Lee Cronin: prediction

Transcript context

…Well, I think it’s a beautiful story of perseverance and the backlash is just a negative word for discourse, which I think is beautiful. That’s the science. I think, as I said when it got accepted and people were saying, we’re kind of hacking on it. And I was like, papers are not gold medals. The reason I wanted to publish that paper in Nature is because it says, “Hey, there’s something before biological evolution.” You have to have that, if you’re not a creationist, by the way, this is an approach. First time someone has put a concrete mechanism, or sorry, a concrete quantification and what comes next you are pushing on is a mechanism. And that’s what we need to get to is an auto catalytic sets, self-replicating molecules, some other features that come in. And the fact that this paper has been so discussed, for me is a dream come true, it doesn’t get better than that. If you can’t accept a few people hating it… And the nice thing is, the thing that really makes me happy is that no one has attacked the actual physical content. You can measure the assembly index, you can measure selection now. So either that’s right or it’s… Well, either that’s helpful or unhelpful. If it’s unhelpful, this paper will sink down and no one will use it again. If it’s helpful, it’ll help people scaffold on it and we’ll start to converge for a new paradigm. So I think that that’s the thing that I wanted to see my colleagues, authors, collaborators and people were like, you’ve just published this paper. You’re a chemist. Why have you done this? Who are you to be doing evolutionary theory? Well, I don’t know. I mean, sorry, did I need to… Who is anyone to do anything? Well, I’m glad you did. Let me just before coming back to Origin of Life and these kinds of questions, you mentioned learning difficulties. I didn’t know about this. So what was it like?…

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