Origin of Life Challenge RESULTS + HUGE announcement w/ Lee Cronin & James Tour | Evolution of Life

[Valin]

Nov. 7 2023

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[Valin]

Nov. 28 2023

[Valin]

Jan 5, 2024

A crucial examination of the debate between Dr. James Tour and Dr. Lee Cronin at Harvard, led by the data scientist Dr. Hector Zenil, holding degrees in BSc Math (UNAM), PGCert Nano (Oxon), MPhil Logic (ENS), PhD CompSci (Lille), and PhD Phil (Sorbonne).

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[Valin]

Jan 29, 2024 ID The Future Podcast

Are we close to cracking the origin of life problem or not? In 2021, chemist Dr. Lee Cronin declared publicly that "Origin of life research is a scam." Yet, scientists regularly claim to be close to creating simple and complex life from non-life in their labs, and the public is buying it. On this ID The Future, we bring you the first half of a panel discussion reviewing the recent debate on the origin of life between Rice University chemistry professor Dr. James Tour and University of Glasgow professor of chemistry Dr. Lee Cronin. This is Part 1 of 2.

[Valin]

Feb. 28 2024

 

[Valin]

H/T From a Comment in the above

From Nature, a Devastating Critique of Origin-of-Life Research

David Coppedge

February 28, 2024

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Confession Is Good for the Soul

Nick Lane and Joana Xavier should be commended for their bravery in writing a Comment in Nature’s current issue, “To unravel the origin of life, treat findings as pieces of a bigger puzzle.” Despite the hopeful title, their assessment is devastating to the methodological naturalist origin-of-life (MN-OoL) field and threatens to unmask all the pretensions of the circus actors and their publicists in the media. Their statements are all the more remarkable because the two still believe in OoL and remain hopeful that a solution will come from somewhere, some day.  

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“To unravel the origin of life, treat findings as pieces of a bigger puzzle.”

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Towards an answer

The origins-of-life field faces the same problems with culture and incentives that afflict all of science — overselling ideas towards publication and funding, too little common ground between competing groups and perhaps too much pride: too strong an attachment to favoured scenarios, and too little willingness to be proved wrong.These incentives are amplified by the difficulty of disproving complex interrelated hypotheses involving different disciplines when there is so little direct evidence — no ‘smoking gun’ to be discovered.

Changing this culture will take some work, given the political reality of science — the relentless pressure to publish, to secure funding, tenure or promotion — but it is necessary if the field wishes to continue attracting students. This requires that scientists, but also editors and funders, are aware of the issues that fragmented the field and work to overcome them. We highlight four priorities to begin to move in the right direction.

Train interdisciplinary scientists. Pursuing hypotheses across conventional disciplinary boundaries calls for a new generation of scientists — PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and early-career principal investigators (PIs) — with wide-ranging expertise and a willingness to test specific hypotheses within coherent wider frameworks. The field will clearly benefit from doctoral training that stresses collegiality, interdisciplinarity and the rigorous, open-minded testing of competing hypotheses.

Foster good communication. To promote such a culture, one of us (J.C.X.) co-founded the Origin of Life Early-career Network (OoLEN) in 2020, which has grown to more than 200 international researchers, from students to early-career PIs. It is run by volunteers and has no institutional ties, financial or otherwise. Members engage in debates through regular meetings (online or in-person), disseminate research and write articles together. There is still no shortage of disagreements, but that is part of scientific research and OoLEN promotes a healthy approach to them¹².

For later-career researchers, conferences could help to reach across divides in similar ways. Physics meetings have provided examples. In one, proponents of loop quantum gravity and string theory switched sides in a debate, framing good-humoured but strong arguments against their own position in a constructive form of ‘steel manning’.

Embrace open science. Accepting that specific hypotheses will be disproved and that frameworks will be reshaped requires the publication of negative results — too often undervalued and unpublished. But it is clearly important for the field to know whether, for example, attempts to synthesize cofactors from CO₂ fail — and, specifically, under what conditions.

Dissemination of negative data could be promoted in several ways. Most valuable is a more systematic use of open-access, community-driven knowledge bases that would host and curate data. These would help to collate experimental conditions, highlight genuine gaps in empirical evidence and enable analysis of large data sets through machine-learning studies.

Improve publishing practices. Researchers should aspire to contextualize their findings in cover letters, papers and press releases, to give a sense of how the work fits into a wider framework. Refraining from hype might seem unrealistic but could work if researchers implemented this practice in their roles as peer reviewers for papers and grants as well as authors.

Journal editors and grant-awarding bodies should also consider how polarized the field is to ensure fair reviews. One way to improve the peer-review process would be to enlist more early-career researchers, who tend to be less entrenched in their positions. Transparent peer review (in which anonymous reports are published with a paper) could also curb bias, because it enables constructive criticism without concealing prejudice.

It is too soon to aim for consensus or unity, and the question is too big; the field needs constructive disunity. Embracing multiple rigorous frameworks for the origin of life, as we advocate here, will promote objectivity, cooperation and falsifiability — good science — while still enabling researchers to focus on what they care most about. Without that, science loses its sparkle and creativity, never more important than here. With it, the field might one day get close to an answer.

Nature 626, 948-951 (2024)

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Emphasis Mine