Last year I made a video about James Tour, a chemist and creationist who speaks out against origin of life research. He didn't like it much, so he decided to make a 14-part series about how dumb I am. He really pulled out all the stops, parading all of his classic fallacious talking points, with plenty of bald-faced lies and deliberate misrepresentations of scientific research peppered in for good measure. Honestly, I was rather shocked at how stupid it was. With so much material to work with, I ended up with quite a lot to say in response, and had to split it into two parts.

In this Part 2, we examine how James is lying about our progress towards prebiotic syntheses of all the major classes of biomolecules, and when it comes to cells, James would rather mislead his viewers with dazzling animations of modern eukaryotic cells than actually dig into the relevant literature. If you thought Part 1 was devastating, strap in.

Part 1 of this response:    • Response to James Tour: 700 Papers an...  
My original video on James:    • Elucidating the Agenda of James Tour:...  

Research cited in this video:
Condensation of amino acids in water: https://link.springer.com/article/10....
Amyloid aggregates from amino acid condensations: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/a...
Lee's formation of oligopeptides: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomm...
Peptides by mechanochemistry: https://chemrxiv.org/articles/preprin...
Bruce's peptide bond formation: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/...
Peptide bond half-life: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/...
A route to enantiopure RNA precursors from nearly racemic starting materials: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21860...
Hydrothermal conditions at the origin of cellular life: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.108...
Lipid-assisted polymerization of nucleotides: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/9/4/83
A defense of the RNA world hypothesis: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
Testing ideas in prebiotic analogue conditions: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/11/2/134
The emergence of RNA from the heterogeneous products of prebiotic nucleotide synthesis: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33636...
Jack's nature.com article for laypeople: https://media.nature.com/original/mag...
Lee and the formose reaction: https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrar...
Breslow's autocatalysis: https://www.pnas.org/content/107/13/5723
Peptide-based organocatalysis: https://www.pnas.org/content/103/34/1...
Impressive 92-mer polysaccharide total synthesis: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomm...
Seeberger's automated glycan assembly: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs...
McCollum's lipid synthesis: https://link.springer.com/article/10....
The lipid world: https://link.springer.com/article/10....
Nick Lane and chemiosmosis: https://www.molevol.hhu.de/fileadmin/...
Nick Lane on membrane divergence: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
Selection of prebiotic molecules in amphiphilic environments: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/7/1/3
Full clip of Christian Mayer:    • AbSciCon 2019 - Room 2 Day 3 - Christ...  
Vesicles and nucleic acid amplification: https://www.nature.com/articles/nchem...
Lee's protocells: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4146...

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