Theoretical origin of life: excerpt from Neil Thomas book (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, August 19, 2021, 11:57 (1192 days ago) @ David Turell

It ain't as easy as Dawkins claims:
https://evolutionnews.org/2021/08/myths-monsters-and-lifes-elusive-first-step/

QUOTE: "We might, therefore, do well to pause over the truth status and indeed even the logic of Dawkins’s notion of “entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance,” and establish whether such a notion can be supported by experimental evidence — especially since recent advances in molecular biology show that the humblest bacterium contains more genetic information than the instruction manual for NASA space probes. The very notion of a simple biological entity has become deeply problematical with our increasing knowledge of the molecular world in the last half century, and one might therefore wish to query whether such a thing can exist in nature.

So far, Mr Thomas seems to have provided us with nothing we haven’t read many times before. Here, purely for your interest, is an extract from a work you may or may not be familiar with: “But how does life get started?” Again he [Dawkins] admits that this “may have been a highly improbable occurrence”. “The origin of life was the chemical event, or series of events, whereby the vital condition for natural selection first came about. The major ingredient was heredity, either DNA or (more probably) something that copies like DNA but less accurately, perhaps the related molecule RNA.” This is an extraordinary simplification. The origin of life must at the very least have had two major ingredients, and they must have sparked into life at precisely the same moment: heredity was one, but what Darwin called the “breath” was the other. DNA is not much use in a lifeless body. By only calling on DNA/RNA, at a stroke Dawkins has halved the degree of the already high improbability. But be reassured: “I shall not be surprised if, within the next few years, chemists report that they have successfully midwifed a new origin of life in the laboratory” (p. 137). That’s OK then. Dawkins thinks that the combined knowledge of the finest brains, working on the findings of generations of earlier fine brains, will soon be able consciously to put together the ingredients and breathe the spark of life into them … which will prove that life came about through unconscious chance. Abiogenesis is the name of the theory that inanimate matter spontaneously assembled itself to create life. And it requires just as much credulity as the genesis theory it seeks to replace.

You will find this in section 5, “Origins”, of the “Brief Guide to the Universe”. Maybe you should read it some time.