not knowing the generational life span of the first organisms to develop, this is a pretty weak argument. Presumably, a lot of the initial life forming molecules were a series of microenvironment biochemical reactions. In these settings, there would be a ton of binding site type generational experiments that could have occured with unknown kinetics.
This is something creationists/IDists miss. They start from the unlikelihood of life as it is, ignoring the astronomical number of equally unlikely systems that
didn't make it but might have. At the base of their thinking, IMO, is the assumption that life was
meant to be as it's turned out, specifically with humans as its crowning achievement. From that initial assumption of
meaning ID necessarily derives.
We don't know if life started as prions that assembled into viruses that started to incorporate dna... In such a series, DNA would only be selected if it possessed a binding. As such, there wouldn't be a random generation of binding sites.
Viruses are actually very advanced parasites, they need cellular mechanisms to expolit. They're DNA renegades.
The prion thing is more apt. Prions have a catalytic effect which reproduces the prion. Pre-cellular proto-life (or whatever) must have had the same kind of catalytic effect, one that acted to reproduce the original, randomly-generated catalyst. Not necessarily by one step; the catalyst could produce a different catalyst which in turn produced the original, or produced yet another catalyst which produced the original ... The circular chain can get indefinitely long in theory, although there are obvious practical constraints. The players need to be kept in reasonably close proximity, for instance. In life as we know it the cell does that.
We may never know
exactly how it happened, but I like Black Smokers as a good bet for the location. They're hugely fractal, have vast numbers of tiny niches that could confine sets of quite complex molecules, the walls of the niches could themselves have a catalytic effect, they sit in the middle of a very steep energy gradient (life is all about the energy gradient) and there all sorts of energy-rich chemical building-blocks streaming through that could eddy into the niches. The complex molecules could seep out and congregate again in other niches. If the reproduction was inexact - which it surely would be - evolution by natural selection kicks in. Before you know it we've got income tax and rice-pudding.
It could be happening today. Potential chemical ancestors of life might be popping up every day, every hour. What our chemical ancestors didn't have was predation by established life-forms. Newbies are toast these days.
Oh well. I'll give him this much, It is interesting to think how fast life did progress in relation to the span of the earth.
It is indeed. To me it speaks of the likelihood - not to say inevitabliity - of life emerging where it can, rather than the IDers'
unlikliehood crutch.
.
