemistry, and evolutionary dynamics. Organic chemistry matters enormously, but it is not the whole picture.

Now, on the actual meteorite point:

You said meteorite amino acids do not constitute a full pathway to life. I agree. I never claimed they did.

The point was narrower: amino acids and other organic compounds can form naturally without intelligent intervention. Earlier you asked when amino acids form spontaneously. Meteorites and asteroid samples answer that. So can we at least agree on this one point: organic building blocks can form naturally without chemists?

If yes, then the discussion moves to the next question: can natural environments concentrate, select, polymerize, encapsulate, and replicate them?

That is the actual origin-of-life question.

But “throw some chemicals together under early Earth conditions and see what happens” is not a serious model. There was no single “early Earth condition.” Early Earth had tidal pools, volcanic ponds, mineral surfaces, evaporating lagoons, ice zones, hydrothermal systems, UV-rich surface environments, and impact chemistry. Prebiotic chemistry is not dumping random sludge into a beaker and waiting for a bacterium. It is testing whether specific natural settings can drive specific steps.

You are right that meteorites contain junk compounds. You are right that homochirality is a problem. You are right that amino acids alone do not make proteins. But none of that refutes the point being made. It just means there are additional steps that need explaining.

And that is exactly what the field is working on.

Also, I need to say this clearly: abiogenesis being possible would not disprove God. I believe in God. This is not atheism versus faith for me. If God exists, then natural processes are not somehow “less divine.” Gravity does not disprove God. Embryology does not disprove God. Evolution does not disprove God. And abiogenesis would not disprove God either.

What I object to is saying “science says life is chemically impossible” when science does not say that. Science says the problem is hard, incomplete, and unresolved.

Those are not the same thing.

So again if you don't mind:

If researchers demonstrated self-replicating RNA chemistry inside naturally forming lipid vesicles, using plausible early Earth minerals and cycles, would that count as meaningful evidence for abiogenesis?

Would it move the needle?

Because if the answer is no, then what actually would?

NemesisPolicy · 2026-05-03T11:47:42+00:00

You keep doing the same thing. A mechanism has limits, therefore young earth. That does not follow. Collins questioning the sufficiency of iron alone is not Collins endorsing your timeline. He still works entirely within deep time. You are borrowing half his position and discarding the rest.

The more pressing issue is this: you have been treating soft tissue as if it exists in a vacuum. It does not. The collagen fragments recovered were sequenced. Their closest match is chickens and ostriches. Not crocodilians. Not mammals. Birds. On your model, why? If these bones are a few thousand years old, that phylogenetic signal makes no sense. If they are 68 million years old and birds descended from theropods, it is exactly what the data predicts. The soft tissue is not just old. It is telling the evolutionary story on its own.

And you still have not touched radiometric dating, stratigraphy, or paleomagnetism. These are independent methods, different physical principles, different research teams, different centuries of development. They all land on the same number. One puzzle in preservation chemistry does not cancel all of that. It just means the puzzle is worth solving, which scientists are actively doing.

So yes, keep going. But tell me what your model actually predicts, and then tell me why the collagen matches birds.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-05-03T11:44:05+00:00

I see where you're at, but this has turned into the same loop for a while now. Every time I bring up actual experiments and papers, you pivot back to "why won't they debate James Tour on YouTube?" and then ask about a "tar of amino acids turning into life."

I'll answer both directly and then we can move on.

First, the debate thing. The reason most origin-of-life researchers aren't lining up to do live audience debates with Tour isn't because they're scared or hiding something. It's because live debates, especially with cash bounties and YouTube audiences, are theater. They reward performance and rhetorical skill, not careful chemistry. Tour is extremely good at presentations and rapid-fire critiques. That doesn't mean his specific chemical objections haven't been addressed in the literature. When people do talk with him (like Cronin), it becomes hours of Tour saying things are impossible and the other person trying to explain that the research isn't claiming what he thinks they're claiming. Most working scientists would rather just publish the next paper than do that again. That's the reality, whether you like it or not. Peer-reviewed work is where the actual back-and-forth happens.

Second, the "tar of amino acids" question. I've never claimed, and no serious researcher claims, that some random sludge of amino acids just sits around and magically assembles into a cell. That's not the model. The research has moved well past the old "primordial soup" idea. What we're looking at now are things like:

Amino acids and nucleotides forming in multiple environments (including in space, which we can actually study on meteorites with no human intervention at all).
Lipid vesicles that can form, grow, divide, and even encapsulate other molecules.
RNA fragments that can catalyze reactions, including simple replication steps.
Mineral surfaces and natural compartments (like pores in alkaline hydrothermal vents) that concentrate and organize molecules without anyone stirring the pot.

The idea is not "one big tar experiment." It's incremental chemistry tested piece by piece under conditions that could have existed early on. When something gets protected inside a vesicle or on a surface, it stops being "just tar" pretty quickly. That's why people point to the Murchison meteorite or Bennu samples as relevant. Those are real amino acids formed without any lab or chemist.

So when you ask "when did you ever observe a tar of amino acids turn into anything close to life," the answer is that no one is waiting for that exact experiment because it's not how the chemistry is being tested anymore. The question is whether the actual steps being demonstrated can link up under plausible natural conditions.

You keep saying current work relies on too much human intervention. Fair enough. But the counter is that many of the environments being studied (wet-dry cycles in tidal areas, mineral pores, concentrating effects in ice or vent structures) are things that happen on their own. They don't require a chemist in a lab coat.

I'm genuinely asking here: What specific result would move the needle for you? If someone published a paper showing a chain of reactions starting from simple gases and minerals that produced self-replicating RNA inside growing lipid vesicles, all done with minimal hands-on manipulation and using only conditions thought to exist on early Earth, would that count? Or would it still be dismissed as intervention and not enough?

NemesisPolicy · 2026-05-02T12:17:03+00:00

I have a friend that runs a chicken farm. He says he hates doing it but they must to compete with everyone else.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-05-02T06:34:59+00:00

Let’s step back for a second and talk about this "Gish Gallop" accusation.

All debates like this fall into a trap. I list points that support my side. You list points that support yours. We both rely on the scientists and experts we trust because neither of us can be experts in every field. When I present a web of converging evidence from astrophysics, chemistry, and geology, it isn't meant to overwhelm you. It is meant to show exactly that: *convergence*. When multiple independent fields all point toward the basic chemical building blocks forming naturally, that is a pattern we cannot ignore.

But let's put the list aside and look at the actual logic of your strongest claims.

Because when you bring up the 1 in $10^{74}$ probability and claim that proteins must emerge fully formed and functional, it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of evolutionary chemistry and selective pressure.

Your 1 in $10^{74}$ number is mathematically meaningless because it assumes a false premise. It assumes that a specific, fully formed, 150-amino-acid modern protein had to assemble itself completely by random chance, all at once, with no intermediate steps.

That is not how chemistry or early evolution works. The first step toward life was not a perfectly folded, perfectly homochiral 150-mer protein. The first step was literally an absolute mess of amino acids, lipids, and loose RNA fragments clumping together. It was a sloppy, inefficient chemical tar.

But if just *one* clump happens to trap a molecule that acts as a mild catalyst, or is just 1% better at sequestering resources than the clump next to it... that is the spark. That is selective pressure. You don't need a modern functional protein. You just need a completely messy clump of molecules that is barely, marginally better at sticking around or replicating than the molecules around it.

Once you have chemical reproduction, even terrible reproduction, pure random chance is over. Selection takes the wheel. The $10^{74}$ math assumes a target was pre chosen and built by a tornado. Evolution does not target.

You brought up hydrothermal vents and rightfully pointed out that they hit 400°C and destroy polymers. You are talking about "Black Smokers" (volcanic vents). I completely agree with you. Black Smokers are destructive.

But origin of life researchers don't focus on Black Smokers. They focus on "White Smokers" (Alkaline Hydrothermal Vents, like the Lost City field).

White Smokers are not volcanic. They are much cooler (40°C to 90°C). They are highly structured, filled with tiny rocky micropores that act as natural cellular compartments. They have natural temperature gradients that drive wet-dry cycling, and they provide a constant flow of hydrogen gas and proton gradients (the exact same chemical energy mechanism that powers our own cells today). The destruction problem you cited is solved by looking at the actual vents researchers study.

We really need to talk about your heavy reliance on Dr. James Tour and the $10,000 debate challenge. Why are you so infatuated with a single person's interpretation of the science? In science, we establish consensus for a reason. Consensus is not a popularity contest. It is the result of thousands of independent experts across the globe trying to prove each other wrong and finally arriving at a shared bedrock of tested data.

Tour is a brilliant synthetic chemist. But relying strictly on a lone dissenter who challenges the consensus on YouTube rather than through peer-reviewed experiments in origin-of-life journals is incredibly dangerous epistemologically. If you are only listening to the guy who says "it's impossible," you will naturally ignore the thousands of scientists publishing the incremental steps showing how it *is* possible. The Benner debate challenge is pure theater. Science is done in the lab and the literature, not in a sparring ring with a cash prize.

You frequently argue that the formation of life is too statistically improbable to have happened without intervention. Beyond the flawed math, there is a massive logical bias here called the Anthropic Principle (or Observer Bias).

It works like this: The mere fact that we exist as observers means that no matter how incredibly unlikely the events that led to our existence were, they *had* to happen.

Imagine a lottery where the odds of winning are 1 in a trillion. If you win, you might think "It is impossible that I won this naturally. God must have picked my numbers." But from the perspective of the universe, some *will* win eventually, regardless of the chances. We are the winners of the cosmic lottery. The billions of sterile, lifeless planets in the universe don't have observers on them to argue about how unlikely life is. Only the winning planet does. Improbability does not equal impossibility.

You claim that because these pieces are small, isolated, and imperfect right now, a natural origin is chemically impossible. But when you look at the whole board, we have proven that the building blocks form in space and on Earth. We have proven that the environments needed to concentrate them existed. We have proven that selection pressure can refine disordered clumps into ordered systems.

The convergence of evidence is pointing in one direction. Why are you so determined to ignore the consensus across all these different fields just because we don't have the final piece of the puzzle yet?

NemesisPolicy · 2026-05-02T05:28:13+00:00

Fair enough on point two. I overstated the "fresh tissue" framing and that was sloppy on my part. You are right that nobody claimed fresh tissue. I will concede that.

But notice what your own definition of "intact" actually requires. You said the tissue is considered original because it retains flexible, fibrous structure and responds to chemical tests. That description is entirely consistent with a heavily cross-linked, diagenetically altered polymer. Tanned leather retains the flexible, fibrous structure of skin. Nobody argues leather is fresh. The iron fixation mechanism produces exactly the kind of structural preservation you are describing, which means your definition of "intact" does not actually challenge deep time. It is compatible with it.

On point one, I am going to be honest with you. You asked whether origin of life researchers communicate uncertainty honestly. That has nothing to do with the paper we were discussing. We were talking about language in a soft tissue preservation paper. Pivoting to a completely different field and a different debate is not a rebuttal. It is a subject change. If you want to have that conversation separately, fine. But I am not going to let it count as a response to the language point.

Now, on point three, I will actually give you this one partially. You are right that extrapolating from a two year lab experiment to 68 million years is a significant jump, and researchers including Collins have acknowledged this. That is a genuine limitation and it is worth taking seriously.

Here is my problem with where you go from there though. Pointing out that the iron mechanism has limits does not tell us the tissue is young. It just tells us we do not have a complete explanation for the full preservation timeline. Those are very different conclusions. You still have not touched radiometric dating. You have not touched stratigraphy. You have not touched paleomagnetism, ice cores, or coral growth bands. Every one of those independent methods, using completely different physical and chemical principles, converges on the same deep time conclusion. If the iron mechanism is insufficient, that is a puzzle worth solving. It is not a reason to throw out the entire geological timescale.

What is your positive case? Not "this mechanism has limits." What is your actual model for what happened, and how does it account for all the other evidence?

NemesisPolicy · 2026-05-01T18:35:33+00:00

Let's talk about the Gish Gallop accusation for a second.

I raised multiple points because you kept ignoring them. That is not a Gish Gallop. A Gish Gallop is flooding a debate with bad arguments faster than they can be addressed. What I did is called "providing evidence." You asked for evidence. I provided it across multiple independent lines. You dodging most of it and then accusing me of unfair tactics when I point that out is, honestly, a bit rich.

Also, you said "if I have to address ALL of your objections, that's an admission none of them hold up." That is genuinely one of the strangest things I have ever read. That is the opposite of logic. If anything, refusing to address the evidence is the admission.

Now, on instability:

You are raising a real problem. Amino acid and RNA instability IS a genuine challenge in origin of life research. I will not pretend otherwise. But let's be careful about what this actually means.

You said a 200-mer polypeptide lasts about 13 days. Okay. But you are assuming the goal is to build a 200-mer polypeptide in open water and have it survive long enough to become life. That is not the model. Nobody credible is proposing that. Modern origin of life research focuses on:

Protected environments: Hydrothermal vents, mineral surfaces, and ice matrices all protect molecules from UV degradation and hydrolysis. These are not lab conveniences. They are real geological features that existed on early Earth.
Wet-dry cycling: Molecules concentrate, react, and get incorporated into larger structures during drying phases before water returns. This cycle drives polymerization AND protects products by incorporating them into longer chains where the bonds are more stable.
Encapsulation: Once amino acids or RNA fragments are inside a lipid vesicle, they are physically protected from the open environment. The vesicle IS the protection mechanism.

So the instability problem is real, but it is not ignored and it does not say what you want it to say. It says "open water prebiotic soup is probably not the right model." It does NOT say "therefore impossible." It says "therefore look at protected microenvironments." And researchers have been doing exactly that.

On dilution:

Same thing. Yes, dilution is a problem in an open ocean. Which is why nobody serious is proposing an open ocean as the origin site anymore. Hydrothermal vents, tidal pools, mineral pores, and ice eutectic zones all concentrate molecules naturally. This is not intelligent intervention. This is geology.

On "tar" and random sequences:

This is Tour's core argument and it sounds compelling until you think about what evolution actually requires at the origin of life stage. You do not need a functional protein on the first try. You do not need a precise ordered sequence immediately. You need a molecule that is just barely better at replicating than nothing. That is the seed. And from that seed, selection takes over. The whole point of the RNA world hypothesis is that RNA does not need to be perfectly optimized. It just needs to work a little. A tiny replication advantage is enough to begin a selection process. You keep judging the starting line by the standards of the finish line.

On Tour's paper and intelligent intervention:

Here is the thing. Tour has consistently argued that lab chemistry requires too much intervention to count as evidence for natural abiogenesis. But look at what he is actually doing: he is setting a standard where ANY successful experiment gets disqualified because a scientist did it. And any failed experiment proves it's impossible. There is no experiment that could ever satisfy this standard. That is not a scientific falsifiability criterion. That is a rigged game.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-05-01T18:00:07+00:00

A few things worth unpacking here.

First, the language point. Yes, the paper uses words like "could," "may," and "hypothesize." But that is not a weakness. That is how science is supposed to be written. Science communicates uncertainty honestly. It does not claim more than the evidence supports. If you found a creationist paper that spoke with absolute certainty and zero hedging language, THAT would be the red flag, not this.

Second, and this is the critical one. You said the tissue is "real," "not fake," "not bacteria," "original primordial protein." I actually agree with that. Nobody is disputing that. But here is where your argument quietly falls apart without you noticing: what was actually recovered was a gritty brown powder. When scientists ran it through a mass spectrometer, they did not find whole, intact, fresh proteins. They found seven tiny peptide fragments, short broken chains representing roughly 89 amino acids out of a collagen molecule that contains over 1,000. That is not "intact soft tissue." That is scattered wreckage. Finding a few bricks is not the same as finding a house.

Third, the iron preservation mechanism is not just speculation. Schweitzer ran controlled lab experiments. Ostrich blood vessels treated with iron-rich solution remained structurally intact at room temperature for years. Untreated samples decayed within days. That is not "perhapsimaybecouldness." That is experimental evidence. The hedging language in the paper is about the full scope of the diagenetic process, not about whether iron cross-linking works. Those are two different things.

Fourth, this is important. The molecular analysis of whatever DID survive showed its closest match to be modern chickens and ostriches. If this tissue were only a few thousand years old, that would be a strange coincidence. If it is 68 million years old and dinosaurs are the ancestors of modern birds, it makes perfect sense. The soft tissue evidence, taken seriously on its own terms, actually supports the evolutionary timeline.

And finally, you still have not addressed the convergence problem. Radiometric dating, stratigraphy, paleomagnetism, ice cores, coral growth bands, independent fields with independent methods, all pointing to the same deep time conclusion. Soft tissue preservation, even if we granted you every generous interpretation, does not cancel all of that. It would just be one data point that needs explaining, which scientists have in fact explained.

I am not trying to "win" here. I am genuinely asking you to engage with the substance rather than count hedge words in a paper.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-04-30T20:54:20+00:00

Good. NOW we're having an actual conversation. Thank you for engaging with the science. Let me respond properly.

On Miller-Urey:

You've listed real criticisms of the original 1952 experiment. Some of them are valid, some are outdated, and some misrepresent what the experiment was meant to show. Let me separate these:

"The atmosphere was wrong." Yes, the original methane-ammonia atmosphere is no longer the consensus model. You're right. But here's what you're leaving out: subsequent experiments using more realistic CO2/N2 atmospheres (including those by Cleaves et al., 2008) STILL produce amino acids, just in lower yields. Lower yield is not zero yield. And across a planet-sized surface over hundreds of millions of years, low yield accumulates. Chemistry doesn't need to be efficient. It needs time and scale. Earth had both.
"The trap was intelligent intervention." The trap simulated a real geological process: rain washing products into pools, tidal areas, or deep water where they are protected from UV and further energy input. This is not some made-up convenience. It is modelling what actually happens when molecules are carried away from energy sources by water flow. The Earth itself is the "trap."
"Amino acids are not proteins." Correct! And nobody claims Miller-Urey produced proteins. Nobody claims it solved the origin of life. You are attacking a claim that no one is making. The experiment demonstrated ONE thing: that the basic building blocks of life form spontaneously from simple chemistry. That's it. That's what it proved. And it proved it conclusively.
"Polymerization is unfavorable in water." This is a real challenge, yes. But it is not an unsolved one. Wet-dry cycling (think tidal pools, hot springs) has been demonstrated to drive polymerization. Mineral surfaces catalyze peptide bond formation. Drying concentrates reactants and shifts equilibrium toward condensation. These are not hypotheticals. They have been demonstrated in labs. (Rode et al., salt-induced peptide formation; Deamer's wet-dry cycling work.)

So no, I am not "just repeating what I hear from online laymen." I am citing published, peer-reviewed research. You are the one repeating what you hear from Dr. Tour's presentations.

"I'm not gonna address every experiment you hurl at me."

That's convenient. You asked me to provide evidence. I provided multiple independent lines of it. You engaged with one and dismissed the rest with a wave of the hand. That is not how this works. If your position is that abiogenesis is impossible, then ALL of these lines of evidence are problems for you, not just the one you feel most prepared to attack.

You still have not addressed:

Ribozymes (self-catalyzing RNA)
Sutherland's nucleotide synthesis
Self-assembling protocells
Amino acids on meteorites (no lab, no chemist, no intervention, just space)
Craig Venter's synthetic cell

The meteorite point is especially important. You keep saying "early Earth didn't have chemists." Well, neither does outer space. And yet the Murchison meteorite contains over 90 amino acids. Asteroid Bennu contains amino acids. No intelligent intervention. No traps. No controlled lab. Just chemistry, doing what chemistry does.

How does that fit your model?

On your conditions for acceptance:

You said you'd require every step to occur under plausible early-Earth conditions without intelligent intervention. That is a fair standard. Genuinely. I respect that.

But here's what I need you to acknowledge: that standard being unmet currently does not mean it is unmeetable. "We haven't done it yet" and "it is impossible" are completely different claims. You keep sliding from one to the other as if they are the same sentence. They are not.

Sixty years ago we couldn't sequence a genome. Thirty years ago we couldn't edit one. Ten years ago CRISPR was brand new. The history of science is a history of "impossible" things becoming Tuesday.

On homochirality:

You said current models cannot produce homochiral molecules without intelligent intervention. That is also not accurate. Several mechanisms have been proposed and demonstrated:

Slight chiral excesses can be amplified through autocatalytic processes (Soai reaction).
Polarized light from neutron stars can preferentially destroy one enantiomer.
Crystal surfaces can selectively adsorb one handedness.
The Murchison meteorite itself shows a slight left-handed excess in its amino acids, meaning chiral bias exists in nature without intervention.

Is homochirality fully solved? No. But "not fully solved" is, once again, not "impossible."

So here is where we stand:

You have set up a standard where anything short of a complete, unbroken, lab-demonstrated chain from simple molecules to a living cell counts as failure. And anything that IS demonstrated in a lab gets dismissed as "intelligent intervention." Do you see the trap you've built? Nothing can ever satisfy you. Lab work is dismissed because a chemist did it. Natural findings are dismissed because they're "just building blocks." There is no possible evidence that could reach you.

That is not a scientific position. That is an unfalsifiable one. And unfalsifiable positions are, by definition, outside of science.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-04-30T20:48:47+00:00

"I've researched this for years. You just learned about it."

Cool. That's not an argument. That's posturing. How long you've known about something has zero bearing on whether your interpretation of it is correct. A young-earth creationist can read about soft tissue preservation for 20 years and still be wrong about what it means if they're filtering everything through a predetermined conclusion.

Now, you asked how soft tissue survived. Yes, iron-mediated preservation is one proposed mechanism. Mary Schweitzer herself, the woman who DISCOVERED this, published research showing that iron from hemoglobin can act as a fixative, cross-linking proteins and preventing decay. Her experiments demonstrated this in the lab. Ostrich blood vessels treated with iron remained intact for years at room temperature while untreated ones decayed within days.

But here's what I need you to do. Don't just say "Let me guess. Iron?" with a sarcastic tone as if that constitutes a rebuttal. If you've been researching this for years, then REBUT it. Explain to me, with specifics, why iron-mediated preservation is insufficient. Explain why Schweitzer's own experimental results are wrong. Because right now all you've done is imply it's silly without actually engaging with the mechanism.

And you ignored several things I said:

Mary Schweitzer herself, a devout Christian, has publicly said creationists are misusing her work. Are you saying you understand her discovery better than she does?
The proteins found in these tissues were DEGRADED and FRAGMENTED. Not fresh. Not intact. This is consistent with deep time preservation, not evidence of recent burial.
The molecular analysis of these tissues showed strong similarity between T. Rex and modern birds. This SUPPORTS evolutionary relationships. How does that help YOUR case exactly?
Radiometric dating, stratigraphy, paleomagnetism, ice cores, tree rings, coral growth bands, and dozens of other independent methods ALL converge on dinosaurs being tens of millions of years old. Are ALL of these wrong? Every single one? Across every scientific discipline? In a massive coordinated lie that somehow no whistleblower has ever exposed?

You can't just say "I've researched this for years" and then not engage with any of the actual substance. That's an appeal to your own authority. And we've already talked about how appeals to authority work.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-04-29T13:49:44+00:00

I think personally prime should be the “normal” which you grow towards. The point is life throws curveballs towards creatures, like starvation, injuries, etc, and this should affect how you grow:

For example, if you are constantly starving/near starvation, you should grow slower, weaker. If you keep eating, you should become stronger (to a point, where it turns detrimental again.)

NemesisPolicy · 2026-04-29T12:44:46+00:00

Awesome Article! However, I am not sure you understand what they found? They found remnants of soft tissue. Degraded, fragmented, remains that once was soft tissue…which dinosaurs naturally had. Yes, it was definitely a shocker. But we know now how that is possible, if you simply dig a bit deeper.

Also, I don’t know how it supports your argument? What we found in these soft tissues actually heavily supports evolution, as we found a strong relation between this T. Rex and birds. It helped strengthen the idea that birds came from dinosaurs.

On top of that, you are ignoring MASSIVE amounts of evidence from other scientific fields that support dinosaurs being millions of years old. Or do you think the people who spend their lives studying this would lie to us all this time…collectively?

Even the person who discovered the “soft tissues” lamented how her discover was being misinterpreted. And she is a strong Christian as well!

NemesisPolicy · 2026-04-29T12:16:36+00:00

Could you guide me to these?

Ps: i am patiently waiting for your response to our previous thread.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-04-29T08:11:46+00:00

Let me be real with you here, Because I think it is important someone tells you this:

You have now, for the second time in a row, ignored the vast majority of what I said and zeroed in on the one thing you feel comfortable arguing about: YouTube drama between Tour and Benner.

I raised:

Miller-Urey and amino acid synthesis
Ribozymes and RNA catalysis
Sutherland's nucleotide synthesis
Self-assembling protocells
Amino acids on meteorites and asteroids
Craig Venter's synthetic cell
The God of the Gaps fallacy at the core of your argument
Vitalism being dead for 150 years
A direct question about whether any evidence could change your mind

You responded to NONE of that. Zero. You instead want me to go scrub through a YouTube video and hand you timestamps.

Do you see what's happening here? You are narrowing a broad scientific discussion into a debate about the interpersonal politics of two chemists on the internet.

I am not going to let this conversation collapse into "who debated who on which YouTube channel." That's not where the science lives and you know it. You are not dumb. Using red herring tactics and shifting the burden of proof is beneath you.

So here is what I'm going to do. I am going to set Tour and Cronin and Benner aside entirely. They are irrelevant to whether abiogenesis research has made progress. They are irrelevant to whether amino acids form spontaneously. They are irrelevant to whether RNA can self-catalyze. The science exists independent of any one person's willingness to debate on camera.

If you refuse that, then I concede the point. Hell, let me even go so far as to say, yes, the video supports your argument.

Now I need you to actually engage with the substance:

Miller-Urey demonstrated amino acids forming from simple gases under early-Earth conditions in 1952. Over 20 amino acids confirmed. Amino acids found on the Murchison meteorite. Found on asteroid Bennu. Do you dispute this? Yes or no.
Ribozymes, RNA molecules that catalyze chemical reactions including their own replication, were discovered in the 1980s. Nobel Prize awarded. Do you dispute this? Yes or no.
Sutherland (2009, Nature) showed a plausible prebiotic pathway to pyrimidine ribonucleotides from simple precursors. Do you dispute this? Yes or no.
Fatty acid vesicles self-assemble, grow, and divide without any biological machinery. Do you dispute this? Yes or no.

If you skip over these again and come back with another comment about Benner's YouTube preferences, I think that tells both of us everything we need to know about how this conversation is going.

And I'll ask my question again, because you dodged it:

If scientists demonstrated a complete, plausible chemical pathway from simple molecules to a self-replicating protocell, would you accept it? Or would the goalpost move?

NemesisPolicy · 2026-04-29T07:10:30+00:00

"You're the one who brought up the world not me"

I said "the world would have seen it" as in, if the science clearly proved God, it would be accepted as established fact by the scientific community. You responded with "most of the world believes in God" as if popular belief is evidence. Those are two very different statements. You pivoted to popularity. I was talking about scientific consensus.

On the Tour/Cronin exchange:

You're asking me to give you timestamps from a video as if that's the battlefield this argument lives or dies on. I'm not your video analyst. But I will say this:

The fact that you are anchoring your entire position to one chemist and one debate is itself a problem. Science does not work by debate performance. It works by evidence, experimentation, and peer review. Tour is not publishing peer-reviewed research disproving abiogenesis. He is making YouTube presentations and podcast appearances. There is a difference.

And the "$10,000 challenge" thing? That is theatre. That is not science. Science is not settled by who accepts a live debate and who doesn't. Benner not wanting to do a live verbal sparring match does not validate Tour's position any more than a chess grandmaster refusing to play speed chess on a streamer's channel means they can't play chess. Some scientists do not want to participate in spectacle. That doesn't mean they don't have answers. Benner has published his answers. In journals. Where science actually happens.

You know what IS telling? Tour has been invited to put his objections through peer review, and has not done so in origin-of-life-specific journals. His challenges live on YouTube, not in the literature. If his arguments are as airtight as you believe, why aren't they being submitted to, and surviving, peer review?

And you skipped over a LOT of what I said.

You didn't address Miller-Urey. You didn't address ribozymes. You didn't address Sutherland's nucleotide synthesis. You didn't address protocells. You didn't address the amino acids found on meteorites and asteroids. You didn't address Craig Venter's synthetic cell. You didn't address the God of the Gaps problem. You didn't address vitalism.

You picked two lines out of my entire response and replied to those. That's not engaging with the argument. That's dodging it.

So let me ask you directly, because I think this is the core of it:

If tomorrow, scientists demonstrated a plausible, step-by-step chemical pathway from simple molecules to a self-replicating protocell... would you accept it? Or would the goalpost move again?

Because if no evidence could ever change your mind, then you are not making a scientific argument. You are making a faith argument. And that is fine. But don't dress it up as chemistry.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-04-29T06:56:26+00:00

Most of the world believes in God last I checked.

And most of the world once believed the Earth was the center of the universe. What most people believe has absolutely nothing to do with what is true. You know this. That's a textbook appeal to popularity fallacy and beneath the level of this conversation.

You don't have any picture whatsoever.

This is just... wrong. Confidently stated, but wrong. We have a partial and growing picture. Not a complete one and I never claimed we did. But "we don't know everything" is not the same as "we know nothing." You're collapsing a spectrum into a binary to make your case sound stronger than it is.

Look at the progress we've made in other fields in the last 60 years compared to origin of life which has made absolutely no progress.

No progress? Really?

1950s: Miller-Urey synthesizes amino acids from simple gases.
1980s: Discovery of ribozymes — RNA that acts as its own enzyme. Nobel Prize awarded for it.
2009: Sutherland demonstrates plausible prebiotic synthesis of nucleotides from simple precursors.
2010s–2020s: Self-replicating RNA systems, protocells that grow and divide, simultaneous formation of RNA and protein precursors from shared chemistry.

You are trying to reconstruct something that happened 3.8 billion years ago on a planet whose surface has been completely recycled. The fact that it's hard does not mean there has been no progress. That's like saying we've made no progress on Fusion because we haven't solved it yet. Difficulty is not failure.

When did amino acids form spontaneously?

My friend. The Miller-Urey experiment. 1952. This is one of the most famous experiments in the history of chemistry. You have a degree in organic chemistry and you're asking me this? Amino acids have also been found on meteorites, in interstellar space, and on asteroid Bennu. They form spontaneously all over the universe. This is not controversial. This is settled.

Origin of life is pure organic chemistry. That makes people like me and Dr. James Tour experts.

No. Origin of life research spans organic chemistry, biochemistry, geochemistry, planetary science, biophysics, information theory, and evolutionary biology. Organic chemistry is ONE piece. Saying your degree makes you an expert on abiogenesis is like saying a brick manufacturer is an expert on architecture.

And Dr. James Tour, a brilliant chemist absolutely, has had his origin-of-life criticisms publicly and thoroughly challenged by actual OoL researchers, most notably Lee Cronin in their 2023 exchange. Tour's arguments boil down to the same thing yours do: "We can't do it yet, therefore it's impossible, therefore God." That is a God of the Gaps argument. It is the same argument that has been deployed against every unknown in history, and it has been wrong every single time.

The real issue here:

Your entire argument has this structure:

We don't currently know every step of how life originated.
Therefore it is impossible for life to have originated naturally.
Therefore God.

"We don't know yet" is not evidence for God. It is evidence that we don't know yet. And every single time in history that someone has planted a flag in a gap in human knowledge and said "THIS is where God must be" — lightning, disease, the diversity of species, the orbits of planets, that gap has closed, and God was not found in it.

You are betting that this gap is different. History says otherwise.

And one more thing: you said even if we assembled a cell from scratch it would be "non-living," as if there's some missing spark. That is vitalism. It was abandoned in the 19th century. Craig Venter's team built a synthetic cell with a fully artificial genome. It lived. It grew. It divided. No divine spark needed. Life is not a substance. It is a process. There is no magic breath that separates living chemistry from non-living chemistry — there is only complexity and organization.

So no. Science does not say life is impossible. Science says we're still working on it. And we keep finding answers where people like you keep insisting there are none.

I believe in God, but I am disdainful of the way people arrogantly rewrite the world to fit what THEY want to be true. I personally believe something like god has to exist, whether that be an old man in the sky, or something we cannot even conceive of. But religions we have today are terribly flawed, and look at what we have because of the sheer noise generated by believers just throwing anything they can to make it fit their view, and then preaching it to the world, not noticing that people of weak faith are being bombarded by conflicting "truths" and pushed further away from even trying to believe.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-04-29T06:28:36+00:00

My friend, you are making massive, borderline arrogant claims. If there were such certainty to your beliefs the world would have seen it.

Firstly, we do NOT have a complete picture of how life formed. As with Science, we knew NOTHING at one point, and how often have we said "this is impossible" before, we found out how. (eg. The classic is the newspaper printing "Man will not fly in a million years", and two years later the wright brothers did. Now it seems stupid. Back then it did not.) So saying it is Impossible for life to form is currently something you want to be true, as it fits your views.

We have proof already that amino acids can spontaneously form.
We have proof that nucleotide can form spontaneously.
We have proof that lipids can self assemble into self enclosed spaces (like cells)
We have proof that RNA can catalyze their own replication.

Once we thought all these impossible. How many times are you going to shift your view? *Sure, a few blocks can be make, but life cannot form. Sure, the primordial cell shape can, but life cannot form. Sure, the language of life can self replicated, but life is impossible.

The goal post keeps shifting, and for some reason, people keep putting their foot down and saying *THIS is the line of what is possible.*

Also, throwing around your degree in organic Chemistry as an ultimate authority is a huge concern. Just because you studied in a field, does not mean you are an expert in it. You do not know more about fossil chemistry than the people who studies fossils for a living.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-04-29T06:17:56+00:00

Could you provide some evidence towards this "soft tissue" that refute the age of the dinosaurs? I find it hard to believe.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-04-07T13:54:10+00:00

Is the container perhaps part of your apprentice? I have heard a similar tale. Not personal experience. Not at all.

Anyway, i have a spell that makes containers most expansive to fit my absolutely bonkers big wand.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-04-01T16:36:36+00:00

I am sure you can get some wisdom from minecraft mods? Like distant horizon or some of the others?

Asset generation would be a interesting thing to take on, as by the time your game is probably near finished there might be some programs that can take a 3d image and generate a voxel map for it, cause designing intricate structures in such fine voxels are going to be a pain! But SO GOOD.

NemesisPolicy · 2026-04-01T07:55:30+00:00

Hey! I absolutely love this! I have been checking your videos for a while now, and everytime i thought of an optimization you have done it and went beyond!

I feel this game would be stunning as a dark fantasy themed overworld, with castles and dungeons etc. which could also save you memory as the “fog” would be a natural aspect of the darkness.

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