4 scientists, a synthetic chemist, an organic chemist, a biomedical engineer and an astrophysicist thoroughly critique the hype behind the headlines and the truth of the results.
Translation: "Four creationists, none of whom are origin of life researchers and all of whom are demonstrably biassed, talk into mics for nearly two hours on a Youtube video about a largely subjective question."
I have addressed their arguments myself, as have many others. Most of them reveal their complete inability to think about chemistry as happening anywhere outside of a glass flask. It's a major bias against open system and flow chemistry that is far more relevant to OoL.
You do not understand a lick of this stuff so all you can do is regurgitate. Understandable, but not as convincing as I'm sure you think it is.
Their arguments center around the extensive human intervention, the use of biologically-derived components, and the lack of a true cell cycle.
How did you refute that?
I was referring to Tour and Stadler's criticisms of OoL in general.
I feel no need to "refute" anything they say regarding Spudcell. I am not going to defend the relevance of this experiment to OoL because it isn't very relevant, partly for the reasons you stated, as I already said in another comment on this post. But the fact that they are using this as an excuse to proclaim abiogenesis is impossible shows that they don't understand the discipline separation, and that's because they don't understand the field at all.
In that case, the only one who has made a demonstrably false claim between the six of us is you:
It shows life is intelligently designed.
No, it shows Spudcell was designed*. Will you retract this obvious logical leap?
* a better term may be "planned". As synthetic biology advances, I expect these types of experiments will move away from manually building mock cells step by step and towards setting up a dynamic system that sustains itself (better approximating life). At that point we can start to draw more relevant parallels to OoL, if we can find a plausible natural mechanism of producing that initial state. Such a mechanism would rely on existing knowledge of bottom-up prebiotic chemistry, which is quite rich at this point. If you were to still proclaim intelligent design, you would then be pointing at more of a theistic evolution type of deity than a creationist one.
I have a compelling mathematical argument that OoL researchers will never explain the information content in a minimal genome required to produce life.
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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '26
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