On November 28, 2023, Lee Cronin and James Tour had a debate regarding the origin of life research (Harvard Cambridge Faculty Roundtable). Tour argued that Origin of Life research is a scam that has made absolutely no progress in understanding how non-living things could give rise to living things via mindless natural mechanisms, while Cronin…
I just finished watching three interesting discussions between Rob Stadler and James Tour comparing the potential and limits of Darwinian-style naturalistic evolution vs. what one should expect if intelligent design were required to explain the diversity between major kinds of living things (see video below). Both of these scientists have a high degree of relevant…
Until 2005, scientists believed that soft tissues, proteins, and DNA molecules could not survive beyond a hundred thousand years or so at ambient temperatures due to the rapid nature of the decay of these molecules due to various decay mechanisms – including the inevitable effects of kinetic chemistry (where vibrating molecules gradually rearrange themselves and…
A recent lecture I gave at Loma Linda University for the “Second Look Sabbath Seminars” of Dr. Paul Giem (Link) entitled, “Brilliant and Beautiful, but Wrong” (October 5th, 2019). Sometimes a scientific theory can appear to beautifully explain all or at least almost all of the data at hand. Yet, upon closer examination, it can…
The proposed sequence of the fossilized remains of the evolutionary ancestors of modern whales has long been hailed as one of the clearest pieces of evidence of evolution in action – beginning some 50 million years ago (Ma) with land-dwelling hoofed animals (Mesonychids) and ending with modern whales. First, let’s consider Pakicetus (pictured above). In 1983, Philip…
David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale University, chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, and member of the National Council of the Arts – famed both for his specific scientific expertise, and for his cultural, political, and historical reflections, he’s also now a confessed skeptic of the Darwinian story of origins. While he…
James M. Tour is an American synthetic organic chemist, specializing in nanotechnology. Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, and Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas, United States. Dr. Tour is one of the world’s top synthetic organic chemists in…
Viruses Required for Complex Life: The knee-jerk reaction when hearing the word “virus” is an almost universal negative reaction for most people. After all, viruses are associated with a host of benign as well as severe sicknesses and diseases from the common cold to HIV and its associated autoimmune deficiency syndrome or AIDS. Yet, upon…
Charles Darwin originally proposed that all living things in the world today originated from a single common ancestor from which we all share a history of common descent. This process of common descent formed the “Tree of Life”, where the process of gradual evolutionary changes over hundreds of millions of years of time produced a…
It had been a year since our oldest son, Wesley, had come down with some kind of mysterious illness. After his fourth birthday he had gradually grown weaker and weaker and had stopped growing, had lost weight, and had to rest after walking no more than a few hundred feet at a time. Painful nodules…