Szostak on abiogenesis

[jillery]

The following is a link to a 55-minute lecture by Jack Szostak,
describing the current status of his team's efforts to identify
plausible processes of abiogenesis. He follows his lecture with a
30-minute Q&A with the audience.

Some of the highlights of the lecture include demonstrations of how
lipid bilayers abiotically self-assemble, grow, and divide,
nonenzymatic RNA duplication, abiotic substrates for protein
synthesis, and functions of the first peptides.

The lecture suffers from multiple technical glitches. IMO the
information Szostak provides despite these glitches make viewing this
video worthwhile.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U841Zrd4C5g>


--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[Gary Hurd]

The original lecture was "The Origin of Life: Not as Hard as it Looks? Jack Szosta, Spring 2023 Eyring Lecturer"
https://www.youtube.com/@asuchemistry

The YouTube is the lecture slides.

[jillery]

On Tue, 11 Jul 2023 09:11:17 -0700 (PDT), Gary Hurd <gary...@cox.net>
wrote:

>On Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 1:35:36?AM UTC-7, jillery wrote:
>> The following is a link to a 55-minute lecture by Jack Szostak,
>> describing the current status of his team's efforts to identify
>> plausible processes of abiogenesis. He follows his lecture with a
>> 30-minute Q&A with the audience.
>>
>> Some of the highlights of the lecture include demonstrations of how
>> lipid bilayers abiotically self-assemble, grow, and divide,
>> nonenzymatic RNA duplication, abiotic substrates for protein
>> synthesis, and functions of the first peptides.
>>
>> The lecture suffers from multiple technical glitches. IMO the
>> information Szostak provides despite these glitches make viewing this
>> video worthwhile.
>>
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U841Zrd4C5g>
>>
>>

>The original lecture was "The Origin of Life: Not as Hard as it Looks? Jack Szosta, Spring 2023 Eyring Lecturer"
>https://www.youtube.com/@asuchemistry
>
>The YouTube is the lecture slides.

Your comment illustrates a limit of transcripts, which identified it
as a "hiring lecture", which led me to imagine Szostack was doing an
overly demanding job interview.

You seem familiar with the context of this lecture. I was surprised
at the number of children in the audience and the naivete of many of
the questions, suggesting something like the Royal Institute's
Christmas lectures, in contrast to a presentation to Szostack's
professional peers.

[Gary Hurd]

There were 2 lectures. The YouTube posted was for the general audience. The professional audience was the following day.

https://news.asu.edu/20230309-nobel-laureate-jack-szostak-deliver-distinguished-eyring-lecture-series-asu

I have no idea why the professional audience lecture was not video taped of YouTube.

[jillery]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2023 09:09:33 -0700 (PDT), Gary Hurd <gary...@cox.net>
wrote:

I hope they corrected the technical glitches for the second lecture.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 4:35:36 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:

> The following is a link to a 55-minute lecture by Jack Szostak,
> describing the current status of his team's efforts to identify
> plausible processes of abiogenesis. He follows his lecture with a
> 30-minute Q&A with the audience.

Actually closer to 35 minutes, and very indicative of how much
we still do NOT know about how hard or easy abiogenesis is.

The title of the lecture really overplays its hand:
"Scientist Stories: Jack Szostak, The Origin of Life Not as Hard as it Looks"

I much prefer the title given in another place where the same lecture is shown, despite
the misspelling of Szostak's name:

"The Origin of Life: Not as Hard as it Looks? Jack Szosta, Spring 2023 Eyring Lecturer"

-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLzyco3Q_Rg

The question mark in this title of the lecture is VERY appropriate.
If one wants to remove it, one needs a much more modest title:

"A Few Isolated Steps in the Origin of Life Are Not as Hard as they Look."

I've often used the metaphor of a 100 foot skyscraper, with the first free-living
prokaryote on the roof, while the prebiotic result of the Miller-Urey experiment
is in the basement, the complete list of amino acids used by life as we know it is on the first floor,
and the five nucleotides of life as we know it are on the second floor.

>
> Some of the highlights of the lecture include demonstrations of how
> lipid bilayers abiotically self-assemble, grow, and divide,

This was the isolated stage that impressed me the most.
The necessary lipids themselves I would put on the second floor, but once they are there,
they quickly ascend to the 10th floor to form the lipid vesicles with multiple membrane layers.

From the transcript, unedited except for removing linebreaks and intermediate times:

~46:10: "one of the nice things is you use microscopy to get beautiful images so like what you see here is when a vesicle made of a simple fatty acid oleic acid you just shake it up in water under the right conditions and it spontaneously makes beautiful membrane structures and here you can see smaller vesicles trapped inside a big one they're really really quite beautiful but they also have the amazing property that they can grow in very interesting ways
and so what I'm going to show you here's another movie this is one of these vesicles it's encapsulating a
fluorescent dye which is what you can actually see we had food which is more fatty acids and it grows like in this really an unexpected way ~46:55
...
~47:11: "if you have these vesicles that are kind of complex and they have multiple membrane layers you can throw in more of the building blocks of the membrane fatty acids in this case still and get incorporated into the membrane which will grow andwill grow in this unusual way into filaments which we kind of understand but not completely these are very fragile so they can break down to smaller the other vesicles which can grow and the cycle can repeat"~47:40

Unfortunately, having outrun the other necessities, they are stuck on the 10th floor until
the necessities make their way up there, and they can incorporate useful biomolecules
that they can metabolize, and not just ions or useless garbage.

> nonenzymatic RNA duplication,

This was around the 39 minute point, where he tried to show a film
about it, but after he made it work, he had to admit that there were a whole raft
of problems to complete the process, beginning with the puzzle of how to make the
two strands separate without either one coming apart, due to the complicated structure.

In our cells, other enzymes make this child's play, but...where's
the non-enzymatic way to complete the replication?

The whole process has to repeat on the complementary strand before there is a duplicate of the original.
"This is one of the big things we are working on now," says he a bit after the 45 minute mark,
after showing us a complicated disk with RNA in various places that he didn't have the time
to explain in detail.

> abiotic substrates for protein
> synthesis, and functions of the first peptides.

> The lecture suffers from multiple technical glitches. IMO the
> information Szostak provides despite these glitches make viewing this
> video worthwhile.

No argument there, as long as everyone reading this realizes how apropos my
much more modest suggestion for a title is.

> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U841Zrd4C5g>

Szostak is about as good as they come in the field of OOL, and the way he admits
to how much we do NOT know, especially in the Q&A session, he is well worth listening to.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[jillery]

On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 13:28:37 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 4:35:36?AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>
>> The following is a link to a 55-minute lecture by Jack Szostak,
>> describing the current status of his team's efforts to identify
>> plausible processes of abiogenesis. He follows his lecture with a
>> 30-minute Q&A with the audience.
>
>Actually closer to 35 minutes, and very indicative of how much
>we still do NOT know about how hard or easy abiogenesis is.

To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge. That
you apply it to abiogenesis uniquely overplays YOUR hand.

Your comments remind me of Creationists who, when confronted with
evidence of transitional forms, demand evidence of transitional forms
for those transitional forms. It's easy to dismiss what is known by
pointing to what is unknown.

> > abiotic substrates for protein
>> synthesis, and functions of the first peptides.
>
>> The lecture suffers from multiple technical glitches. IMO the
>> information Szostak provides despite these glitches make viewing this
>> video worthwhile.
>
>No argument there, as long as everyone reading this realizes how apropos my
>much more modest suggestion for a title is.
>
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U841Zrd4C5g>
>
>Szostak is about as good as they come in the field of OOL, and the way he admits
>to how much we do NOT know, especially in the Q&A session, he is well worth listening to.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 5:05:40 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 13:28:37 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >On Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 4:35:36?AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> >
> >> The following is a link to a 55-minute lecture by Jack Szostak,
> >> describing the current status of his team's efforts to identify
> >> plausible processes of abiogenesis. He follows his lecture with a
> >> 30-minute Q&A with the audience.
> >
> >Actually closer to 35 minutes, and very indicative of how much
> >we still do NOT know about how hard or easy abiogenesis is.

> To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge.

Too bad so many of your kindred spirits in talk.origins don't
acknowledge this where abiogenesis, a.k.a. OOL, is concerned.
Faced with huge gaps in our knowledge about it, they
use formulas like, "Sure, we don't know everything about it yet,"
or "Huge progress is being made every day," etc.

>That you apply it to abiogenesis uniquely overplays YOUR hand.

Not with the way your kindred spirits overplay THEIR hand
with nary a protest by you.

They rhapsodize about how what I call the first two floors
of my metaphoric 100 floor skyscraper are being better
and better understood every day. One of them, who
killfiled me about five years ago, even got angry at MarkE
for not reading up on these articles and books, and refusing all
invitations to discuss what I call the 40th floor and beyond.

Just the other day, he insulted Ron Dean for not acknowledging
the fact [read: falsehood] that his questions about pathways
from the phyla of the Cambrian back to the LCA of those phyla
had been answered.

Now you overplay YOUR hand:

> Your comments remind me of Creationists

Like Ron Dean? If not, can you name one who is or was
active in talk.origins in the last decade?

EVEN JUST ONE?

> who, when confronted with
> evidence of transitional forms,

... under the broad idea of the word "transitional forms" whereby
a platypus is somehow "transitional" between mammals and
living reptiles? Harshman did this a long while ago.

>demand evidence of transitional forms
> for those transitional forms. It's easy to dismiss what is known by
> pointing to what is unknown.

You are taking refuge in a huge generality. Try arguing this specific case:

It is easy to dismiss ideas of "transitional" forms that still
leave huge gaps, like the best candidate for ancestry of full-fledged
pterosaurs being a lizardlike reptile that shows no signs of developing gliding
membranes, let alone wings, and whose forelimbs were much shorter than its hindlimbs.

> > > abiotic substrates for protein
> >> synthesis, and functions of the first peptides.
> >
> >> The lecture suffers from multiple technical glitches. IMO the
> >> information Szostak provides despite these glitches make viewing this
> >> video worthwhile.
> >
> >No argument there, as long as everyone reading this realizes how apropos my
> >much more modest suggestion for a title is.
> >
> >> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U841Zrd4C5g>
> >
> >Szostak is about as good as they come in the field of OOL, and the way he admits
> >to how much we do NOT know, especially in the Q&A session, he is well worth listening to.

Note the words "the way" and "how much": not vague generalities like yours,
but one specific example after another.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 7/14/23 3:18 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> who, when confronted with
>> evidence of transitional forms,
> ... under the broad idea of the word "transitional forms" whereby
> a platypus is somehow "transitional" between mammals and
> living reptiles? Harshman did this a long while ago.
>
> >demand evidence of transitional forms
>> for those transitional forms. It's easy to dismiss what is known by
>> pointing to what is unknown.
> You are taking refuge in a huge generality. Try arguing this specific case:
>
> It is easy to dismiss ideas of "transitional" forms that still
> leave huge gaps, like the best candidate for ancestry of full-fledged
> pterosaurs being a lizardlike reptile that shows no signs of developing gliding
> membranes, let alone wings, and whose forelimbs were much shorter than its hindlimbs.
>

So you take a passing comment that doesn't even concern me as an
opportunity to rant about how dumb I am? Of course a platypus is a
transitional form, in exactly the sense paleontologists mean the term.
It displays a combination of traits intermediate between the "reptilian"
and "mammalian" conditions. That is, it retains some primitive traits
long since transformed in other mammal lineages. Why is that obviously
wrong? Is that not evidence that mammals are descended from "reptiles",
just as much as Tiktaalik is evidence that tetrapods are descended from
"fish"?

Regarding the Cambrian explosion, wouldn't a primitive lophotrochozoan
not belonging to any extant phylum be a good transitional form between
those phyla and earlier bilaterians? How big a gap is too big to be used
as evidence of a transition?

Of course this is all irrelevant to the supposed topic, but I guess
jillery was the first person to begin the derailment.

[Glenn]

On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 3:20:39 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 5:05:40 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> > On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 13:28:37 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> > <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >On Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 4:35:36?AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> > >
> > >> The following is a link to a 55-minute lecture by Jack Szostak,
> > >> describing the current status of his team's efforts to identify
> > >> plausible processes of abiogenesis. He follows his lecture with a
> > >> 30-minute Q&A with the audience.
> > >
> > >Actually closer to 35 minutes, and very indicative of how much
> > >we still do NOT know about how hard or easy abiogenesis is.
>
> > To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge.
> Too bad so many of your kindred spirits in talk.origins don't
> acknowledge this where abiogenesis, a.k.a. OOL, is concerned.
> Faced with huge gaps in our knowledge about it, they
> use formulas like, "Sure, we don't know everything about it yet,"
> or "Huge progress is being made every day," etc.
> >That you apply it to abiogenesis uniquely overplays YOUR hand.
> Not with the way your kindred spirits overplay THEIR hand
> with nary a protest by you.

Since you seem to agree, how exactly do we know that we know less that what we don't know, and why is it "the nature" of most knowledge?

[jillery]

On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 15:18:30 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 5:05:40?PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>> On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 13:28:37 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
>> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >On Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 4:35:36?AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>> >
>> >> The following is a link to a 55-minute lecture by Jack Szostak,
>> >> describing the current status of his team's efforts to identify
>> >> plausible processes of abiogenesis. He follows his lecture with a
>> >> 30-minute Q&A with the audience.
>> >
>> >Actually closer to 35 minutes, and very indicative of how much
>> >we still do NOT know about how hard or easy abiogenesis is.
>
>> To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge.
>
>Too bad so many of your kindred spirits in talk.origins don't
>acknowledge this where abiogenesis, a.k.a. OOL, is concerned.
>Faced with huge gaps in our knowledge about it, they
>use formulas like, "Sure, we don't know everything about it yet,"
>or "Huge progress is being made every day," etc.

More of your baseless allusions and quotemines designed to obfuscate.
The topic is about what Szostak says in the cited video, not what some
alleged kindred spirits in T.O. allegedly said. But then your
compulsive hijacking of topics also serves to obfuscate.

Even if your allegations were accurate, the sense of your alleged
quote actually well describes YOUR willingness here to dismiss what is

known by pointing to what is unknown.

> >That you apply it to abiogenesis uniquely overplays YOUR hand.
>
>Not with the way your kindred spirits overplay THEIR hand
>with nary a protest by you.

Then instead of your arguments based on allusions and quotemines, you
need to specify how these alleged kindred spirits allegedly
overplaying their hand informs you actually overplaying YOUR hand.

>They rhapsodize about how what I call the first two floors
>of my metaphoric 100 floor skyscraper are being better
>and better understood every day. One of them, who
>killfiled me about five years ago, even got angry at MarkE
>for not reading up on these articles and books, and refusing all
>invitations to discuss what I call the 40th floor and beyond.
>
>Just the other day, he insulted Ron Dean for not acknowledging
>the fact [read: falsehood] that his questions about pathways
>from the phyla of the Cambrian back to the LCA of those phyla
>had been answered.

Then cite this alleged insult, so everybody can check for themselves
to what you only allude above. More likely, this is another case of
what you claim to have happened, having little resemblance to what
actually happened. But avoiding a specific cite gives you an excuse
to add yet another round of your mindless compulsive obfuscations.

So you recognize Ron Dean as someone who, when confronted with
evidence of transitional forms, demands evidence of transitional forms
for those transitional forms. That suggests your previous baseless
allusion of alleged insults in fact was nothing like what you alleged
to have happened.

>> who, when confronted with
>> evidence of transitional forms,
>
>... under the broad idea of the word "transitional forms" whereby
>a platypus is somehow "transitional" between mammals and
>living reptiles? Harshman did this a long while ago.

Even if he did, that would be a good example.

> >demand evidence of transitional forms
>> for those transitional forms. It's easy to dismiss what is known by
>> pointing to what is unknown.
>
>You are taking refuge in a huge generality. Try arguing this specific case:
>
>It is easy to dismiss ideas of "transitional" forms that still
>leave huge gaps, like the best candidate for ancestry of full-fledged
>pterosaurs being a lizardlike reptile that shows no signs of developing gliding
>membranes, let alone wings, and whose forelimbs were much shorter than its hindlimbs.

Your comments above are a specific case. Thank you for proving my
point for me. Once again, you turn your post into a self-parody.

>> > > abiotic substrates for protein
>> >> synthesis, and functions of the first peptides.
>> >
>> >> The lecture suffers from multiple technical glitches. IMO the
>> >> information Szostak provides despite these glitches make viewing this
>> >> video worthwhile.
>> >
>> >No argument there, as long as everyone reading this realizes how apropos my
>> >much more modest suggestion for a title is.
>> >
>> >> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U841Zrd4C5g>
>> >
>> >Szostak is about as good as they come in the field of OOL, and the way he admits
>> >to how much we do NOT know, especially in the Q&A session, he is well worth listening to.
>
>Note the words "the way" and "how much": not vague generalities like yours,
>but one specific example after another.
>
>
>Peter Nyikos
>Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
>Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
>http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

Do your employers know you associate them with a parody of yourself?

[Glenn]

No troll here. Nah.

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 12:15:40 AM UTC-4, Glenn wrote:
> On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 3:20:39 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 5:05:40 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> > > On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 13:28:37 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> > > <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >On Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 4:35:36?AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:

snip

> > > To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge.
.
> > Too bad so many of your kindred spirits in talk.origins don't
> > acknowledge this where abiogenesis, a.k.a. OOL, is concerned.
> > Faced with huge gaps in our knowledge about it, they
> > use formulas like, "Sure, we don't know everything about it yet,"
> > or "Huge progress is being made every day," etc.
> > >That you apply it to abiogenesis uniquely overplays YOUR hand.
> > Not with the way your kindred spirits overplay THEIR hand
> > with nary a protest by you.

.
very tempted to snip out much of that too.

> Since you seem to agree, how exactly do we know that we know less
> that what we don't know, and why is it "the nature" of most knowledge?

.
That's a fair question. The answer is not simple but is, maybe, profound.

It isn't easy to know, it's harder to prove.

The usual metaphor is to portray knowledge as an expanding sphere
with the "unknown" being some area beyond the boundary of that
sphere. But how far beyond the boundary of the sphere? Of course
there's the infinite out there in the "beyond". But to overwork the
metaphor some, consider the radius of this sphere of knowledge.
That in some ways represents where we have data we understand
which one might consider as things we can plot on a graph. Knowledge
is like the line or curve we fit to the data. But being curious types,
we often like to extrapolate to conditions beyond where we have
data.

So back to torturing the metaphor, we have our sphere of knowledge,
and a radius of that sphere, and the "what we don't know" is akin
to that area beyond our sphere of knowledge within our sight, which is
about one more radius out.

Without the metaphor, the more we learn, the more we discover things
beyond our knowledge. This observation is mostly a personal assertion,
and in no way a proof, except I can say it is an often repeated
observation of learned people.

Behind that, many have observed that education is the process of
refining our understanding of what we don't understand. Life experience
reveals that adolescents know everything but as they age the
successful ones stop asserting to know everything. Partly, that's
a processes of trimming away the things we "know that just ain't so."
Few things illustrate this better than the process of learning
quantum mechanics.

None of this is likely to be a satisfactory answer to Glenn. And
I wouldn't fault him in the slightest for not thinking much of
my answer. It is, however, a sentiment I've seen expressed by
many people who I hold in the highest regard.

[jillery]

On Sat, 15 Jul 2023 09:09:47 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

You might have a point if your one-liner was a reply to a one-liner.
That your one-liner completely ignores all but the last line makes
your post yet another self-parody.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 12:10:37 PM UTC-4, Gary Hurd wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 1:10:36 PM UTC-7, jillery wrote:
> > On Tue, 11 Jul 2023 09:11:17 -0700 (PDT), Gary Hurd <gary...@cox.net>
> > wrote:
> > >On Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 1:35:36?AM UTC-7, jillery wrote:
> > >> The following is a link to a 55-minute lecture by Jack Szostak,
> > >> describing the current status of his team's efforts to identify
> > >> plausible processes of abiogenesis. He follows his lecture with a
> > >> 30-minute Q&A with the audience.
> > >>
> > >> Some of the highlights of the lecture include demonstrations of how
> > >> lipid bilayers abiotically self-assemble, grow, and divide,
> > >> nonenzymatic RNA duplication, abiotic substrates for protein
> > >> synthesis, and functions of the first peptides.
> > >>
> > >> The lecture suffers from multiple technical glitches. IMO the
> > >> information Szostak provides despite these glitches make viewing this
> > >> video worthwhile.
> > >>
> > >> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U841Zrd4C5g>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >The original lecture was "The Origin of Life: Not as Hard as it Looks? Jack Szosta, Spring 2023 Eyring Lecturer"
> > >https://www.youtube.com/@asuchemistry

Is this a duplicate of the following YouTube film? the title is the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLzyco3Q_Rg

> > >
> > >The YouTube is the lecture slides.
> > Your comment illustrates a limit of transcripts, which identified it
> > as a "hiring lecture", which led me to imagine Szostack was doing an
> > overly demanding job interview.
> >
> > You seem familiar with the context of this lecture. I was surprised
> > at the number of children in the audience and the naivete of many of
> > the questions, suggesting something like the Royal Institute's
> > Christmas lectures, in contrast to a presentation to Szostack's
> > professional peers.
> > --
> > You're entitled to your own opinions.
> > You're not entitled to your own facts.
> There were 2 lectures. The YouTube posted was for the general audience. The professional audience was the following day.
>
> https://news.asu.edu/20230309-nobel-laureate-jack-szostak-deliver-distinguished-eyring-lecture-series-asu

This is just an announcement, not even a synopsis of the film.

> I have no idea why the professional audience lecture was not video taped of YouTube.

Perhaps they were concerned about how much ignorance Szostak revealed among the best
scientists as to how abiogenesis COULD have occurred. Perhaps the questions the professional
scientists asked might be even more embarrassing to Szostak.

I"m surprised no one in the audience of his lecture that WAS taped asked him about the following
anomaly. I'd be very disappointed if the professionals didn't pick up on it either.

At one point in the film, between the ca. 13:00 minute point and the ca. 13:50 point, Szostak
completely abandons the project of trying to re-create prebiotic conditions
or simulating something like natural selection. Instead, he talks about
an unspecified number of "generations" of RNA molecules in the laboratory,
in which the human experimenters carefully select the mutants that are in the direction of
"molecules that do uh what we want okay."

The "what we want" is to bind an ATP molecule, but they are still working on
how to bind more tightly to this quite simple molecule.

Human selection like this was well known before Darwin came along and showed how SOME
of it could be done (much more slowly!) via natural selection.

But Szostak's method is like Intelligent Design not only because it is a human selection process,
but because there was a specific goal in mind. The idea of physical processes having a specific direction
was abandoned over a century before Szostak's experiment.


After I pointed some of this out to Ron Dean on another thread, jillery figuratively threw
Charles Darwin under the bus by calling the distinction I was making between
human selection and natural selection "a PRATT."

My rebuttal to that can be found here:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/0XgjzJpuiMA/m/mKMU6r1oBgAJ
Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Sorry to be so late with this, John. As you probably know, I've been
intensely busy on the thread, Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?

On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 6:45:40 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 7/14/23 3:18 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> who, when confronted with
> >> evidence of transitional forms,

> > ... under the broad idea of the word "transitional forms" whereby
> > a platypus is somehow "transitional" between mammals and
> > living reptiles? Harshman did this a long while ago.
> >
> > >demand evidence of transitional forms
> >> for those transitional forms. It's easy to dismiss what is known by
> >> pointing to what is unknown.

> > You are taking refuge in a huge generality. Try arguing this specific case:
> >
> > It is easy to dismiss ideas of "transitional" forms that still
> > leave huge gaps, like the best candidate for ancestry of full-fledged
> > pterosaurs being a lizardlike reptile that shows no signs of developing gliding
> > membranes, let alone wings, and whose forelimbs were much shorter than its hindlimbs.
> >
> So you take a passing comment that doesn't even concern me as an
> opportunity to rant about how dumb I am?

What's gotten into you, John? Lately you've been turning one on-topic
issue after another into a purely personal one, and an intense one
at that, simply because we are in disagreement over some statement
involving on-topic matters.

Now you've taken that dysfunctional behavior to a new depth
by taking umbrage over a factual statement that you not only
do not disagree with, you *confirm* it below!


I was just letting jillery know how loosely the word
"transitional" is used these days. And what better authority to cite than
you, who are the default person for most t.o. regulars to go to for information
on systematics?

So where do you get this stuff about "dumb"? Have you forgotten
what semantics is all about?

>Of course a platypus is a
> transitional form, in exactly the sense paleontologists mean the term.

Could you please point us to a published source where a paleontologist uses the
following definition?

> It displays a combination of traits intermediate between the "reptilian"
> and "mammalian" conditions. That is, it retains some primitive traits
> long since transformed in other mammal lineages. Why is that obviously
> wrong?

Why so defensive so soon? I don't even recall that definition from earlier.

But now that you ask, it seems, to my mathematical mind, that it lacks a
clear picture of necessary and sufficient conditions for being transitional.

Consider this: if a platypus could talk, it might say
how insulted it is in being called a "duckbill", inasmuch as its bill
makes ducks' bills (and indeed all other mouth parts in Chordata) into
primitive traits in comparison. It is extensively innervated, with numerous
sense organs, and so efficient at hunting in murky water that the platypus closes its
eyes and ears when underwater, relying on its bill alone for catching its aquatic prey.

After describing a few more "advanced" features it has, it might then turn the tables on us
and say that it is we, who flatter ourselves with the term "higher mammals,"
who are transitional between it and the LCA of Crown Mammalia.
How would you argue against that?


But, to answer your question another way: there is nothing wrong with using a word
once its usage is properly defined and its limitations understood.
In particular, it does not imply that a transitional organism is anything like one
in a direct evolutionary pathway of intermediates, which is what Ron Dean
was asking for on the thread, Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?

> Is that not evidence that mammals are descended from "reptiles",
> just as much as Tiktaalik is evidence that tetrapods are descended from
> "fish"?

Tiktaalik is MUCH closer to a true intermediate than a platypus.

If we used an up to date system of taxonomy where morphospace is used
to decide what rank an assemblage of genera fits into, I could
probably say that Tiktaalik is in the same family as the
LCA of crown Tetrapoda, and Elpistostege in the same subfamily.
About the best I could say about the platypus is that it is
in the same infraclass as the LCA of crown Mammalia.

Unfortunately, the dominant systematists of today are so
caught up in the slogan, "Ranks are arbitrary" that nobody
has any incentive to bring the concept of rank into the 21st century.

> Regarding the Cambrian explosion, wouldn't a primitive lophotrochozoan
> not belonging to any extant phylum be a good transitional form between
> those phyla and earlier bilaterians? How big a gap is too big to be used
> as evidence of a transition?

Since this is being actively discussed on the thread, Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?
I'll postpone talking about this here until the issue there is clarified.

> Of course this is all irrelevant to the supposed topic, but I guess
> jillery was the first person to begin the derailment.

This is so typical of the evolution of threads in talk.origins,
going back to before I first participated here in 1995, that
it hardly seems to be worth mentioning.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

Univ. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 7/24/23 2:38 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> Sorry to be so late with this, John. As you probably know, I've been
> intensely busy on the thread, Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?
>
> On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 6:45:40 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 7/14/23 3:18 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> who, when confronted with
>>>> evidence of transitional forms,
>
>>> ... under the broad idea of the word "transitional forms" whereby
>>> a platypus is somehow "transitional" between mammals and
>>> living reptiles? Harshman did this a long while ago.
>>>
>>>> demand evidence of transitional forms
>>>> for those transitional forms. It's easy to dismiss what is known by
>>>> pointing to what is unknown.
>
>>> You are taking refuge in a huge generality. Try arguing this specific case:
>>>
>>> It is easy to dismiss ideas of "transitional" forms that still
>>> leave huge gaps, like the best candidate for ancestry of full-fledged
>>> pterosaurs being a lizardlike reptile that shows no signs of developing gliding
>>> membranes, let alone wings, and whose forelimbs were much shorter than its hindlimbs.
>>>
>> So you take a passing comment that doesn't even concern me as an
>> opportunity to rant about how dumb I am?
>
> What's gotten into you, John? Lately you've been turning one on-topic
> issue after another into a purely personal one, and an intense one
> at that, simply because we are in disagreement over some statement
> involving on-topic matters.

I would say that you're doing that. It's not that we are in
disagreement, per se. It's that you introduce attacks on me into random
topics.

> Now you've taken that dysfunctional behavior to a new depth
> by taking umbrage over a factual statement that you not only
> do not disagree with, you *confirm* it below!

Your language says that it's a bad, in fact ignorant, thing to do. Is
that sort of characterization happening below the level of consciousness
for you?

> I was just letting jillery know how loosely the word
> "transitional" is used these days. And what better authority to cite than
> you, who are the default person for most t.o. regulars to go to for information
> on systematics?

> So where do you get this stuff about "dumb"? Have you forgotten
> what semantics is all about?

No. Connotation here is all. That wasn't a simple statement of fact. It
was an attack.

>> Of course a platypus is a
>> transitional form, in exactly the sense paleontologists mean the term.
>
> Could you please point us to a published source where a paleontologist uses the
> following definition?

Can you point us to a published source where a paleontologist uses any
other? If transitional forms had to be ancestral, there could be none
known, since we can't recognize ancestors. Is Acanthostega ancestral to
anything? Is Archaeopteryx? No way to know, and yet we consider them
transitional. Most known maniraptorans postdate Archaeopteryx, yet they
too are considered transitional forms. The age of the fossil is not
important, and it doesn't even have to be a fossil.

>> It displays a combination of traits intermediate between the "reptilian"
>> and "mammalian" conditions. That is, it retains some primitive traits
>> long since transformed in other mammal lineages. Why is that obviously
>> wrong?
>
> Why so defensive so soon? I don't even recall that definition from earlier.
>
> But now that you ask, it seems, to my mathematical mind, that it lacks a
> clear picture of necessary and sufficient conditions for being transitional.
>
> Consider this: if a platypus could talk, it might say
> how insulted it is in being called a "duckbill", inasmuch as its bill
> makes ducks' bills (and indeed all other mouth parts in Chordata) into
> primitive traits in comparison. It is extensively innervated, with numerous
> sense organs, and so efficient at hunting in murky water that the platypus closes its
> eyes and ears when underwater, relying on its bill alone for catching its aquatic prey.
>
> After describing a few more "advanced" features it has, it might then turn the tables on us
> and say that it is we, who flatter ourselves with the term "higher mammals,"
> who are transitional between it and the LCA of Crown Mammalia.
> How would you argue against that?

I wouldn't. We are indeed primitive for many characters that have
derived states in platypodes. As far as those characters are concerned,
we're transitional forms. As far as the characters for which platypodes
are primitive while we are derived, it's a transitional form.

> But, to answer your question another way: there is nothing wrong with using a word
> once its usage is properly defined and its limitations understood.
> In particular, it does not imply that a transitional organism is anything like one
> in a direct evolutionary pathway of intermediates, which is what Ron Dean
> was asking for on the thread, Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?

Yes. And the proper response is that it's impossible to determine
whether a fossil or series of fossils constitute a direct evolutionary
pathway.

>> Is that not evidence that mammals are descended from "reptiles",
>> just as much as Tiktaalik is evidence that tetrapods are descended from
>> "fish"?
>
> Tiktaalik is MUCH closer to a true intermediate than a platypus.

Depends on how you measure intermediacy, I suppose, and how you define
"true intermediate".

> If we used an up to date system of taxonomy where morphospace is used
> to decide what rank an assemblage of genera fits into, I could
> probably say that Tiktaalik is in the same family as the
> LCA of crown Tetrapoda, and Elpistostege in the same subfamily.
> About the best I could say about the platypus is that it is
> in the same infraclass as the LCA of crown Mammalia.

Fortunately, there is no such system, as it would result in taxonomic
chaos. But you do seem to have the germ of some operational definition
of "degree of intermediacy", calculated as the morphological distance
from the reconstructed ancestor. A "true intermediate" would exactly
resemble the reconstructed ancestor, having zero autapomorphies. That at
least is a defensible definition, though I wouldn't see any benefit to
using it.

I suppose this depends on one's purpose in talking about intermediates.
If it's to defend common descent to Ron Dean, I don't see how that would
work in any case. If it's to gauge the course of evolution, I think my
definition works better, as we would have more material to work with.

> Unfortunately, the dominant systematists of today are so
> caught up in the slogan, "Ranks are arbitrary" that nobody
> has any incentive to bring the concept of rank into the 21st century.

Similarly, I see no serious move among chemists to bring the concept of
phlogiston into the 21st Century.

>> Regarding the Cambrian explosion, wouldn't a primitive lophotrochozoan
>> not belonging to any extant phylum be a good transitional form between
>> those phyla and earlier bilaterians? How big a gap is too big to be used
>> as evidence of a transition?
>
> Since this is being actively discussed on the thread, Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?
> I'll postpone talking about this here until the issue there is clarified.
>
>
>> Of course this is all irrelevant to the supposed topic, but I guess
>> jillery was the first person to begin the derailment.
>
> This is so typical of the evolution of threads in talk.origins,
> going back to before I first participated here in 1995, that
> it hardly seems to be worth mentioning.

Still, one might not want to encourage the practice. No?

[jillery]

Your comment above is typical of your baseless personal attacks which
you indugle yourself. Even if it was true, it would still have
utterly no relevance to the topic or anything anybody said; classic
troll bait.

[Glenn]

I suppose you don't regard those comments as classic troll bait.

[jillery]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2023 07:59:22 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

I suppose you do.

[Burkhard]

What an erudite analysis, and an excellent example of seeing the "benefit of the doubt"
in action used by one of the greatest minds on TO! (you often tell us that that's what you are,
and as you also often told us that you are the most honest person here, how could I not believe it?)

I'm standing in awe, and someone like me can only try to learn from your example.
I'm particularly impressed how you ruled our after careful fact checking and research
into the event all the more mundane explanations why the second lecture was not filmed, such as e.g.;

- a general policy by the IT support that runs the university's youtube account to only ever post the
general public version the the Eyring lecture - just as they did in all the previous years (
if they posted any video at all that is0

- the technical glitches that beset the recording of the first
lecture were not resolved in time, so the decision was taking
not to record the technical lecture

- the technical problems got worse/made recording impossible

- the lecture was held in a different room, not suitable for recording a hybrid lecture

- one or several member(s) of the audience refused to sign the data protection release form

- the lecture contained copyrighted material, such as a 3. party video clip illustrating
a point, that made youtube posting too risky for the university' legal department

So that after careful research that allowed you to categorically rule out all these mundane
and innocent explanations, you are of course totally right to speculate about the nefarious
reasons - as Sherlock Holmes used to say, if you have ruled out the impossible, whatever
remains, however improbable, must be true. Even if in this case it means that a Nobel
Laureate talking about his core field of research made a methodological plunder to
obvious that someone like you who has not spend a single hour of his life in a lab
doing abiogenesis research would immediately spot it!

Now me, I've always admitted that I'm a layperson when it comes to biology, so what would
I know. But I have spend quite a bit of time among scientists who also try to distinguish
between design and natural causes, and strangely enough they too would do all the things
you find objectionable below. They must be all doing it wrong then. So for instance in an
arson investigation, the initial question would be if the fire was the result of an accident or
planned. We'd try to recreate the scene as best as we can in, and quite intentionally with
varying degrees of correspondence to the hypothesised initial conditions. If e.g. the test is
if two adjacent materials would have allowed the fire to spread, ignoring for the moment
that it would have rained on the day makes the reconstruction easier, and still gives valuable
information if it shows no transfer was possible. The asymmetry between falsification
and confirmation sees to that.

A second reason is that the initial conditions are also only ever hypothesised, based
e.g. on witness statements or the weather report. These could be wrong or misleading.
So finding "a" reconstruction of a natural pathway is valuable, even if it only holds for
conditions that contradict the hypothesised initial conditions. Same I'd say with
abiogenesis: If we find a pathway from molecules to life, but one that requires conditions
other than those we think held when life was first formed on earth, can mean one of
several things:

- this is not how life originated on earth
- life did originate this way, but our theory about the "when" was wrong, it happened at
another time when other conditions held
- life did originate in this way, and at this time - we were simply wrong in our theories about
early earth.

Same issue with the use of "artificial selection" In any reconstruction, we try to achieve a known
goal - in our case a fire that creates a pattern that we can then compare with the pattern at the
crime scene. There is nothing paradoxical or untoward about it - when reconstructing a single historical
event under laboratory conditions, inevitably we know and direct it towards a predefined endpoint. The
only thing needed is to document all the design choices that went into the experiment, and then
if necessary carry out follow up tests to see if they can be removed.

So we'll nudge e.g. a candle towards the curtain, to see if the pattern from the burning curtain matches what
we found on the scene. If not then the "wind blew over a candle" hypothesis is falsified. If yes, then and only then
do we have to check if the candle could have fallen over by itself, or needed someone to push it the way we
did in the experiment. And if we find the human interference is necessary, then that tells us a lot
about the perpetrator/designer, what they did, when and how (here: threw a candle at the curtain)

All of this is pretty straightforward experimental design - and all experiments are after all designed.
So it seems to me that what Szostak does is not just perfectly legit, it is what any putative "ID scientists"
should do too, to see where exactly, how and in what way.with what tools the designer interfered. Strangely
enough, not a single one seems to care.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 7:10:41 PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 12:15:40 AM UTC-4, Glenn wrote: [text snipped by above writer]

> > On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 3:20:39 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 5:05:40 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:

<snip superfluous attributions>

> snip
> > > > To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge.
> .
> > > Too bad so many of your kindred spirits in talk.origins don't
> > > acknowledge this where abiogenesis, a.k.a. OOL, is concerned.
> > > Faced with huge gaps in our knowledge about it, they
> > > use formulas like, "Sure, we don't know everything about it yet,"
> > > or "Huge progress is being made every day," etc.

> > > >That you apply it to abiogenesis uniquely overplays YOUR hand.

> > > Not with the way your kindred spirits overplay THEIR hand
> > > with nary a protest by you.
> .
> very tempted to snip out much of that too.

> > Since you seem to agree, how exactly do we know that we know less
> > that what we don't know, and why is it "the nature" of most knowledge?
> .
> That's a fair question. The answer is not simple but is, maybe, profound.

Your rudimentary answer is simple, but...you really need to rein in your propensity to brag.
For "maybe, profound," substitute "maybe, helpful."

> It isn't easy to know, it's harder to prove.


> The usual metaphor is to portray knowledge as an expanding sphere
> with the "unknown" being some area beyond the boundary of that
> sphere.

That's a highly idealized metaphor. Sorry to have to break this to you,
but what you write below reminds me of the saying,
"Consider a spherical cow."

> But how far beyond the boundary of the sphere? Of course
> there's the infinite out there in the "beyond". But to overwork the
> metaphor some, consider the radius of this sphere of knowledge.

To elaborate on the saying, how do you define the radius of a real-life cow?

> That in some ways represents where we have data we understand
> which one might consider as things we can plot on a graph. Knowledge
> is like the line or curve we fit to the data. But being curious types,
> we often like to extrapolate to conditions beyond where we have
> data.

The on-topic case before us is: how much extrapolation is
possible from biological evolution to OOL? With biological evolution,
there has been a tremendous advance in our data about what has happened
in, roughly, 3.5 to 4 gigayears, but we have no data at all about
what happened in the preceding 500 million years or less.
How do you extrapolate from zero data?

However, to be fair, we can also extrapolate backwards
from what drives evolution of life as we know it,
to life as we don't know it, and then no life at all.
It's easy to think we've done better than is the case.
Just recently, an anti-ID regular wrote that once
we have replication, we have mutation -- but no mention
of natural selection, because we need environmental information
to plausibly argue that the analogue of natural selection
as defined for life as we know it, is operative at this level.

In fact, at this level, differential survival [whatever that means]
could be just as random as mutation. Also, the fidelity of
replication has to be very high (though not perfect), and it
has to happen at a high rate, possible only with a powerful
ribozyme replicase.

> So back to torturing the metaphor, we have our sphere of knowledge,
> and a radius of that sphere, and the "what we don't know" is akin
> to that area beyond our sphere of knowledge within our sight, which is
> about one more radius out.

"akin" is one place where your metaphor breaks down in the light of the
case before us. And there are other weaknesses on which I could elaborate.
[This is no bluff, as you will learn if you try to call it.]
As the old saying goes, "A lovely theory was murdered by a cruel gang of cold facts."

> Without the metaphor, the more we learn, the more we discover things
> beyond our knowledge. This observation is mostly a personal assertion,
> and in no way a proof, except I can say it is an often repeated
> observation of learned people.
>
> Behind that, many have observed that education is the process of
> refining our understanding of what we don't understand. Life experience
> reveals that adolescents know everything but as they age the
> successful ones stop asserting to know everything. Partly, that's
> a processes of trimming away the things we "know that just ain't so."
> Few things illustrate this better than the process of learning
> quantum mechanics.
>
> None of this is likely to be a satisfactory answer to Glenn.

It's too inchoate to be a satisfactory answer to anyone familiar with OOL.

> And I wouldn't fault him in the slightest for not thinking much of
> my answer. It is, however, a sentiment I've seen expressed by
> many people who I hold in the highest regard.

Why so bashful about who they are? Might they be confined to
talk.origins regulars? 'twas one of them whom I first saw using
the formula, "Consider a spherical cow."

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS What a lovely coincidence! I've been composing this reply,
on and off [mostly off] for something like a week now,
and just as I am putting on the finishing touches, Burkhard
does the first post to this thread in close to a week!

[peter2...@gmail.com]

OOPS! while I was putting the finishing touches on my reply to Daggett,
the blue announcement at the bottom of my screen flashed
for the post to which I am now replying, and I assumed it was an incoming post.
Oh, well, no harm done.

The following statement touched off a burst of sarcasm by you, Burkhard:

> > Perhaps they were concerned about how much ignorance Szostak revealed among the best
> > scientists as to how abiogenesis COULD have occurred. Perhaps the questions the professional
> > scientists asked might be even more embarrassing to Szostak.

> What an erudite analysis, and an excellent example of seeing the "benefit of the doubt"
> in action used by one of the greatest minds on TO!

Is this where the sarcasm stops?

> (you often tell us that that's what you are,

Is this your idea of a joke that no one should take seriously?

> and as you also often told us that you are the most honest person here,

Is this an allusion to my frequent calling of myself a "goddamn moralizer"?

There are a number of people here whose complete honesty I have seen
no reason to doubt, and I have alluded to that fact on occasion.
One of them is someone whom you've gotten egg
on your face for vitriolic comments that turned out to be false: Ron Dean.

> how could I not believe it?)

Next, you revert to the kind of sarcasm that has earned for you the
superlative, "Most condescendingly dishonest regular in talk.origins." [1]

> I'm standing in awe, and someone like me can only try to learn from your example.
> I'm particularly impressed how you ruled our after careful fact checking and research
> into the event all the more mundane explanations why the second lecture was not filmed, such as e.g.;

Your sarcasm rides roughshod over my opening qualifier, "Perhaps" for the rest of the
first sentence of what you quoted above, and of the second sentence.

Internet Vandals [2] like yourself typically have a terrible time with qualifying adjectives, adverbs,
phrases and clauses.

[1] I have posted such superlatives about 10 or so people. You dethroned the previous
holder of this description, who had held it for at least twice as long as you have so far.
All such superlatives are backed by extensive experience with the titleholders.

[2] This denotes a person who is highly destructive of meaningful communication
between people who sincerely disagree on some central issues.

> - a general policy by the IT support that runs the university's youtube account to only ever post the
> general public version the the Eyring lecture - just as they did in all the previous years (
> if they posted any video at all that is0

A conjectured policy of which I knew nothing, and still don't, because of the lack
of documentation, despite my efforts to get some support for it.

If you had bothered to look at the comments section of the
video that jillery linked in the OP,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U841Zrd4C5g
you would have seen how short it is (17 posts in all) , and possibly have seen the last comment and reply:

[QUOTE:]
@iangould5218
@iangould5218
3 weeks ago
Hello, you should state that this video was taken without permission from the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University Youtube Channel
1
@peternyikos8020
@peternyikos8020
2 weeks ago
Do you have any evidence for this claim of yours? How do you account for the fact that this video was not taken down?
[end of quote]

Can you succeed where iangould5218 failed? Or did your conjecture
come off the top of your head? [Notice how much nicer I am to you
than you were to Ron on the occasion alluded to above. That's NOT sarcasm.]

>
> - the technical glitches that beset the recording of the first
> lecture were not resolved in time, so the decision was taking
> not to record the technical lecture

Your shortage of faith in the abilities of the IT personnel at ASU
over a 24 hour period is duly noted.

> - the technical problems got worse/made recording impossible
>
> - the lecture was held in a different room, not suitable for recording a hybrid lecture
>
> - one or several member(s) of the audience refused to sign the data protection release form
>
> - the lecture contained copyrighted material, such as a 3. party video clip illustrating
> a point, that made youtube posting too risky for the university' legal department

Since you are a nonentity where biological and prebiotic issues are concerned,
all you could do in your next paragraph was to tediously continue
your sarcasm, but you underestimated your ignorance at the end.

> So that after careful research that allowed you to categorically rule out all these mundane
> and innocent explanations, you are of course totally right to speculate about the nefarious
> reasons - as Sherlock Holmes used to say, if you have ruled out the impossible, whatever
> remains, however improbable, must be true. Even if in this case it means that a Nobel
> Laureate talking about his core field of research made a methodological plunder to
> obvious that someone like you who has not spend a single hour of his life in a lab
> doing abiogenesis research would immediately spot it!

The reality is much more mundane, as I told jillery elsethread:

[excerpt, my words from two separate posts:]

> >Szostak is about as good as they come in the field of OOL, and the way he admits
> >to how much we do NOT know, especially in the Q&A session, he is well worth listening to.

Note the words "the way" and "how much": not vague generalities like yours,
but one specific example after another.

[end of excerpt]

All documentable from the film with the help of the transcript, but you
can't be bothered to see how bent out of shape your sarcasm is, can you?

>
> Now me, I've always admitted that I'm a layperson when it comes to biology, so what would
> I know. But I have spend quite a bit of time among scientists who also try to distinguish
> between design and natural causes, and strangely enough they too would do all the things
> you find objectionable below.

That's because their aims are often different from what you imagine.
Now I will show a spin doctor like you how I actually give Szostak the
benefit of the doubt:

Szostak's abandonment in 13:00 - 13:50 [see below] was, I surmise, done in order to come
up with RNA sequences that are not found in living organisms, but which
show what the percentage [3] of sequences are that are conducive to progress
towards "life as we know it," beginning with the first free-living bacteria [prokaryotes].
The kind of "forced evolution" they carry out is infinitely better than to just
sit down and try to come up with such a ribozyme from scratch.

[3] extraordinarily small by everyday standards, but perhaps not for the millions of years
and the size of earth for making OOL a reality. However, it would take a century or two
to succeed at that. But they are taking the first baby steps, at least if my giving them
the right benefit of the doubt.


<snip of things to be dealt with later on this week>

> > I"m surprised no one in the audience of his lecture that WAS taped asked him about the following
> > anomaly. I'd be very disappointed if the professionals didn't pick up on it either.
> >
> > At one point in the film, between the ca. 13:00 minute point and the ca. 13:50 point, Szostak
> > completely abandons the project of trying to re-create prebiotic conditions
> > or simulating something like natural selection. Instead, he talks about
> > an unspecified number of "generations" of RNA molecules in the laboratory,
> > in which the human experimenters carefully select the mutants that are in the direction of
> > "molecules that do uh what we want okay."
> >
> > The "what we want" is to bind an ATP molecule, but they are still working on
> > how to bind more tightly to this quite simple molecule.
> >
> > Human selection like this was well known before Darwin came along and showed how SOME
> > of it could be done (much more slowly!) via natural selection.
> >
> > But Szostak's method is like Intelligent Design not only because it is a human selection process,
> > but because there was a specific goal in mind. The idea of physical processes having a specific direction
> > was abandoned over a century before Szostak's experiment.
> >

Do you know enough about Darwin's theory to see the importance of what I wrote next?
It doesn't seem like it -- you showed no sign of comprehending it in the part I snipped out.

> > After I pointed some of this out to Ron Dean on another thread, jillery figuratively threw
> > Charles Darwin under the bus by calling the distinction I was making between
> > human selection and natural selection "a PRATT."
> >
> > My rebuttal to that can be found here:
> >
> > https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/0XgjzJpuiMA/m/mKMU6r1oBgAJ
> > Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

[Burkhard]

no no, go on, not finished yet

> > (you often tell us that that's what you are,
> Is this your idea of a joke that no one should take seriously?

both

> > and as you also often told us that you are the most honest person here,
> Is this an allusion to my frequent calling of myself a "goddamn moralizer"?
>

give the man a cigar! Or rather, that among many other examples where you
feel the need to tell everybody just what a paragon of virtue you are

> There are a number of people here whose complete honesty I have seen
> no reason to doubt, and I have alluded to that fact on occasion.
> One of them is someone whom you've gotten egg
> on your face for vitriolic comments that turned out to be false: Ron Dean.

So far you failed to show any mistake I made. IIRC, you only whined a lot that I
wasn't sufficiently harsh to other people who had been mean, mean I say, to you,
Oh, and some pretty inane comments about German law and culture,

> > how could I not believe it?)
> Next, you revert to the kind of sarcasm that has earned for you the
> superlative, "Most condescendingly dishonest regular in talk.origins." [1]

Interesting use of the passive voice here. I think what you mean is: "Next,
you revert to the kind of sarcasm for which I, Peter, and only I use the insult

"Most condescendingly dishonest regular in talk.origins."

> > I'm standing in awe, and someone like me can only try to learn from your example.
> > I'm particularly impressed how you ruled our after careful fact checking and research
> > into the event all the more mundane explanations why the second lecture was not filmed, such as e.g.;
> Your sarcasm rides roughshod over my opening qualifier, "Perhaps" for the rest of the
> first sentence of what you quoted above, and of the second sentence.
>
> Internet Vandals [2] like yourself typically have a terrible time with qualifying adjectives, adverbs,
> phrases and clauses.

you mean we see through your mealymouthed attempts to create plausible deniability
for your insinuations and personal attacks? Yup

>
> [1] I have posted such superlatives about 10 or so people. You dethroned the previous
> holder of this description, who had held it for at least twice as long as you have so far.
> All such superlatives are backed by extensive experience with the titleholders.
>
> [2] This denotes a person who is highly destructive of meaningful communication
> between people who sincerely disagree on some central issues.
> > - a general policy by the IT support that runs the university's youtube account to only ever post the
> > general public version the the Eyring lecture - just as they did in all the previous years (
> > if they posted any video at all that is0
> A conjectured policy of which I knew nothing, and still don't, because of the lack
> of documentation, despite my efforts to get some support for it.

So when you pontificated on the other thread about "benefit of the doubt", you did not really
mean "benefit of the doubt", at least not in the way it is normally understood? Because for that
a conjectured explanation is all it takes - it is a possible, though not necessarily provably true,
benign explanation of a behaviour. Once it is documented true, no "benefit of the doubt" needed,
then it would be plain false.

Anyhow, I did provide in this case provide the relevant evidence, the pattern of posting videos.
That is whenever the university posted videos of Eyring lectures in past years (not that often,
seems a new policy) they only posted the public lecture, not the expert talk.

>
> If you had bothered to look at the comments section of the
> video that jillery linked in the OP,

Why would I look at the video channel of a third party to draw any inferences on the reasons
ASU may or may not have to only upload the public lecture? You make no sense whatsoever.

I watched the video of course on the official ASU channel. There you also get older Eyring lectures,
and as I said, they haven't in the past uploaded the expert talk either.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U841Zrd4C5g
> you would have seen how short it is (17 posts in all) , and possibly have seen the last comment and reply:
>
> [QUOTE:]
> @iangould5218
> @iangould5218
> 3 weeks ago
> Hello, you should state that this video was taken without permission from the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University Youtube Channel
> 1
> @peternyikos8020
> @peternyikos8020
> 2 weeks ago
> Do you have any evidence for this claim of yours? How do you account for the fact that this video was not taken down?
> [end of quote]
>
> Can you succeed where iangould5218 failed? Or did your conjecture
> come off the top of your head? [Notice how much nicer I am to you
> than you were to Ron on the occasion alluded to above. That's NOT sarcasm.]

Yah, and it held for exactly one sentence, so congratulations. And that you see
the two issues as analogous tells us a lot about your distorted moral compass.
I chided Ron for making unsupported conjectures that attacked the professionalism
of a third party, my own "conjecture" (which wasn't really a conjecture) was
to exculpate someone from (your) accusation of unprofessionalism, not exactly
the same thing. Though I must admit I did rather enjoy showing how little you really
care for the "benefit of the doubt" if it is you who is doing the attacking, here on
Szostak and/or ASU

As to your question. The original of the lecture is on ASUs official channel. That one
has a general copyright notice, so they are not making things freely available under
a creative commons license. They may have given Axial permission of course. Axial
seems to work with university spin-offs, so there may be a prior connection. Normal
practice however would be to acknowledge the original copyright holder. On balance
I'd say it is more likely than not that Axial reposted it without ASU permission.

> >
> > - the technical glitches that beset the recording of the first
> > lecture were not resolved in time, so the decision was taking
> > not to record the technical lecture
> Your shortage of faith in the abilities of the IT personnel at ASU
> over a 24 hour period is duly noted.

your misconception of what "benefit of the doubt" means duly noted.
As for the ability to sort out a problem in 24 hrs, if this was an evening talk it's
more like 8 hrs, and if the expert talk was earlier on the day, possibly even less.

If the problem is in a difficult to replace piece of hardware, that can take a lot of time
and may require ordering new equipment. Quite a number of other problems could be
the source that would go beyond anything inhouse IT can solve, problems with 3
party vendor software. I'd say I average around 8-10 talks per year, and organise around
4. In any given year, I'd say I encounter around 2 problems that go beyond the ability of
university inhouse IT to resolve.

> > - the technical problems got worse/made recording impossible
> >
> > - the lecture was held in a different room, not suitable for recording a hybrid lecture
> >
> > - one or several member(s) of the audience refused to sign the data protection release form
> >
> > - the lecture contained copyrighted material, such as a 3. party video clip illustrating
> > a point, that made youtube posting too risky for the university' legal department
> Since you are a nonentity where biological and prebiotic issues are concerned,
> all you could do in your next paragraph was to tediously continue
> your sarcasm, but you underestimated your ignorance at the end.
> > So that after careful research that allowed you to categorically rule out all these mundane
> > and innocent explanations, you are of course totally right to speculate about the nefarious
> > reasons - as Sherlock Holmes used to say, if you have ruled out the impossible, whatever
> > remains, however improbable, must be true. Even if in this case it means that a Nobel
> > Laureate talking about his core field of research made a methodological plunder to
> > obvious that someone like you who has not spend a single hour of his life in a lab
> > doing abiogenesis research would immediately spot it!
> The reality is much more mundane, as I told jillery elsethread:
>
> [excerpt, my words from two separate posts:]
> > >Szostak is about as good as they come in the field of OOL, and the way he admits
> > >to how much we do NOT know, especially in the Q&A session, he is well worth listening to.
>
> Note the words "the way" and "how much": not vague generalities like yours,
> but one specific example after another.
> [end of excerpt]
>
> All documentable from the film with the help of the transcript, but you
> can't be bothered to see how bent out of shape your sarcasm is, can you?

Absolutely no idea what you mean with any of this. The only vague generalities seem to
come from you, I gave concrete examples of what I have in mind And my point was not
how he acknowledges the gaps in our knowledge, but your accusation of misleading
experiment design

> >
> > Now me, I've always admitted that I'm a layperson when it comes to biology, so what would
> > I know. But I have spend quite a bit of time among scientists who also try to distinguish
> > between design and natural causes, and strangely enough they too would do all the things
> > you find objectionable below.
> That's because their aims are often different from what you imagine.
> Now I will show a spin doctor like you how I actually give Szostak the
> benefit of the doubt:
>
> Szostak's abandonment in 13:00 - 13:50 [see below] was, I surmise, done in order to come
> up with RNA sequences that are not found in living organisms, but which
> show what the percentage [3] of sequences are that are conducive to progress
> towards "life as we know it," beginning with the first free-living bacteria [prokaryotes].
> The kind of "forced evolution" they carry out is infinitely better than to just
> sit down and try to come up with such a ribozyme from scratch.
>
> [3] extraordinarily small by everyday standards, but perhaps not for the millions of years
> and the size of earth for making OOL a reality. However, it would take a century or two
> to succeed at that. But they are taking the first baby steps, at least if my giving them
> the right benefit of the doubt.

still no idea what you mean, My point was your claim that he made basic mistakes in
experimental design.

>
>
> <snip of things to be dealt with later on this week>
> > > I"m surprised no one in the audience of his lecture that WAS taped asked him about the following
> > > anomaly. I'd be very disappointed if the professionals didn't pick up on it either.
> > >
> > > At one point in the film, between the ca. 13:00 minute point and the ca. 13:50 point, Szostak
> > > completely abandons the project of trying to re-create prebiotic conditions
> > > or simulating something like natural selection. Instead, he talks about
> > > an unspecified number of "generations" of RNA molecules in the laboratory,
> > > in which the human experimenters carefully select the mutants that are in the direction of
> > > "molecules that do uh what we want okay."
> > >
> > > The "what we want" is to bind an ATP molecule, but they are still working on
> > > how to bind more tightly to this quite simple molecule.
> > >
> > > Human selection like this was well known before Darwin came along and showed how SOME
> > > of it could be done (much more slowly!) via natural selection.
> > >
> > > But Szostak's method is like Intelligent Design not only because it is a human selection process,
> > > but because there was a specific goal in mind. The idea of physical processes having a specific direction
> > > was abandoned over a century before Szostak's experiment.
> > >
> Do you know enough about Darwin's theory to see the importance of what I wrote next?

Do you think Szostak knows enough about Darwin to anticipate this objection? And do
you think that a forensic arson investigator does not know that gusts of wind are not
send by Huracan to set houses of evildoers on fire, and still reconstruct sometimes a
fire by using ventilators that direct the wind just so that mock house is set on fire (e.g.
by a candle that tipps over?) to mirror as closely as possible the outcome of the real fire?

> It doesn't seem like it -- you showed no sign of comprehending it in the part I snipped out.

You mean where I gave reasons why it doesn't matter for the purpose of the experiment that
evolution is not goal driven, and that in reconstruction of past events with known outcome,
we can frequently behave "as if" nature had the eventual outcome as goal, and nonetheless, if
done properly and carefully, get interesting results? You know that simply by snipping it in one post,
it does not go away and everyone can look up what I wrote elsethread?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:51:00 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 1, 2023 at 6:10:59 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > OOPS! while I was putting the finishing touches on my reply to Daggett,
> > the blue announcement at the bottom of my screen flashed
> > for the post to which I am now replying, and I assumed it was an incoming post.
> > Oh, well, no harm done.

I've gotten to wondering, though: is it possible to spoof dates as successfully
as it is to spoof email addresses? I ask because I once got an email from
a colleague dated in the year 1973, more than a decade before he sent it. He explained
that if he made a specialized kind of mistake in his email, an automated command would
put it at the bottom of the recipient's inbox with that date.

Back in those days, my mailbox was much less cluttered with earlier email
than it is now, and that is how I was able to find it in the first place, at the very bottom.

Thanks for clarifying.

> > > and as you also often told us that you are the most honest person here,

> > Is this an allusion to my frequent calling of myself a "goddamn moralizer"?
> >
> give the man a cigar! Or rather, that among many other examples where you
> feel the need to tell everybody just what a paragon of virtue you are

More of the same sarcasm, obviously.

I use the word "goddamn" for a reason, which is that most people
here act as though it were despicably rude for me to document
dishonesty, hypocrisy, harassment, etc. in a way that SHOWS it is one of those things.

This is a complete contrast to total lack of evidence used by the person who tried to get
DIG to ban me from talk.origins, and the way he got treated for
his opposite kind of rudeness. All he got from most people who replied to his flood
of vile, trumped-up charges against me was the "good cop" treatment, "Just ignore him."

You were an exception, except that I can't recall whether you told him
in direct reply that you think he should be the one who is banned.

> > There are a number of people here whose complete honesty I have seen
> > no reason to doubt, and I have alluded to that fact on occasion.
> > One of them is someone whom you've gotten egg
> > on your face for vitriolic comments that turned out to be false: Ron Dean.

> So far you failed to show any mistake I made.

The main "mistake" was to flat out accuse him of lying when, in fact,
he had just failed to realize that Paley had written two different
works with the same keywords in the title: one that was required reading
for Darwin, the other optional. I went through your whole vitriolic post here:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/0XgjzJpuiMA/m/VTRzF_sdBgAJ

Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?

Jul 20, 2023, 9:50:46 PM

Have you been keeping up with the way he exonerated himself of deliberate lying?

Thanks perhaps to your admired jillery replying to it first, in her own inimitable way,
your reply to the linked post was a travesty that I won't have time to properly
deal with for several months.

Here is just one thing, for now. You missed the point in the one place where Martin Harran
addressed a tiny bit while snipping out the rest. He missed the point in a different way,
but that's another story.

I wanted to know whether *everyday* German had a concept equivalent
to "giving the other guy the benefit of the doubt." The word "guy" (statt e.g.,"person")
tipped off Martin, but not you.

You went into a long spiel about how the German legal system uses the concept,
but never said anything about common everyday speech. Here in the USA,
the concept comes naturally to most people, even though it may be "more honored in the breach
than in the observance," as Shakespeare put it in "Hamlet."


Care to address that issue now?

> IIRC, you only whined a lot that I
> wasn't sufficiently harsh to other people who had been mean, mean I say, to you,

Wrong in every detail. Here is what you are dishonestly and condescendingly
spin-doctoring the bejesus out of in the last sentence:

[EXCERPT FROM NEAR THE END OF THE LINKED POST]
> And yet, here we are again, you engaging in the same character assassination, even though you know that these claims are factually wqromg. Do you intend to male IDlers/creationists look bad? Because you do a sterling job of achieving just that

You lack a sense of proportion. I could document far worse behavior by Harshman
and jillery,
[END OF EXCERPT]

That was Ron Dean whom you accused, not me. Your "to you,"
is thus of the genre of one of Harshman's favorite formulae,
"It's all about you, isn't it?"

On this thread you can see just how fulsomely that formula applies to him.
It's in the first half of the last reply he did to me on this very thread.

I haven't replied to that post yet, but I will reply either today or tomorrow.

> Oh, and some pretty inane comments about German law and culture,

See above about the one in the linked post. I await your reply to my last question.


Remainder deleted, with on-topic parts to be replied to within a week.


Peter Nyikos

[Burkhard]

yup

>
> I use the word "goddamn" for a reason, which is that most people
> here act as though it were despicably rude for me to document
> dishonesty, hypocrisy, harassment, etc. in a way that SHOWS it is one of those things.
>
> This is a complete contrast to total lack of evidence used by the person who tried to get
> DIG to ban me from talk.origins, and the way he got treated for
> his opposite kind of rudeness. All he got from most people who replied to his flood
> of vile, trumped-up charges against me was the "good cop" treatment, "Just ignore him."
>
> You were an exception, except that I can't recall whether you told him
> in direct reply that you think he should be the one who is banned.
> > > There are a number of people here whose complete honesty I have seen
> > > no reason to doubt, and I have alluded to that fact on occasion.
> > > One of them is someone whom you've gotten egg
> > > on your face for vitriolic comments that turned out to be false: Ron Dean.
>
> > So far you failed to show any mistake I made.
> The main "mistake" was to flat out accuse him of lying when, in fact,
> he had just failed to realize that Paley had written two different
> works with the same keywords in the title: one that was required reading
> for Darwin, the other optional. I went through your whole vitriolic post here:

You misread the post, as per usual. I accused him of lying because he had explicitly
accepted the evidence that Darwin's change in religious attitude and his research
in biology did not coincide just a few years ago, and that therefore his imputation
that Darwin's atheism motivated him to manipulate research data to achieve his
desired outcome was provably false.

Even though he accepted it at the time, he more or less verbatim posted the same claim,
with the same flawed evidence, again (and without any indication that he found anything
new that may have changed his mind). This is not the only case of this behaviour, I documented
it also for the "evo-devo" issue where he accepts at one point that his claims don't hold,
only to repeat them a few years later again, so there is a pattern.

His confusion about the two books was just a side issue for clarification.

Very much unlike you, before I accuse anyone of dishonesty I need strong evidence
that a) their claim is false and b) the person who makes the claim knows it to be false.
For the latter it is not enough that the person was shown strong evidence - a closed
mind can after all reject even very strong and compelling evidence. That
means it is almost never possible to accuse someone of lying on TO. This was one of the
exceptions, and my documentation was ways ahead of anything you ever provide
when accusing people of dishonesty.

>
> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/0XgjzJpuiMA/m/VTRzF_sdBgAJ
> Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?
> Jul 20, 2023, 9:50:46 PM
>
> Have you been keeping up with the way he exonerated himself of deliberate lying?
>
> Thanks perhaps to your admired jillery replying to it first, in her own inimitable way,
> your reply to the linked post was a travesty that I won't have time to properly
> deal with for several months.
>
> Here is just one thing, for now. You missed the point in the one place where Martin Harran
> addressed a tiny bit while snipping out the rest. He missed the point in a different way,
> but that's another story.

I have no idea what any of the above means.

>
> I wanted to know whether *everyday* German had a concept equivalent
> to "giving the other guy the benefit of the doubt." The word "guy" (statt e.g.,"person")
> tipped off Martin, but not you.
>
> You went into a long spiel about how the German legal system uses the concept,
> but never said anything about common everyday speech. Here in the USA,
> the concept comes naturally to most people, even though it may be "more honored in the breach
> than in the observance," as Shakespeare put it in "Hamlet."

First, the concept is a technical legal term, so if you use it, you should expect an answer along
these lines. Second, you assume without evidence that there is a big gap between
the acceptance of an idea in the legal system and public attitudes, which for democracies at
least is highly implausible.

Third, I have no intention to engage further with your US centric bigotry that ascribes
(without objective evidence of course) positive and negative character traits to entire
people. I guess I can only assume that you do this because you live in a former
slaveholder state where the attitude of charactering, classifying and denigrating people
because of their ancestry is second nature to everyone - or so I would argue if I had your
mindset, I guess. As I don't, treat it not as a statement of my actual belief, but an attempt
to hold a mirror up to show just how unacceptable your behaviour is - for all the good it will do

>
>
> Care to address that issue now?
> > IIRC, you only whined a lot that I
> > wasn't sufficiently harsh to other people who had been mean, mean I say, to you,
> Wrong in every detail. Here is what you are dishonestly and condescendingly
> spin-doctoring the bejesus out of in the last sentence:
>
> [EXCERPT FROM NEAR THE END OF THE LINKED POST]
> > And yet, here we are again, you engaging in the same character assassination, even though you know that these claims are factually wqromg. Do you intend to male IDlers/creationists look bad? Because you do a sterling job of achieving just that
>
> You lack a sense of proportion. I could document far worse behavior by Harshman
> and jillery,
> [END OF EXCERPT]
>
> That was Ron Dean whom you accused, not me. Your "to you,"
> is thus of the genre of one of Harshman's favorite formulae,
> "It's all about you, isn't it?"

So? And your response was that there are other people who in your view do even worse than Ron
Just as I said

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Thursday, August 3, 2023 at 1:01:01 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:51:00 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:


> > > Is this an allusion to my frequent calling of myself a "goddamn moralizer"?

.

> > give the man a cigar! Or rather, that among many other examples where you
> > feel the need to tell everybody just what a paragon of virtue you are

.

> More of the same sarcasm, obviously.

Half right, I suspect.

> I use the word "goddamn" for a reason, which is that most people
> here act as though it were despicably rude for me to document
> dishonesty, hypocrisy, harassment, etc. in a way that SHOWS it is one of those things.

I should know better but I'm jumping in anyway.
You misapprehend. It is not really that you __attempt__ to document where
others are being dishonest. It's where you repeatedly claim to have succeeded
to people who honestly don't agree that you have.

Then, you take the fact that they don't agree that you succeeded in documenting
the dishonesty of others, as a mark that those who disagree on that point are
also dishonest. People recognize this as a house of cards. You are convinced,
they are not. Wash, rinse, repeat.

As a minor point, there are those who likely think the initial effort, to somehow
prove that somebody else is lying, is a misguided sideshow. But I expect that
such a feeling is at least in part predicated on having previous experience
with the cycle indicated above. It almost never succeeds in convincing
anyone other than the author of the accusations, and that author then compounds
the situation. Ultimately, a significant fraction of the accusations of dishonestly
seem linked to people who don't believe prior accusations of dishonestly were
either successfully or wisely prosecuted.

That you characterize this as your audience being amoral atheists just ices the cake.

[Burkhard]

you mean bereft of nutritional value, bound to make you overweight and rots your teeth? :o)

[jillery]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 10:34:28 -0700 (PDT), Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>
wrote:

>On Thursday, August 3, 2023 at 6:01:01?PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:51:00?PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:

>> > On Tuesday, August 1, 2023 at 6:10:59?PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> > > OOPS! while I was putting the finishing touches on my reply to Daggett,
>> > > the blue announcement at the bottom of my screen flashed
>> > > for the post to which I am now replying, and I assumed it was an incoming post.
>> > > Oh, well, no harm done.
>> I've gotten to wondering, though: is it possible to spoof dates as successfully
>> as it is to spoof email addresses? I ask because I once got an email from
>> a colleague dated in the year 1973, more than a decade before he sent it. He explained
>> that if he made a specialized kind of mistake in his email, an automated command would
>> put it at the bottom of the recipient's inbox with that date.
>>
>> Back in those days, my mailbox was much less cluttered with earlier email
>> than it is now, and that is how I was able to find it in the first place, at the very bottom.

>> > > On Saturday, July 29, 2023 at 6:40:56?PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>> > > > On Saturday, July 22, 2023 at 2:05:47?AM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> > > > > On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 12:10:37?PM UTC-4, Gary Hurd wrote:

Your recognition of this behavior has been identified by myself and
others many times. It is one of the many challenges to having a
coherent discussion with R.Dean. Another is his interpreting such
recognition as a personal attack, about which he complains with great
zeal but with no objective basis.

Relevant to the very post and poster to which you reply here, PeeWee
Peter recently picked up on an earlier episode of the above, and
accused that I:

"risked giving Ron a heart attack"
*********************************
From: "peter2...@gmail.com" <peter2...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2023 13:24:51 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <68e440e3-d6f8-416f...@googlegroups.com>
**********************************

which is a willfully stupid and outrageous slander, one of many that
PeeWee Peter doesn't even acknowledge, nevermind even pretend to
retract.

>Very much unlike you, before I accuse anyone of dishonesty I need strong evidence
>that a) their claim is false and b) the person who makes the claim knows it to be false.
>For the latter it is not enough that the person was shown strong evidence - a closed
>mind can after all reject even very strong and compelling evidence. That
>means it is almost never possible to accuse someone of lying on TO. This was one of the
>exceptions, and my documentation was ways ahead of anything you ever provide
>when accusing people of dishonesty.
>
>
>>
>> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/0XgjzJpuiMA/m/VTRzF_sdBgAJ
>> Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?

>> Jul 20, 2023, 9:50:46?PM

[Mark Isaak]

On 8/3/23 10:34 AM, Burkhard wrote:

[snip to an off-topic pet peeve]

> Third, I have no intention to engage further with your US centric bigotry that ascribes
> (without objective evidence of course) positive and negative character traits to entire
> people. I guess I can only assume that you do this because you live in a former

> slaveholder state [. . .]

I consider it inaccurate to refer to South Carolina (or any US state) as
a "former" slaveholder state. The 13h amendment, which people
abbreviate to say it repealed slavery, includes an exception for people
convicted of crime. Treating them as slaves is still legal, and still
routine. Nor is this a nitpick, since it explains why the US prison
population is far greater than that of any other country in the world,
and why those people are disproportionately black.

--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

[Martin Harran]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2023 10:52:15 -0700 (PDT), Lawyer Daggett
<j.nobel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thursday, August 3, 2023 at 1:01:01?PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

>> On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:51:00?PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>
>
>> > > Is this an allusion to my frequent calling of myself a "goddamn moralizer"?
>.
>> > give the man a cigar! Or rather, that among many other examples where you
>> > feel the need to tell everybody just what a paragon of virtue you are
>.
>> More of the same sarcasm, obviously.
>
>Half right, I suspect.
>
>> I use the word "goddamn" for a reason, which is that most people
>> here act as though it were despicably rude for me to document
>> dishonesty, hypocrisy, harassment, etc. in a way that SHOWS it is one of those things.
>
>I should know better but I'm jumping in anyway.
>You misapprehend. It is not really that you __attempt__ to document where
>others are being dishonest. It's where you repeatedly claim to have succeeded
>to people who honestly don't agree that you have.
>
>Then, you take the fact that they don't agree that you succeeded in documenting
>the dishonesty of others, as a mark that those who disagree on that point are
>also dishonest.

You forget that those who regularly disagree with him are actually
part of some collective group (aka conspiracy) whose raison d'etre is
to attack him.

[Martin Harran]

On Fri, 4 Aug 2023 08:01:28 -0700, Mark Isaak
<specime...@curioustaxon.omy.net> wrote:

>On 8/3/23 10:34 AM, Burkhard wrote:
>
>[snip to an off-topic pet peeve]
>
>> Third, I have no intention to engage further with your US centric bigotry that ascribes
>> (without objective evidence of course) positive and negative character traits to entire
>> people. I guess I can only assume that you do this because you live in a former
>> slaveholder state [. . .]
>
>I consider it inaccurate to refer to South Carolina (or any US state) as
>a "former" slaveholder state. The 13h amendment, which people
>abbreviate to say it repealed slavery, includes an exception for people
>convicted of crime. Treating them as slaves is still legal, and still
>routine. Nor is this a nitpick, since it explains why the US prison
>population is far greater than that of any other country in the world,
>and why those people are disproportionately black.

Hasn't the concept of 'slaveholder' now been dispelled as these were
really people imparting skills that would be to the benefit of these
so-called slaves in later life?

[Bob Casanova]

On Fri, 04 Aug 2023 18:52:55 +0100, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Martin Harran
<martin...@gmail.com>:

Kamala? Is that you?
>
--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

[peter2...@gmail.com]

It's obvious now: you were just being smart-alecky everywhere above.

You even admitted to being a smart alec in sci.bio.paleontology
last month.

I'm sure jillery appreciates the way you took the attention off
the challenge I gave her way up there.

> >> Of course a platypus is a
> >> transitional form, in exactly the sense paleontologists mean the term.

Here is how you defined it below:

> > Could you please point us to a published source where a paleontologist uses the
> > following definition?

Repeated from below:

> >> It displays a combination of traits intermediate between the "reptilian"
> >> and "mammalian" conditions. That is, it retains some primitive traits
> >> long since transformed in other mammal lineages.

You ducked this question:

> Can you point us to a published source where a paleontologist uses any
> other?

YES!!

It took a long time before it finally occurred to me that a famous quotation
uses a very different definition:

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record
persist as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary
trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and
nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable,
not the evidence of fossils.
--Stephen J. Gould - "Evolution's Erratic Pace," _Natural History_,
vol. 86(5) (May 1987): pp. 12-16, at p. 14
Reprinted in _The Panda's Thumb_, pp. 181-182.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part3.html#quote3.2

By YOUR definition, the strata are full of transitional fossils, so you
have inadvertently consigned Stephen J. Gould to the ranks of non-paleontologists.

Now tell me: was all that smart-alecky garbage about connotations designed
to distract me from thinking about your question? It almost worked.

> If transitional forms had to be ancestral, there could be none
> known, since we can't recognize ancestors. Is Acanthostega ancestral to
> anything? Is Archaeopteryx? No way to know, and yet we consider them
> transitional. Most known maniraptorans postdate Archaeopteryx, yet they
> too are considered transitional forms. The age of the fossil is not
> important, and it doesn't even have to be a fossil.

I leave it to you to tell everyone whether one of your fellow cladophiles
posed this line of argument to Gould, and if not, why not.


Concluded in next reply, coming your way tomorrow.


Peter Nyikos

Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[jillery]

On Mon, 7 Aug 2023 18:32:55 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>I'm sure jillery appreciates the way you took the attention off
>the challenge I gave her way up there.

Since you mention it, and to the contrary, jillery appropriately
ignored your challenge. You're welcome.

[John Harshman]

I'm going to point to this as evidence of your inability to detect humor
or to untangle humorous and serious aspects of a post or even a single
sentence.

>>>> Of course a platypus is a
>>>> transitional form, in exactly the sense paleontologists mean the term.
>
> Here is how you defined it below:
>
>
>
>>> Could you please point us to a published source where a paleontologist uses the
>>> following definition?
>
> Repeated from below:
>
>>>> It displays a combination of traits intermediate between the "reptilian"
>>>> and "mammalian" conditions. That is, it retains some primitive traits
>>>> long since transformed in other mammal lineages.
>
> You ducked this question:
>
>> Can you point us to a published source where a paleontologist uses any
>> other?
>
> YES!!

No, as it happens. You are misreading.

> It took a long time before it finally occurred to me that a famous quotation
> uses a very different definition:
>
> "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record
> persist as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary
> trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and
> nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable,
> not the evidence of fossils.
> --Stephen J. Gould - "Evolution's Erratic Pace," _Natural History_,
> vol. 86(5) (May 1987): pp. 12-16, at p. 14
> Reprinted in _The Panda's Thumb_, pp. 181-182.
> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part3.html#quote3.2
>
> By YOUR definition, the strata are full of transitional fossils, so you
> have inadvertently consigned Stephen J. Gould to the ranks of non-paleontologists.

That's pathetic. Gould is talking about the fine transitions between
species. As you presumably know, he later complained that creationists
were using his words in the same way you try to here, and he responded
by stating that transitions between higher groups were abundant.

> Now tell me: was all that smart-alecky garbage about connotations designed
> to distract me from thinking about your question? It almost worked.

I respond here only because you would assume silence to mean consent:
this is all your fevered imagination.

>> If transitional forms had to be ancestral, there could be none
>> known, since we can't recognize ancestors. Is Acanthostega ancestral to
>> anything? Is Archaeopteryx? No way to know, and yet we consider them
>> transitional. Most known maniraptorans postdate Archaeopteryx, yet they
>> too are considered transitional forms. The age of the fossil is not
>> important, and it doesn't even have to be a fossil.
>
> I leave it to you to tell everyone whether one of your fellow cladophiles
> posed this line of argument to Gould, and if not, why not.

I have no idea. But I suppose asking the question means you don't have
to think about what I said.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

And below, you show your amazing degree of chutzpah by ignoring
the sequel of that admission, with the climax here:

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.bio.paleontology/c/cdqVyJHLShc/m/tZ-PydubAAAJ
Re: Attack of the mammals
Aug 2, 2023, 6:12:11 PM

> > I'm sure jillery appreciates the way you took the attention off
> > the challenge I gave her way up there.

You next revert to a decade-old scam of yours, about which
you were caught telling a whopper of a lie in the linked post.
In your pathetic reply to the same linked post, you reverted to the
role of an unfairly maligned person who only wanted to get back to
on-topic discussion.


Now you let us see just how much on-topic discussion REALLY means to you:

> I'm going to point to this as evidence of your inability to detect humor
> or to untangle humorous and serious aspects of a post or even a single
> sentence.

Baloney. Every last bit of what you had written above earlier,
was you being smart-alecky.

One of several reasons why I describe you as being "The most cunningly
dishonest person in talk.origins and sci.bio.paleontology"
is that your comments run the entire spectrum from obvious jokes
to shameless lies, with a gradualism that Darwin had hoped for evolution to follow.

In the linked post, you were caught red-handed in a shameless lie about your
decade-old scam.


The topic shifted abruptly here, so I will do a separate reply for it,
to be done shortly after I see that this one has posted.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 10:26:07 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 8/7/23 6:32 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Monday, July 24, 2023 at 6:05:51 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> >> On 7/24/23 2:38 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 10:26:07 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 8/7/23 6:32 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Monday, July 24, 2023 at 6:05:51 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> >> On 7/24/23 2:38 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

Picking up where I left off in the preceding post:

> >>> On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 6:45:40 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:

> >>>> Of course a platypus is a
> >>>> transitional form, in exactly the sense paleontologists mean the term.
> >

> >>> Could you please point us to a published source where a paleontologist uses the
> >>> following definition?
> >
> > Repeated from below:
> >
> >>>> It displays a combination of traits intermediate between the "reptilian"
> >>>> and "mammalian" conditions. That is, it retains some primitive traits
> >>>> long since transformed in other mammal lineages.
> >
> > You ducked this question:
> >
> >> Can you point us to a published source where a paleontologist uses any
> >> other?
> >
> > YES!!

> No, as it happens. You are misreading.

The part I quoted [see below] perfectly fits a use of the word "transitional."
You are actually talking here about an alleged context, which
is impossible to misread, because you didn't give one.

> > It took a long time before it finally occurred to me that a famous quotation
> > uses a very different definition:
> >
> > "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record
> > persist as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary
> > trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and
> > nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable,
> > not the evidence of fossils.
> > --Stephen J. Gould - "Evolution's Erratic Pace," _Natural History_,
> > vol. 86(5) (May 1987): pp. 12-16, at p. 14
> > Reprinted in _The Panda's Thumb_, pp. 181-182.
> > http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part3.html#quote3.2
> >
> > By YOUR definition, the strata are full of transitional fossils, so you
> > have inadvertently consigned Stephen J. Gould to the ranks of non-paleontologists.

> That's pathetic.

Under-supported gratuitous put-down noted.

> Gould is talking about the fine transitions between species.

Is that supposed to be true because YOU say so, with nothing said about the context?

Here are the two sentences IMMEDIATELY before the one that starts the quote:

"We do not see slow evolutionary change in the fossil record because we study only one step in thousands. Change seems to be abrupt because the intermediate steps are missing."

There is one "exception that proves the rule" where there are many times fewer
than a thousand fine transitions between successive species in the fossil record.
This is the horse family, the topic of Kathleen Hunt's excellent FAQ:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html

But there is hardly any other family with such fine fossil gradations.
It is more common to see thousands of steps missing between It is more common to see thousands of steps missing between
one kind of animal and something closely resembling a possible ancestor.
Two examples are bats and pterosaurs, with nothing known between
expert fliers and any possible fully terrestrial ancestors.


> As you presumably know,

I know nothing like what you claim next, prevaricator:

> he later complained that creationists
> were using his words in the same way you try to here,

I accuse you of misrepresenting what creationists claim.
Let's see whether you plead not guilty, and give a credible defense.

> and he responded
> by stating that transitions between higher groups were abundant.

I'd like to see a direct quote, with a source whose context I can
read for myself. As I indicated above, your handwaving away
of contexts is highly suspicious.


<snip of irrelevant polemical interlude>

> >> If transitional forms had to be ancestral, there could be none
> >> known, since we can't recognize ancestors. Is Acanthostega ancestral to
> >> anything? Is Archaeopteryx? No way to know, and yet we consider them
> >> transitional. Most known maniraptorans postdate Archaeopteryx, yet they
> >> too are considered transitional forms. The age of the fossil is not
> >> important, and it doesn't even have to be a fossil.
> >
> > I leave it to you to tell everyone whether one of your fellow cladophiles
> > posed this line of argument to Gould, and if not, why not.

> I have no idea. But I suppose asking the question means you don't have
> to think about what I said.

I've thought about everything you've said on this thread, but what you
said above starts with a perennial claim of yours that throws Kathleen Hunt's
claims of direct ancestry in her FAQ under the bus, along with my talk about
"prime ancestor candidates".

But you left out your usual "proof": your cladophile way is "objective".

Like hell it is.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

It's so difficult to resist at this point a comment on you having proved
with geometric logic that there was another key to the wardroom locker.
But perhaps you could just give all this nonsense a rest for a while.

[John Harshman]

I presume you had the context available to you. But yes, it's a use of
the word "transitional", but a use we weren't talking about.

>>> It took a long time before it finally occurred to me that a famous quotation
>>> uses a very different definition:
>>>
>>> "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record
>>> persist as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary
>>> trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and
>>> nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable,
>>> not the evidence of fossils.
>>> --Stephen J. Gould - "Evolution's Erratic Pace," _Natural History_,
>>> vol. 86(5) (May 1987): pp. 12-16, at p. 14
>>> Reprinted in _The Panda's Thumb_, pp. 181-182.
>>> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part3.html#quote3.2
>>>
>>> By YOUR definition, the strata are full of transitional fossils, so you
>>> have inadvertently consigned Stephen J. Gould to the ranks of non-paleontologists.
>
>> That's pathetic.
>
> Under-supported gratuitous put-down noted.

Unsupported gratuitous put-down noted.

>> Gould is talking about the fine transitions between species.
>
> Is that supposed to be true because YOU say so, with nothing said about the context?

It's true because I know Gould's published work. I imagine you do to, so
why are you arguing about this?

> Here are the two sentences IMMEDIATELY before the one that starts the quote:
>
> "We do not see slow evolutionary change in the fossil record because we study only one step in thousands. Change seems to be abrupt because the intermediate steps are missing."

Doesn't that support my claim? This is what punctuated eqilibria is all
about.

> There is one "exception that proves the rule" where there are many times fewer
> than a thousand fine transitions between successive species in the fossil record.
> This is the horse family, the topic of Kathleen Hunt's excellent FAQ:
>
> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html
>
> But there is hardly any other family with such fine fossil gradations.
> It is more common to see thousands of steps missing between It is more common to see thousands of steps missing between
> one kind of animal and something closely resembling a possible ancestor.
> Two examples are bats and pterosaurs, with nothing known between
> expert fliers and any possible fully terrestrial ancestors.

I feel that you would expect me to say something here and would say
something like <crickets> if I didn't. Is that right?

>> As you presumably know,
>
> I know nothing like what you claim next, prevaricator:
>
>> he later complained that creationists
>> were using his words in the same way you try to here,
>
> I accuse you of misrepresenting what creationists claim.
> Let's see whether you plead not guilty, and give a credible defense.

Was Gould (below) misrepresenting what creationists claim?

>> and he responded
>> by stating that transitions between higher groups were abundant.
>
> I'd like to see a direct quote, with a source whose context I can
> read for myself. As I indicated above, your handwaving away
> of contexts is highly suspicious.

Have you ever read, for example, Eldredge and Gould 1972? (Eldredge N.,
Gould S.J. Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism.
In: Schopf T.J.M. editor. Models of Paleobiology, 1972. p. 82-115.)

As for the actual quote, here:

T]ransitions are often found in the fossil record. Preserved transitions
are not common -- and should not be, according to our understanding of
evolution (see next section) but they are not entirely wanting, as
creationists often claim. [He then discusses two examples: therapsid
intermediaries between reptiles and mammals, and the half-dozen human
species - found as of 1981 - that appear in an unbroken temporal
sequence of progressively more modern features.]

Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy of
their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to
buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am
-- for I have become a major target of these practices.

I count myself among the evolutionists who argue for a jerky, or
episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change. In 1972 my
colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated
equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record
-- geologically "sudden" origin of new species and failure to change
thereafter (stasis) -- reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory,
not the imperfections of the fossil record. In most theories, small
isolated populations are the source of new species, and the process of
speciation takes thousands or tens of thousands of years. This amount of
time, so long when measured against our lives, is a geological
microsecond . . .

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is
infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists -- whether
through design or stupidity, I do not know -- as admitting that the
fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are
generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between
larger groups.

- Gould, Stephen Jay 1983. "Evolution as Fact and Theory" in Hens Teeth
and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History. New York: W.
W. Norton & Co., p. 258-260.

> <snip of irrelevant polemical interlude>

Hey, it was your interlude.

>>>> If transitional forms had to be ancestral, there could be none
>>>> known, since we can't recognize ancestors. Is Acanthostega ancestral to
>>>> anything? Is Archaeopteryx? No way to know, and yet we consider them
>>>> transitional. Most known maniraptorans postdate Archaeopteryx, yet they
>>>> too are considered transitional forms. The age of the fossil is not
>>>> important, and it doesn't even have to be a fossil.
>>>
>>> I leave it to you to tell everyone whether one of your fellow cladophiles
>>> posed this line of argument to Gould, and if not, why not.
>
>> I have no idea. But I suppose asking the question means you don't have
>> to think about what I said.
>
> I've thought about everything you've said on this thread, but what you
> said above starts with a perennial claim of yours that throws Kathleen Hunt's
> claims of direct ancestry in her FAQ under the bus, along with my talk about
> "prime ancestor candidates".
>
> But you left out your usual "proof": your cladophile way is "objective".
>
> Like hell it is.

Yeah, we disagree on whether you have thought. My actual point, which I
didn't bother to make, was that Gould wouldn't have needed to have this
argument used on him, because he didn't in any way disagree.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Sorry to be so late with replying to the on-topic parts of your post here,
Burkhard. The 3day+ downtime of Beagle is only partly to blame.

On Wednesday, August 2, 2023 at 8:51:00 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 1, 2023 at 6:10:59 PM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Saturday, July 29, 2023 at 6:40:56 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> > > On Saturday, July 22, 2023 at 2:05:47 AM UTC+1, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

[...]

> > > > > On Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 1:10:36 PM UTC-7, jillery wrote:

[...]

> > > > > > >On Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 1:35:36?AM UTC-7, jillery wrote:

A little bit of context here:

> > > > > > >> The following is a link to a 55-minute lecture by Jack Szostak,
> > > > > > >> describing the current status of his team's efforts to identify
> > > > > > >> plausible processes of abiogenesis. He follows his lecture with a
> > > > > > >> 30-minute Q&A with the audience.

[...]
> > > > > > >> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U841Zrd4C5g>

> > > > > > I was surprised at the number of children in the audience and the naivete of many of
> > > > > > the questions, suggesting something like the Royal Institute's
> > > > > > Christmas lectures, in contrast to a presentation to Szostack's
> > > > > > professional peers.

AFAIK, this latter presentation hasn't been made public.

More intriguingly: does anyone reading this know whether *that* lecture was open to the public?


<huge snip to get to the on-topic part, starting with your words>

> > > you are of course totally right to speculate about the nefarious reasons

Something I haven't done and do not intend to do, having seen
no sign of nefariousness by Szostak.

> > > - as Sherlock Holmes used to say, if you have ruled out the impossible, whatever
> > > remains, however improbable, must be true. Even if in this case it means that a Nobel
> > > Laureate talking about his core field of research made a methodological plunder to
> > > obvious that someone like you who has not spend a single hour of his life in a lab
> > > doing abiogenesis research would immediately spot it!

There was no methodological blunder. What I wrote instead was that at one point
in the lecture, Szostak abandoned all talk about recreating primitive earth conditions
[preserved in text below].

But the methodology in what he did instead was flawless. His goal was to
take a huge "library" of long RNA strings and run them through as many "generations"
of replication as necessary to get an RNA string that would bind to an ATP molecule.
The methodology was to pick the sequences of each generation that showed the
most promise in advancing towards that goal, and he and his coworkers succeeded
in using this method to attain that goal.

This is VASTLY better than using theory to find such sequences from scratch.

> > The reality is much more mundane, as I told jillery elsethread:
> >
> > [excerpt, my words from two separate posts:]
> > > >Szostak is about as good as they come in the field of OOL, and the way he admits
> > > >to how much we do NOT know, especially in the Q&A session, he is well worth listening to.
> >
> > Note the words "the way" and "how much": not vague generalities like yours,
> > but one specific example after another.
> > [end of excerpt]
> >

> > All documentable from the film with the help of the transcript.

<snip>

> And my point was not
> how he acknowledges the gaps in our knowledge, but your accusation of misleading

> experiment design.

"misleading" is way too strong. The flaw was in the exposition: Szostak gave no
hint as to the relevance of his experiment to OOL research [see 11:50 thru 16:30].

It took me a long time to figure out how it might be relevant, but then I realized
that it gave a lot of intermediate goals to shoot for under prebiotic conditions.
Especially if several radically different ATP-binding strings emerged from the experiments.

This, however, is still a far cry from the first "Holy Grail" of abiogenesis research.
The search for this first aims to find an RNA string --by whatever means, initially -- which will take
any other RNA string and, in a bath rich in nucleotides, produce the complementary
string in something like real time. Then the first Holy Grail is reached when such an
RNA string is produced under primitive earth conditions without human intervention.

> > >
> > > Now me, I've always admitted that I'm a layperson when it comes to biology, so what would
> > > I know. But I have spend quite a bit of time among scientists who also try to distinguish
> > > between design and natural causes, and strangely enough they too would do all the things
> > > you find objectionable below.

I fail to see what you meant by those last four words.

> > That's because their aims are often different from what you imagine.
> > Now I will show a spin doctor like you how I actually give Szostak the
> > benefit of the doubt:
> >
> > Szostak's abandonment in 13:00 - 13:50 [see below] was, I surmise, done in order to come
> > up with RNA sequences that are not found in living organisms, but which
> > show what the percentage [3] of sequences are that are conducive to progress
> > towards "life as we know it," beginning with the first free-living bacteria [prokaryotes].
> > The kind of "forced evolution" they carry out is infinitely better than to just
> > sit down and try to come up with such a ribozyme from scratch.
> >
> > [3] extraordinarily small by everyday standards, but perhaps not for the millions of years
> > and the size of earth for making OOL a reality. However, it would take a century or two
> > to succeed at that. But they are taking the first baby steps, at least if my giving them
> > the right benefit of the doubt.

> still no idea what you mean,

Did my talk about the first Holy Grail help? There are several other Holy Grails to be
sought for and found before the first free-living prokaryote emerges naturally, and I think
I was extraordinarily generous in the words "a century or two," but I don't expect you
to agree with that for quite a while.

> My point was your claim that he made basic mistakes in
> experimental design.

You read too much into what I actually wrote.

> >
> > <snip of things to be dealt with later on this week>

Alas, that plan went by the wayside, but I think I can handle that tomorrow;
if not, then early next week.

> > > > I"m surprised no one in the audience of his lecture that WAS taped asked him about the following
> > > > anomaly. I'd be very disappointed if the professionals didn't pick up on it either.
> > > >
> > > > At one point in the film, between the ca. 13:00 minute point and the ca. 13:50 point, Szostak
> > > > completely abandons the project of trying to re-create prebiotic conditions
> > > > or simulating something like natural selection. Instead, he talks about
> > > > an unspecified number of "generations" of RNA molecules in the laboratory,
> > > > in which the human experimenters carefully select the mutants that are in the direction of
> > > > "molecules that do uh what we want okay."
> > > >
> > > > The "what we want" is to bind an ATP molecule, but they are still working on
> > > > how to bind more tightly to this quite simple molecule.
> > > >
> > > > Human selection like this was well known before Darwin came along and showed how SOME
> > > > of it could be done (much more slowly!) via natural selection.
> > > >
> > > > But Szostak's method is like Intelligent Design not only because it is a human selection process,
> > > > but because there was a specific goal in mind. The idea of physical processes having a specific direction
> > > > was abandoned over a century before Szostak's experiment.

I stand by what I wrote here, but that isn't the end of the story. Now that I've talked
about why they probably ran the experiment, and why they were aiming for that goal,
you can understand the bigger context better.

> > > >
> > Do you know enough about Darwin's theory to see the importance of what I wrote next?

> Do you think Szostak knows enough about Darwin to anticipate this objection?

Sure, but that calls for preparing a long explanation of the real purposes of the experiment.

> And do you think that a forensic arson investigator does not know that gusts of wind are not
> send by Huracan to set houses of evildoers on fire, and still reconstruct sometimes a
> fire by using ventilators that direct the wind just so that mock house is set on fire (e.g.
> by a candle that tipps over?) to mirror as closely as possible the outcome of the real fire?

The proper analogy to that would be Szostak knowing just what natural process he was
modeling. But it would take many years to find a natural process under primitive earth
conditions that would take him to even one of the RNA strings that "did what he wanted."

And maybe he and other researchers would decide that they need to re-run the experiment
he is describing, looking for alternative paths. This is if they are getting fed up with
lack of progress towards ANY of the strings in the batch that "gave them what they wanted."

> > It doesn't seem like it -- you showed no sign of comprehending it in the part I snipped out.

> You mean where I gave reasons why it doesn't matter for the purpose of the experiment that
> evolution is not goal driven, and that in reconstruction of past events with known outcome,
> we can frequently behave "as if" nature had the eventual outcome as goal, and nonetheless, if
> done properly and carefully, get interesting results? You know that simply by snipping it in one post,
> it does not go away and everyone can look up what I wrote elsethread?

Szostak and co. had interesting results, all right, but now the fun ends
and the really hard work, explained above, begins.

Of course, your loaded last question suggests that you may still think that
you met these objections in the snipped part that I will tackle later,
but I recommend that you refresh your memory about it.
You may need to do some thinking about how to modify them
in the light of what I wrote above, especially about your arson analogy.


Peter Nyikos

Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS I left in below what you did, even thought you had no comments about it.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

It has long been my objective to take care of the greater part of this first post you did to this thread,
Burkhard, and I finally put it on my agenda for today, but I've been plagued with my laptop giving
me very suboptimal performance all day. I'll turn it off for the night and see whether that helps;
if not, I'll take it in to the University and have our IT person take a look at it.

Just so you know what to expect, I'll give you a preview of what I hope to address tomorrow.

On Saturday, July 29, 2023 at 6:40:56 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:

<snip superflous attributions>

> > > > >On Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 1:35:36?AM UTC-7, jillery wrote:

> > > > >> The following is a link to a 55-minute lecture by Jack Szostak,
> > > > >> describing the current status of his team's efforts to identify
> > > > >> plausible processes of abiogenesis. He follows his lecture with a
> > > > >> 30-minute Q&A with the audience.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> Some of the highlights of the lecture include demonstrations of how
> > > > >> lipid bilayers abiotically self-assemble, grow, and divide,
> > > > >> nonenzymatic RNA duplication, abiotic substrates for protein
> > > > >> synthesis, and functions of the first peptides.

<big snip, including text of yours that I've addressed before>

I've addressed the first two sentences below also, but I'll be giving a different slant
on them and then go on to everything else that I have left in below.

That's it -- but I should note, before signing off, in re that last sentence:
I'm far from wanting to talk about designers of things whose very existence is a mystery
at our present state of knowledge. If this seems evasive to you, see the talk about
Holy Grails in my last reply to you on Aug 17, 2023, 4:30:06 PM UTC-4, the last post to this thread before this one.

Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I'm really embarrassed at how long it has taken me to get around to posting this.
No excuses tonight, just a final wrap-up of the on-topic parts of your post.

On Saturday, July 29, 2023 at 6:40:56 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
<snip superflous attributions>

> > > > >On Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 1:35:36?AM UTC-7, jillery wrote:

> > > > >> The following is a link to a 55-minute lecture by Jack Szostak,
> > > > >> describing the current status of his team's efforts to identify
> > > > >> plausible processes of abiogenesis. He follows his lecture with a
> > > > >> 30-minute Q&A with the audience.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> Some of the highlights of the lecture include demonstrations of how
> > > > >> lipid bilayers abiotically self-assemble, grow, and divide,
> > > > >> nonenzymatic RNA duplication, abiotic substrates for protein
> > > > >> synthesis, and functions of the first peptides.

<big snip, including text of yours that I've addressed before>

I've addressed the first two sentences below also, but I'll be giving a different slant
on them and then go on to everything else that I have left in below.

> Now me, I've always admitted that I'm a layperson when it comes to biology, so what would
> I know. But I have spend quite a bit of time among scientists who also try to distinguish
> between design and natural causes, and strangely enough they too would do all the things
> you find objectionable below.

You seem to be proceeding from the incorrect premise that I am trying to distinguish between
designed and not designed events in OOL. Au contraire, I want to avoid talking about designers of things
whose very existence -- indeed whose *possible* existence is a mystery at our present state of knowledge.

> They must be all doing it wrong then. So for instance in an
> arson investigation, the initial question would be if the fire was the result of an accident or
> planned. We'd try to recreate the scene as best as we can in, and quite intentionally with
> varying degrees of correspondence to the hypothesised initial conditions.

At our present state of knowledge, OOL is more like the case of two primitive hunters
coming across a pride of lions devouring a carcass which they are unable to
identify from a distance. Not wishing to risk their lives by getting closer, they return to their village
saying that they don't know whether the carcass is that of a human or that of some
other large animal.

For the carcass, substitute the state of the protocells before the genetic code came
into being. Was that before or after DNA replication was fully in place? It does
make a difference what the next few steps will be like.

[Do I need to explain the concept of "genetic code" to you? It is very much misused by some people
who don't know enough biochemistry. If you are not sure, never mind, just read the next paragraph.]

Or take it further back: at what stage did the genetic material come to be
completely inside a cell membrane? Was it before or after the longest RNA strings [1]
reached a length of 20? 100? And how did the genetic material move from
one ur-cell [2] to another? Could there possibly have been protein-lined pores
like modern cells have, or was there some unknown other liner of the pores
that was able to open or close?

[1] I should probably play it safe and say "nucleotide strings" since
there has been some theorizing that RNA has some drawbacks
and perhaps the strings should be of PNA or some other kinds of
nucleotides to begin with. If this is greek to you, never mind: there
are enough other unknowns to worry about.

[2] There is an article in the Talk.origins Archive that talks about ur-cells.
They are hypothetical precursors of cells, but tiny compared to the smallest bacteria.
It's been a long time since I've looked at that article, and it may take a while to find it.

> If e.g. the test is
> if two adjacent materials would have allowed the fire to spread, ignoring for the moment
> that it would have rained on the day makes the reconstruction easier, and still gives valuable
> information if it shows no transfer was possible. The asymmetry between falsification
> and confirmation sees to that.

In that "further back" scenario, it is hard to tell just what simplifications to make.
But the worst part of it is, that we haven't a clue as to what the "chemical
composition" of those nucleotide strings might have been. By that I mean the exact
sequences of nucleotides [we have a "4-letter alphabet here] that comprised it.

> A second reason is that the initial conditions are also only ever hypothesised, based
> e.g. on witness statements or the weather report. These could be wrong or misleading.

That's one reason I kept things so simple in that "primitive hunters" scenario,
so that this would not be an obstacle to a report to the others in their village,
but the main reason was to do justice to how little we know about OOL.

> So finding "a" reconstruction of a natural pathway is valuable, even if it only holds for
> conditions that contradict the hypothesised initial conditions. Same I'd say with
> abiogenesis: If we find a pathway from molecules to life,

That "if" is something that we are maybe two centuries away from.
Never mind if it is THE pathway or not. We don't have a clue
as to what *any* pathway MIGHT look like. So it will only
be long after our deaths that OOL researchers will be ready
to tackle the following questions:

> but one that requires conditions
> other than those we think held when life was first formed on earth,

We are also decades if not centuries away from figuring what those
required conditions might be. There may even have been so
many chance occurrence that we might have to give up on
whether any were "required."

> can mean one of
> several things:
>
> - this is not how life originated on earth

Barring a decision that panspermia [either directed or undirected] was OOLOE
[Origin Of Life ON Earth], in which case we just leave off "on earth", researchers
in the next century or two will be happy if they can just get a scenario, and only
then start wondering whether this is how it started.

> - life did originate this way, but our theory about the "when" was wrong, it happened at
> another time when other conditions held

I doubt that this will excite researchers to more than 5% of the intensity that
the search for a possible scenario did. If by some miracle they manage
to come up with the RIGHT sequence of events, then the chances of finding outside funding
for "when" it happened will be nil.

Besides, we have a tolerably good fix on when it happened already: 3500 million years ago,
give or take a couple of hundred million.

> - life did originate in this way, and at this time - we were simply wrong in our theories about
> early earth.

The same two paragraphs I wrote about the second possibility hold here, *mutatis mutandis*.

>
> Same issue with the use of "artificial selection" In any reconstruction, we try to achieve a known
> goal - in our case a fire that creates a pattern that we can then compare with the pattern at the
> crime scene. There is nothing paradoxical or untoward about it - when reconstructing a single historical
> event under laboratory conditions, inevitably we know and direct it towards a predefined endpoint. The
> only thing needed is to document all the design choices that went into the experiment, and then
> if necessary carry out follow up tests to see if they can be removed.

Now this much is on target: Szostak and co. had a predetermined goal of a ribozyme that
could fit an ATP molecule. And the way they went about it was, I believe, the right way.

But the difficulty of even *identifying* a *candidate* for The First Holy Grail of OOL --
a ribozyme replicase [3] -- is immeasurably more difficult than this. And the
path to the Holy Grail under primitive earth conditions without any intelligent
tampering is far more formidable than even *that* difficulty.

[3] Defined in a post that I did today, in reply to a post by Ron Dean:
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/yl0TJZ0nueg/m/QD6n3mIXAgAJ
Re: Origin of Life Challenge

> So we'll nudge e.g. a candle towards the curtain, to see if the pattern from the burning curtain matches what
> we found on the scene. If not then the "wind blew over a candle" hypothesis is falsified. If yes, then and only then
> do we have to check if the candle could have fallen over by itself, or needed someone to push it the way we
> did in the experiment. And if we find the human interference is necessary, then that tells us a lot
> about the perpetrator/designer, what they did, when and how (here: threw a candle at the curtain)

Like I wrote above, I'm not ready to speculate about what any designers might have done, and may never be,
given our state of ignorance.

> All of this is pretty straightforward experimental design - and all experiments are after all designed.
> So it seems to me that what Szostak does is not just perfectly legit, it is what any putative "ID scientists"

> should do too, to see where exactly, how and in what way. with what tools the designer interfered.

These are two utterly different ways of proceeding, and I'm only interested in what Szostak and
others like him are able to achieve.

> Strangely
> enough, not a single one seems to care.

I care, and care deeply about what Szostak is trying to do. Maybe you could persuade
Athel or Bill Rogers or Lawyer Daggett to care about discussing OOL.
You have an excellent relationship with these three, don't you?

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS I've snipped a bunch of text about which you didn't comment,
and about which I've completely changed my mind insofar as
they were criticisms of Szostak and company. They are truly
on the right path, but that path needs dozens of generations of
researchers to achieve the goal of explaining how OOL might have happened, IMO.