The much-anticipated Harvard roundtable on the origin of life with chemist James Tour and OOL researcher Lee Cronin is now available to watch. The two of them give opening presentations, followed by a dinner conversation with others, followed by a panel. Stay tuned here as our scientists weigh in. From myself, a few random observations. 

Above all, major props to Lee Cronin for showing up at all. That took courage. He earns my admiration. He does repeatedly complain about shouting — the only problem being that while Tour shouted at YouTuber Dave Farina in their debate (and who wouldn’t?), he doesn’t shout at all in this matchup, that I could detect. Is he intense? Sure. But he doesn’t shout.

Lee Cronin won plaudits — for being “charming” and “well dressed” — from one woman I discussed the video with. Indeed. I did find myself having a difficult time following some of his presentation. If it were carefully transcribed, I’m not sure it would parse as prose in a completely satisfactory way. By contrast, Tour is crisp and concrete. I got to the end of these three hours still far from sure what Cronin’s Assembly Theory means, other than it has something to do with the universe exercising a power for natural selection before life got going. But in that case, what was the universe selecting for or toward, in the absence of intelligent design? 

Speaking of which, in the panel discussion, Tour was challenged by physicist Randy Isaac for associating with “creationists” including ID proponents: “Your work is widely used by the Discovery Institute and many other creationist organizations,” and “you allow all your work to be used as evidence,” and you give “permission to be published.” But obviously, ID is not creationism. Do ID proponents seek Tour’s permission to cite and discuss his work, which he then indulgently grants as a mark of his favor? Do you think we need to ask permission to embed and write about a YouTube video with Tour like the one above? Of course not. 

Tour explained that while he doesn’t endorse or embrace ID, he’s “sympathetic” to it. Fair enough. ID folks are as free to quote his published work as anyone else is. By the way, the sky is blue.