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The Tour vs Farina Debate Part Two

Dr. Craig continues his evaluation of the debate and offers some conclusions.

KEVIN HARRIS: Welcome back to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig . We are going to pick up right where we left off on the Tour-Farina debate [1] that everyone’s been talking about. Let’s go to the studio with Dr. Craig.

DR. CRAIG: Farina admittedly looks as though he's simply committing the fallacies of argument ad hominem and the genetic fallacy, but I don't think that he is technically as I think about it. He does not say that Tour’s views are false because he's a pathological liar. Rather, he claims that the evidence refutes Tour's view and therefore he is a liar. And similarly he doesn't say that Tour's views are false because he reached them for religious reasons. Rather he claims that Tour's religious beliefs warp his scientific views. So I don't think that he's committing these logical fallacies despite appearances. The question then becomes, all right then, if that's what he's come to debate, what evidence does Farina present for these very serious allegations?

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's a video reel of Farina's evidence. Let me explain what you'll hear. Farina says that Tour is lying about primordial soup being taught in textbooks, about there only being a few research groups in origin of life, and he mentions an experiment using water and hydrogen peroxide. And then the moderator, Dr. Guida, challenges Farina on what is meant by "functional." So let's go to that clip now.

MR. FARINA: Let's list a few and get some answers. So, first the "Textbook" thing—" Primordial soup model is lightning and then a slithering creature crawls out, and that's what all these college level textbooks say ." Again, no they don't. He made that up. Like a liar. Next, " This boutique field of a dozen researchers " thing. Of the millions of papers that comprise this field, I went through a handful of the ones I've read and made this list. There are thousands more. Pretty dumb lie, huh? . . . Take for example this study by Stephen Benner, a researcher James regularly slanders. Here, Benner was showing nucleotide polymerization over basaltic glass to form RNA. James notes that Benner washes the glass thoroughly with hydrogen peroxide, and ultra pure water. And then throws his hands in the air about how this makes the study not prebiotically relevant, because he is washing away trace magnesium that would impede nucleotide polymerization on the early Earth. In his profound ignorance James neglects to realize that basaltic rock is specifically rich in magnesium. Information that anyone who had taken Geology 101 would know. Furthermore, he wonders where oh where could one find hydrogen peroxide and ultra pure water on the early Earth, as though its use makes the study not prebiotically relevant. In reality these are used to destroy biological material like bacteria that would contaminate the results. So, in fact the washes are done specifically to make the experiment prebiotically relevant.

DR. TOUR: 1 out of 3—Jack Szostak would nev– How much does he have there? How much does he have? Tell me. You read the paper.

MR. FARINA: It says "functional RNAs", James. That means that they do things.

DR. TOUR: I haven't seen that paper. You're bringing in other papers, which we agreed you would not do. Now tell me, how much is there? Because I don’t know. I’ve not read that paper.

MR. FARINA: James, you're presenting yourself as an expert in this field.

DR. TOUR: You read it. Tell me. How much 2',5' does he have?

MR. FARINA: I don't remember every single detail of the paper.

DR. TOUR: All right. There we go. You don't remember because you don't want to remember. You read the paper. You brought that in, and we were not supposed to introduce any papers that had not been in our videos. That—you agreed to.

DR. TOUR: You can't have 1 out of every 3 be a wrong linkage. You would never code for a peptide with that. It's over.

MR. FARINA: How do you know? It says "Functional RNAs."

DR. TOUR: Because it's a trace. Because it doesn’t work.

MR. FARINA: You have no idea what RNAs do. Do you understand that RNAs have catalytic function?

DR. WAYNA GUIDA: So just from a chemical point of view, though, we would need to know what "Functional RNA" meant.

MR. FARINA: Having catalytic properties.

DR. WAYNA GUIDA: Because RNA has many functions. . . . To have functional RNA, it has to do at least three things. It has to serve as messenger RNA, ribosomal RNA, and . . .

MR. FARINA: Uh, no. Messenger RNA. You're talking about features of modern cells. We're talking about prebiotic nucleic acids.

DR. WAYNA GUIDA: But ultimately it has to do that. So what function, is my question, did he show that it performed? It has to at least perform one of the three. Ultimately, it's going to have to perform all three.

MR. FARINA: Replication? I'm not sure exactly in the context of the paper.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. There's a lot to respond to there.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. To begin with, there is an enormous difference between telling a lie and simply saying something false. I think that in our culture today we have become far too prone to calling people liars. This is uncivil and it's highly unprofessional. I cannot imagine someone like Alvin Plantinga at a professional meeting calling his philosophical commentators “liars” or accusing them of lying. Similarly, there was recently a review of my book In Quest of the Historical Adam that I thought was seriously misrepresentative of what my views actually were. I wrote to the editor of the journal to correct this review. Now, I didn't accuse the reviewers of lying or being liars. What I said was that the reviewers misunderstood and therefore misrepresented my views in the book. But you don't accuse people of being liars. Not every falsehood is a lie. To be lying, the person needs to be trying to deceive others by saying something that he himself knows to be false. So when you look at Farina's example, I don't think these are lies. For example, the textbook about the prebiotic soup. Here it concerns a cartoon that appeared in one of them of lightning striking a pond and a green creature slithering out of the pond. I didn't have any trouble myself with this cartoon because I took it simply to symbolize the idea that life originated in the seas and then migrated onto the land. But James Tour feared that students and lay people take cartoons like that literally and are therefore misled. Indeed, he has shared statistics indicating that something like 40% of Americans believe that scientists have been able to create life forms like frogs in the laboratory, which is just astonishing ignorance. So I think what Tour did here is simply an over-generalization. Certainly not all of the textbooks display that cartoon, but all of the textbooks do teach the primordial soup model. It's not a lie. If anything he's guilty of over-generalizing as when, for example, you say, “Everybody is coming to the party.” It's not literally true. It's an over-generalization. Similarly, when he talks about there being a few dozen research groups, that is not a lie. That's at most an exaggeration. I think the truth is that origin of life research is a relatively narrow discipline compared to other fields of chemistry. So at most Tour is exaggerating when he says it's pursued by a few dozen different research groups. In the debate he later clarifies this to say he's talking about the groups that are following Jack Szostak’s method. What about the experiment with the washing with water and hydrogen peroxide? This has to do with the problem of investigator interference which is a major problem in origin of life research. To what degree is the investigator allowed to interfere in the prebiotic chemistry without making it unrealistic and therefore incapable of happening on the prebiotic Earth? In the example, if Farina is right it would be a mistake on Tour's part to protest washing the sample with water and hydrogen peroxide because that was merely intended to make the sample sterile and free of any bacteria which would not have existed on a prebiotic Earth. Now, I don't know if Farina is right about that, but in any case even if Tour is just simply mistaken, it's not a lie. He could have chosen abundant examples to illustrate illicit investigator interference in order to make his point. None of these I think qualifies as a lie much less a brazen lie. With respect to the last one about the production of functional RNA in the laboratory, I think what this one really reveals is how little understanding Dave Farina has of the papers he cites. He just reads the titles and probably the abstracts, whereas Tour actually analyzes the paper. He goes through the chemistry and shows why in fact the synthesis doesn't work as claimed. I think Guida really embarrasses Farina by asking that question, “ What function of RNA is the title referring to? ” and Farina couldn't answer the question. He didn't know. When Guida later said in an email, “I hope I didn't overstep my bounds by asking Dave which RNA function he was referring to. He sidestepped my question and seemed ignorant of the fact that the right answer is ribosomal. This really brought home the message to me that his understanding of chemistry and biochemistry is superficial.” So why didn't Dave know the answer to the question as to which function of RNA the paper was talking about? Well, simply because he read the title or the abstract of the article and it says that the RNA is functional, and that seemed to be the extent of the depth of his knowledge.

KEVIN HARRIS: If I could just re-emphasize what you said. Calling someone a liar is a serious allegation. It is really a personal attack. I know that we're supposed to, as believers in Christ, we're to turn the other cheek when it comes to these personal attacks in one-on-one relationships. Dr. Tour, I think, did for the most part. I don't know where this easily calling someone a liar in our culture – I don't know where that came from either. But when I grew up and I know when you grew up, those were fighting words. That's a serious allegation.

DR. CRAIG: And to call him a pathological liar is to say the man is mentally ill. Tour was right when he said later on, “ You're trying to psychoanalyze me .” That's exactly what Farina was doing, and he's less competent to do that than he is to address the chemistry.

KEVIN HARRIS: In this next clip, Farina presents another accusation against Dr. Tour. It's one with which we are all familiar. Let's check it out.

MR. FARINA: James doesn't know how life began, so there is a gap in his knowledge. But he believes that God created life because of religious Scripture so that's the god of the gaps. You can cry about it all you want. That's what you believe. . . . James has admitted publicly that he's a creationist. He believes that God created life due to religious Scripture, which to him takes priority over scientific evidence. From his website, faith and belief go beyond scientific evidence for this scientist. Anyone who thinks this is not relevant to the discussion is delusional, as James is openly admitting that there's no science that could ever be done that will convince him that life was not directly created by God. He is ideologically bound to denying abiogenesis.

KEVIN HARRIS: God of the gaps? We are all familiar with that one.

DR. CRAIG: Farina doesn’t understand what god of the gaps reasoning is. God of the gaps reasoning is inferring God's existence in order to plug up a gap in our scientific knowledge. But believing in God on the basis of religious Scripture is not god of the gaps reasoning. People have believed in God on the basis of Scripture for centuries before they were even aware that a gap existed. So if Tour’s belief in God is based, as he says, on religious Scripture (not on making an inference from a gap in our scientific knowledge), this is not god of the gaps reasoning. Farina just doesn't understand it.

KEVIN HARRIS: The second slide is from Dr. Tour's website. It's another one. There's a lot of detail there, and the slide just went past quickly. But if we could look at that, when you read that you see that Dr. Tour is just saying it's perfectly OK if we figure how some of this works and how it came together and we could even recreate it because it's just discovering how God happened to have done it. It doesn't add or take away from theism in and of itself.

DR. CRAIG: Right.

KEVIN HARRIS: Comment on that.

DR. CRAIG: What we have here is Dave Farina taking Jim Tour out of context. He cites him out of context. Do we have the full quotation on a slide to show? Here is the full quotation. Tour says,

I would say that fundamentally I am a progressive creationist, meaning that God didn't just set the whole thing off and then it ran by itself. That there were specific acts of creation where he set this thing in motion. He called the molecules together - how ever he does that - through self-assembly or… and gets it into this this very very stable high energy state as we learned about this morning and so I don’t know the details - I know what the Scriptures say that everything has been created by Him - everything - and the details of this I don’t know. This is why he gives us the ability to investigate and to look.

That is the exact opposite of god of the gaps reasoning! What he says there is that God may have caused the molecules to self-assemble and become a living thing. So there's no gap to be filled. Farina is quoting him out of context to make him sound like he believes in god of the gaps where, in fact, Tour is willing to admit that there is a purely unbroken naturalistic account of the origin of life that we simply haven't discovered yet. This just shows how misrepresentative Farina is of his opponent's views. By way of summary of the logos of the debate, James Tour has laid out a very good case for a mainstream position with respect to origin of life research. And Dave Farina, who came to debate a different topic, I think has completely failed to show either that Tour is a pathological liar or that his religious views warp his scientific studies.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. Let's shift now to the ethos exhibited in the debate, starting with Dr. Tour. Here's Dr. Tour's reactions and interactions. Let's go to that one.

DR. TOUR: Thank you. Before we get started I want to do something. I've got a gift for Mr. Farina. Now, I was thinking what could I get such an amazing person. And I got you something that I am sure you do not have. This is– This is something called laser-induced graphene. It was a process we developed in 2013, where a laser can hit any surface that's made out of carbon. And in this case, it's paper. And the laser can write a pattern. So, what you're going to look at is paper that has been converted into carbon—the carbohydrates have been converted into graphene—through the laser action, and so here's what we've got for you.

QUESTION: Hi. My question is for both Dr. Tour and Mr. Farina. It's simply put: What is one thing that they admire about each other's scientific career?

DR. TOUR: OK. Let me start. Let me start. This man has said multiple times that I've called him stupid. I have never called him stupid because I don't think he's stupid. I have said he's clueless on this topic. I have said he cannot read the scientific literature. That doesn't mean stupid. This man has become a musician and then he went out, and in 2015, he started an educational site, which is huge. Stupid people can't do that. I admire him. This is– this is an educational site. And I have never called him stupid because he's not stupid. He's not stupid. So I admire him for his educational site, and he—from what I understand—I'm not a musician—from what I understand with people who said he's an excellent musician—I admire him for that as well. His wife is here. He's a father. He has two children. I admire that. That a man can have a wife and two children and stay married, and do these things these days, that is wonderful. That is wonderful. I admire that.

DR. WAYNA GUIDA: Both individuals have agreed to stay on if you want to come up and ask further questions if you haven't had enough.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, it looks like Dr. Tour offered several olive branches to Farina.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. That portrait was just a remarkable gift. Tour shows himself to be a gracious gentleman throughout this debate. He never stoops to personal attacks and does not reciprocate in kind to Farina's insults. He expresses admiration for him and even after this acrimonious debate he goes over to shake his hand. So I think that when it comes to the ethos (or personal character) of the speaker, Tour's character really does shine brightly.

KEVIN HARRIS: I just want to say real quick before I forget, too, some guy laughed like a hyena very distractingly throughout the debate, including when Dr. Tour presented Dave with the portrait. You hear him just laugh this cackling laugh. That guy should have been thrown out. Dr. Guida did his best to moderate this debate but, again, we can talk some more about the format.

DR. CRAIG: There are in these university audiences certain types of people who are just cretans, and they have come to see blood on the floor. They think a good debate is insults and mudslinging and the winner is the one who has the best zinger. It's really sad that there are people like that in these audiences, and I think the person you're mentioning is one such.

KEVIN HARRIS: Now let's hear Professor Farina's answer to the same question, “What do you admire about your opponent?” Let's go to that clip.

MR. FARINA: I admire the tenacity with which you stick to a script of lies. It's actually quite impressive. "I never said Dave was stupid! I just said his content is a manure dump! I just said everything he says is wrong! I said he's 'clueless'! I said he doesn't know chemistry!" Although again, who's used my content to pass his class? Anybody here? That's what I thought, James! "He doesn't know chemistry", yet I'm helping your students. Isn't that interesting?

DR. TOUR: Thank you. Thank you.

KEVIN HARRIS: How would you contrast their responses?

DR. CRAIG: Here, when asked to say something he admires about Tour's scientific ability, Farina continues to insult. He admires his tenacity in lying, he says. And even after being insulted by Farina, Tour says, “ Thank you. Thank you for helping my students .” Farina's incivility, his rudeness, his unprofessionalism is truly shameful. Even if he has not technically committed logical fallacies of argument ad hominem or the genetic fallacy, he has certainly egregiously violated the rules of etiquette for debate, and therefore I think the ethos of these two speakers stands in very sharp contrast.

KEVIN HARRIS: The third thing that you wanted to discuss was the element of pathos. Explain to us what that means.

DR. CRAIG: The pathos of a speaking event is the personal connection that the speaker has with his audience. Does he connect emotionally with the audience? Does he relate to them well? That is a strategic part of any speaking situation.

KEVIN HARRIS: There were some fiery moments in the debate. Let's look at some of those, beginning with Dr. Tour.

DR. TOUR: I'm not done. I'm not done. I'm not done. The thermodynamic method and the kinetic method . . . You don't have enzymes. Because you couldn't make them here. You couldn't make them there. No enzymes! You're lost. Mr. Farina! Here! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! You don’t do it. . . . that is on a surface; that is not in water. It's not doing any reaction on that mineral. As soon as it gets in water, boom! Eight hours. Eight hours. Eight hours in water. That's it. . . .

QUESTION: I was just wondering. What's your opinion on Tour constantly yelling over you, not letting you speak and just screaming the entire time. You could not say anything.

QUESTION: Does this mean that you treat all of your graduate student mentees in the same manner as Mr. Farina?

DR. TOUR: Zero have been given for origin of life! Zero! All this wonderful chemistry! Zero! 420. Zero. None have been given. You don't want me to say “clueless?” I won’t say “clueless.” How about I just agree with Cronin? "Scam!"

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, Dr. Tour is certainly passionate.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. I think in this debate Tour really loses his composure and as a result I think it spoils his connection with the audience. I could sense as the debate progressed that the good will that he initially cultivated at the beginning with his gift to Dave Farina and then his very fine constructive speech was just eroded in the course of the debate through his yelling at Dave Farina, shouting at him and talking over him and interrupting him constantly. I thought those two student questions were especially painful when the one student asked Farina, “How do you feel when Dr. Tour is constantly talking over you?” and then the other student asked, “Do you really treat your graduate students in the same way that you treat Farina here tonight?” That was painful to hear. So I think this is the element of the debate that Tour was weakest on – establishing and maintaining his connection with his audience.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's take a look at Farina's demeanor. Check out this clip.

MR. FARINA: Hey, everyone. Thanks to Rice University for having us here tonight. We are here because of James Tour. James is a chemist, and also an apologist, who lies about Origin of Life research on the Internet. It's quite the double life. . . . I don't care what any of you guys are saying. None of you– None of you have any capacity to read this literature! And you're just blindly believing James. You have no idea what he's talking about. . . . As though you people have any f*****g clue what any of us are talking about! "Ohh! I know about RNA!" No, you don't! You have no clue what either of us are saying! Deal with it! . . . That's why I brought a bunch of research James pretends isn't real, and you're all pretending to understand right now.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. What do you think about his pathos?

DR. CRAIG: Well, Farina's demeanor is so much more pleasant and amiable than James Tour, even though he's so rude and uncivil. He's smiling. He's relaxed. He remains calm throughout. He never loses his cool, but then he blows it by turning on the audience and beginning to attack them – which is not very smart if you want to develop your relationship with those that you want to persuade. And it's especially awkward, I think, when you reflect that many of the students in that audience were probably chemistry students themselves who did have a good deal of understanding of the terms of the debate. So while Farina, I think, does have a pleasant and amiable demeanor, he also exhibits a terrible deficiency in his pathos in turning upon his audience and attacking and even swearing at them. So the bottom line for me of this whole debate as I analyze it is that Tour has it all over Farina concerning both the logos and the ethos aspects of the debate, but I think that Tour loses the pathos. And this is unfortunate because the pathos is usually the most significant factor in an audience debate. You just can't lose your connection with your audience.

KEVIN HARRIS: I'm curious. How have you avoided these kinds of contentious wild exchanges in your debating career?

DR. CRAIG: Well, you've got to keep your emotions in check no matter how the other person is attacking you or how badly things seem to be going. You just can't let your emotions get the best of you. You need to smile frequently. You need to show the audience that you're having a good time, that you're enjoying the debate no matter how badly you're being treated or attacked. It's just really important to project that calm confidence through a smile and a winsome manner.

KEVIN HARRIS: I told several people, and I told you as well, that it made me really appreciate that you've always insisted on a proper format for a debate and that there are just certain people and situations despite all these challenges and things like that that you just won't schedule, that you won't do. It really made me appreciate that you have been a stickler for the format of the debate.

DR. CRAIG: Thanks, Kevin.

KEVIN HARRIS: I know that it might be difficult to wrap up today, but please give us what you think are some of the main takeaways from this event and the topic.

DR. CRAIG: I think it shows that you need to come well-prepared to the debate. You need to anticipate your opponent's objections so that you have answers prepared in advance. But then, above all, you've got to maintain your connection with the audience. Those would be the main takeaways, I think, from this debate.

KEVIN HARRIS: Thank you so much for being here for Reasonable Faith today. Just a quick reminder. We really do appreciate your support – your prayer support, your financial support – as we continue the work of Reasonable Faith all over the world. Go to ReasonableFaith.org. We’ll see you next time. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxEWXGSIpAI (accessed June 26, 2023).

[2] Total Running Time: 30:49 (Copyright © 2023 William Lane Craig)

Picking on the Wrong Guy

“professor dave” digs a pit for james tour … but falls into it himself.

Professor James Tour is a name that has become increasingly familiar to Christian apologists with a scientific bent. Tour, a world-class synthetic organic chemist and nanotechnologist, based at Rice University in Houston, Texas, gained international notoriety a few years ago for calling out the many deceptions cultivated by origin-of-life researchers who had been making bold claims about getting close to creating life from non-living chemicals.

Tour took a close look at the materials and methods these researchers employed, and after reading their papers, simply pointed out that in devising their experiments, all of them – and I mean every single one of them – had involved a great deal of human intervention .

The chemical reactions in their experiments were highly controlled. For example, they had used chemicals in pure form (read: brought in) and optimised for temperature, pH, concentration, and other factors using multi-million-dollar instruments. What’s more, the commonly asserted notion that with enough time, many of these hurdles could be overcome was also shown by Tour to be untenable. Why? Because in any realistic natural environment, molecules degrade or are attacked by other chemical species, so scuppering the entire enterprise.

Although the results of their experiments represent anything but true abiogenesis (life arising from non-life), they then passed their work off to a largely ignorant science journalism community that was either unwilling to ask questions or incapable of understanding the amount of human engineering (read: intelligent design) needed to substantiate their claims of having cleared (or almost cleared) the abiogenesis hurdle. The net result of all of this, as Tour pointed out, is mass deception about origin-of-life science on a global scale.

“Professor Dave” Punches Up and out of His League

Despite indirect acknowledgement s in top-rated publications like Nature, written by leaders in prebiotic chemistry who agreed with Tour’s criticism, certain YouTubers were not deterred from attempting to discredit Tour’s claims. Dave Farina, of Professor Dave Explains , is an amusing example of one who appears to be a glutton for punishment. Despite having more than 2 million subscribers, Farina, who earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and failed to complete a master’s in education in science teaching, had the audacity to criticize Tour’s breakdown of the exaggerated claims of prebiotic chemists.

Farina first attacked Dr. Tour in August 2020 . Tour responded with a 14-part presentation on his own YouTube channel, which very fairly and consistently debunked Farina’s scientific claims. And true to his deep Christian faith, Tour never once resorted to ad hominem attacks. He even invited Farina to have dinner with his family.

But instead of showing a bit of humility and throwing in the towel, as any sensible person out of his/her depth ought to have done, Farina launched another attack on Dr. Tour, this time canvassing the opinion of a few other scientists, some of whom Tour had debated previously . It should also be noted that Farina declined to engage in dialogue/debate with Dr. Tour on these issues. This time Farina got real nasty, accusing Tour of being “out of his depth,” and “clueless” about the real state of origin-of-life research. What’s more, he viciously mocked Tour’s Christian faith, claiming that it had blinded him to the truth. Serious accusations indeed! So how did it end up?

Not good, for Mr. Farina. Tour pointed his viewers to Farina’s abusive language in the comments section of his (Farina’s) YouTube presentation, and how he deleted important comments made by scientifically competent onlookers to save face. Indeed, in one exchange I personally had with Farina, he accused me of “knowing nothing” and said I did “not have a Ph.D. in biochemistry.” When I posted links to some research papers I had authored, he still dismissed me as a buffoon. That’s where I left off. I didn’t think it was worth the time and effort to engage him on the facts.

And the Beat Goes On

Dr. Tour went much further though. In his second attack, Farina stated that synthetic chemistry is just one of the disciplines involved in origin-of-life research, and he said Dr. Tour wasn’t qualified to talk about such research because he was a synthetic chemist. That argument holds little water though, as organic chemistry is absolutely central to the theory of chemical evolution, where it stands at the interface of all the other disciplines Farina had mentioned. If the organic chemistry isn’t right, you reach an impasse. Curiously, Farina’s three guest scientists turned out to be …. wait for it …. synthetic chemists! Furthermore, when the details of their experiments were carefully examined, they too all showed a great deal of human intervention!

One might argue that chemists engaged in prebiotic chemistry research must, by necessity, have highly controlled conditions in order to get started, but it must be remembered that no such controls could have been in place in the hostile environments likely to be encountered on a primordial earth.

What’s more, Tour took the time to look at the papers written by Farina’s three guest scientists and showed that their methods also involved a great deal of human intervention. And there’s still more. Tour pointed out some very basic mistakes made by Farina on the slides he used to argue his case. Indeed, there were scientific errors on every one of his slides!

It turns out that Farina didn’t go any further than to read the abstracts of the papers he used against Tour. But as any researcher will tell you, abstracts are often misleading and frequently show unconscious bias toward the worldviews of the researchers themselves. By looking “under the bonnet,” as it were, Tour showed that Farina had glossed over many of the details without checking the precise methodologies employed by the researchers he had cited, and that in all cases, human intervention was absolutely required.

Farina also attacked Tour on the teaching of the primordial soup model. He said that deceptive pictures showing a primordial soup in an ancient ocean with lightning bolts and some organism slithering out of our planet’s early oceans are only seen in elementary school textbooks, but never in college-level tomes. But Tour responded by showing slides of dozens of university textbooks showing the very same pictures, including a couple I have in my own library.

In addition, one of Farina’s guest scientists, British inorganic chemist Lee Cronin, described some of Tour’s claims as “nefarious.” Cronin appeared in a TED talk in 2011 claiming that he would be able to create life in just a few years. Twelve years later, we’re still waiting for him to produce the readies.

Anyone interested in origin-of-life science, or even in the integrity of claims about it, should take the time to watch Dr. Tour’s video critiquing origin-of-life science’s exaggerated claims . If you’re not convinced, work through the other links and videos above, to see the extent to which Dr. Tour has soundly addressed the lies, deceptions, and exaggerations made by “Professor Dave” and his guests. I’d encourage fact checking both Farina’s and Tour’s claims. I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but we can only hope that this smooth-talking popular science communicator gets his science right in the future.

And as for any naturalistic origin of life, we’re still as clueless as ever!

is that author of eight books on amateur and professional astronomy. His latest book is Choosing & Using Binoculars, a Guide for Stargazers, Birders and Outdoor Enthusiasts (Springer Publishing, 2023).

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Evolution News & Science Today

Life sciences, a war of words how to tell who won the tour-farina debate.

A few years ago, just as I was finishing writing my PhD thesis, I received an email from an Internet questioner with the subject “War of Words.” This person expressed concerns that there is so much back and forth between experts in the debate over the origin and evolution of life and intelligent design, that it can sometimes be difficult for a non-expert to determine who is right. I can sympathize with this: Even though I have multiple science degrees, took many undergraduate and graduate courses in evolution, and have closely followed the science for years, it’s still a challenge to keep up with everything. What’s a non-expert to do?

Last Friday we witnessed a debate on the origin of life (OOL) between two widely followed voices on the topic: Rice University chemistry Professor James Tour, and YouTube science educator Dave Farina, aka “Professor Dave.” This debate, which took place on the Rice University campus, was at times turbulent, but it provides an apt example of how to answer my “War of Words” Internet questioner.

“No Viable Model”

The topic of the debate was: “Are We Clueless About the Origin of Life?” Discovery Institute did not organize this debate and I was not a big fan of this framing because it would be much harder to prove a high standard, that OOL researchers are “clueless,” than it would be to prove some lesser — but still entirely reasonable — claim like “There is no viable model for the origin of life.” Nonetheless, Tour faithfully stuck to the debate topic, and he made a strong scientific case against the natural chemical origin of life. 

Dave Farina represented the standard view that unguided natural chemical processes could have produced the first life on earth. Unfortunately, however, Farina decided to focus on a very different debate topic. His topic was essentially — no exaggeration —  Is James Tour a liar and a fraud?  — and that is precisely what he asserted over and over again throughout the night. Farina’s venom and personal attacks and insults against Tour knew almost no boundaries. It was a spectacle, and I was shocked that the moderator allowed it to proceed. But Farina’s focus on personal attacks and his repeated refusals to answer Tour’s reasonable scientific challenges made it clear to many viewers that Tour had the better argument. 

If you don’t believe me, consider some comments on the YouTube chat posted by viewers who are apparently self-described as atheists, agnostics, and/or former supporters of Farina:

• “Am I the only non-religious person that finds Tour much more convincing than Dave? This debate made me further convinced. The problem with Dave is that strangely, as an educator, he in no way tried to educate James Tour, but only attack him and slander him, he has zero class, and from a psychology standpoint, seems like he did nothing but dodge and deflect, which would suggest he doesn’t have a deep understanding of the subject, but merely a surface level one, a true scientist wants people to understand the truth, and would carefully address Tours questions concisely and on a deeper level.”
• “I’m an atheist, however, Farina’s smug and snide attacks on Tour throughout this debate, disgusted me. I may disagree with Tour’s mission, however, no one can ignore his considerable contribution to science.”
• “I’m agnostic, but hearing Dr. Farina’s statements, grounded on insulting and sarcasm sincerely show more how clueless he or his community are…usually when you use sarcasm it is because you have [little] to say. I say this as an academic myself (other field though) when I see colleagues use sarcasm is because they don’t know how to ground their statements.”
• “I’m [an] atheist and this was embarrassing to watch. Dave claiming that James doesn’t know how to read papers, while…citing barely anything beyond the titles of a bunch of papers. I think that disrespecting the audience and claiming to know what they do and don’t know was the worst move of the entire debate. It shows that he’s arguing emotionally.”
• “I’ve been floating around this conflict, viewing from the outside. Dave’s videos helped me in middle-high school. Dave poisoned the well, then used insults and rhetoric as the substance of his ‘argument’. This was disappointing, I was hoping he would bring something of value. Dr. Tour won this one.”

You Don’t Need a PhD

So even though my “War of Words” questioner worried that you need to be an expert to sort through these issues, I’m going argue here that you don’t need a PhD in science and unlimited time to read the literature to quickly see who has the better argument.

You may not be an expert in chemistry like James Tour with a lifelong career trying to synthesize molecules in the laboratory. You may not have published hundreds of peer-reviewed chemistry papers like Tour. You may not even have taken any college-level science courses. But you can watch the debate and learn a lot about who has the upper hand on the OOL question. If you want to know who has the better argument, examining the rhetorical styles of different “sides” of a debate can speak volumes.

Over three subsequent posts, I’m going to elaborate on three reasons that we can see that Tour won, based upon a rhetorical analysis of the debate (plus a little science):

• Tour focused on science, Farina focused on character assassination.
• Tour posed reasonable scientific challenges which Farina refused to answer
• Farina relied heavily upon playground tactics, appeals to authority, and citation bluffing.

We’ll tackle the first reason in the next post. But first a viewer’s warning.

Not for the Faint of Heart

As the debate wore on, at times both participants got quite intense; if you don’t like raised voices, don’t watch this debate. Frankly, as Farina spewed more and more venom against Tour, at times he (Tour) became animated, and even took a few shots at Farina’s chemistry knowledge. Tour’s words about Farina weren’t remotely comparable in intensity or number to Farina’s personal attacks on Tour. In my next post you will read a sampling of just some of those personal attacks. So if you are bothered by Tour’s irritation, ask yourself: Could you withstand such hatred and not get a little hot under the collar? James Tour is a great man…but like the rest of us, he is after all just a man. 

Regardless, it’s undeniable that this debate got a bit ugly and it reminded me why sometimes I don’t like debates. I do wonder if it was wise to give a platform to a person like Farina who was so thoroughly and unabashedly dedicated to making the night about assassinating James Tour’s character rather than investigating the science. Perhaps the moderator was given instructions to keep the debate going no matter how much nastiness and personal venom Farina threw at Tour. I really don’t know. But this is the kind of thing, unfortunately, that needlessly turns some people away from otherwise serious scientific conversations and dialogues over important questions about origins and science / faith issues. 

One Other Thing Is Clear

Farina is a skilled at quickly throwing out lots of arguments of varying quality and then using passive-aggressive maneuvers aimed at provocation. If you are the type of person who is susceptible to theatrics, intimidation, mockery, and character assassination, you might think Farina won. But once you climb out of Farina’s world of venom, invectives, mockery, and rapid-fire citation bluffs, you realize there isn’t much there. On substance, James Tour won the debate handily. Despite a few lapses here and there as the night wore on, overall he focused strongly on the science and made loads of good arguments that Farina did not address. That’s simply a fact.

But even if you didn’t know much about the science, you can easily tell who came armed with facts, knowledge, and a passion for seeking out the truth, and who came with a simple goal to destroy his opponent, at all costs. I’ll be back tomorrow.

The Unique Burial of a Child of Early Scythian Time at the Cemetery of Saryg-Bulun (Tuva)

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Pages:  379-406

In 1988, the Tuvan Archaeological Expedition (led by M. E. Kilunovskaya and V. A. Semenov) discovered a unique burial of the early Iron Age at Saryg-Bulun in Central Tuva. There are two burial mounds of the Aldy-Bel culture dated by 7th century BC. Within the barrows, which adjoined one another, forming a figure-of-eight, there were discovered 7 burials, from which a representative collection of artifacts was recovered. Burial 5 was the most unique, it was found in a coffin made of a larch trunk, with a tightly closed lid. Due to the preservative properties of larch and lack of air access, the coffin contained a well-preserved mummy of a child with an accompanying set of grave goods. The interred individual retained the skin on his face and had a leather headdress painted with red pigment and a coat, sewn from jerboa fur. The coat was belted with a leather belt with bronze ornaments and buckles. Besides that, a leather quiver with arrows with the shafts decorated with painted ornaments, fully preserved battle pick and a bow were buried in the coffin. Unexpectedly, the full-genomic analysis, showed that the individual was female. This fact opens a new aspect in the study of the social history of the Scythian society and perhaps brings us back to the myth of the Amazons, discussed by Herodotus. Of course, this discovery is unique in its preservation for the Scythian culture of Tuva and requires careful study and conservation.

Keywords: Tuva, Early Iron Age, early Scythian period, Aldy-Bel culture, barrow, burial in the coffin, mummy, full genome sequencing, aDNA

Information about authors: Marina Kilunovskaya (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Vladimir Semenov (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Varvara Busova  (Moscow, Russian Federation).  (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Kharis Mustafin  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Technical Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Irina Alborova  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Biological Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Alina Matzvai  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected]

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Out of the Centre

Savvino-storozhevsky monastery and museum.

Zvenigorod's most famous sight is the Savvino-Storozhevsky Monastery, which was founded in 1398 by the monk Savva from the Troitse-Sergieva Lavra, at the invitation and with the support of Prince Yury Dmitrievich of Zvenigorod. Savva was later canonised as St Sabbas (Savva) of Storozhev. The monastery late flourished under the reign of Tsar Alexis, who chose the monastery as his family church and often went on pilgrimage there and made lots of donations to it. Most of the monastery’s buildings date from this time. The monastery is heavily fortified with thick walls and six towers, the most impressive of which is the Krasny Tower which also serves as the eastern entrance. The monastery was closed in 1918 and only reopened in 1995. In 1998 Patriarch Alexius II took part in a service to return the relics of St Sabbas to the monastery. Today the monastery has the status of a stauropegic monastery, which is second in status to a lavra. In addition to being a working monastery, it also holds the Zvenigorod Historical, Architectural and Art Museum.

Belfry and Neighbouring Churches

Located near the main entrance is the monastery's belfry which is perhaps the calling card of the monastery due to its uniqueness. It was built in the 1650s and the St Sergius of Radonezh’s Church was opened on the middle tier in the mid-17th century, although it was originally dedicated to the Trinity. The belfry's 35-tonne Great Bladgovestny Bell fell in 1941 and was only restored and returned in 2003. Attached to the belfry is a large refectory and the Transfiguration Church, both of which were built on the orders of Tsar Alexis in the 1650s.  

To the left of the belfry is another, smaller, refectory which is attached to the Trinity Gate-Church, which was also constructed in the 1650s on the orders of Tsar Alexis who made it his own family church. The church is elaborately decorated with colourful trims and underneath the archway is a beautiful 19th century fresco.

Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral

The Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral is the oldest building in the monastery and among the oldest buildings in the Moscow Region. It was built between 1404 and 1405 during the lifetime of St Sabbas and using the funds of Prince Yury of Zvenigorod. The white-stone cathedral is a standard four-pillar design with a single golden dome. After the death of St Sabbas he was interred in the cathedral and a new altar dedicated to him was added.

Under the reign of Tsar Alexis the cathedral was decorated with frescoes by Stepan Ryazanets, some of which remain today. Tsar Alexis also presented the cathedral with a five-tier iconostasis, the top row of icons have been preserved.

Tsaritsa's Chambers

The Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral is located between the Tsaritsa's Chambers of the left and the Palace of Tsar Alexis on the right. The Tsaritsa's Chambers were built in the mid-17th century for the wife of Tsar Alexey - Tsaritsa Maria Ilinichna Miloskavskaya. The design of the building is influenced by the ancient Russian architectural style. Is prettier than the Tsar's chambers opposite, being red in colour with elaborately decorated window frames and entrance.

At present the Tsaritsa's Chambers houses the Zvenigorod Historical, Architectural and Art Museum. Among its displays is an accurate recreation of the interior of a noble lady's chambers including furniture, decorations and a decorated tiled oven, and an exhibition on the history of Zvenigorod and the monastery.

Palace of Tsar Alexis

The Palace of Tsar Alexis was built in the 1650s and is now one of the best surviving examples of non-religious architecture of that era. It was built especially for Tsar Alexis who often visited the monastery on religious pilgrimages. Its most striking feature is its pretty row of nine chimney spouts which resemble towers.

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