In “More News Sources Admit the ‘Mystery’ of Life’s Origin” (Evolution News & Views, February 28, 2012), Casey Luskin notes the pretense that Darwin’s natural selection acting on random mutation is responsible for the origin of life. For example, from LiveScience,
Just as species are believed to have evolved over time, the individual molecules that form the basis of life also likely developed in response to natural selection, scientists say.
The problem, Luskin says, is,
… natural selection requires replication. But as far as we’re aware, life cannot replicate until many parts are present. Without natural selection, you’re stuck with what David Berlinski calls “sheer dumb luck.” Unless there’s some reason (and none is given in the article) to expect the spontaneous production of all the “stable modules” of the 400-amino-acid receptor, all you can rely on is sheer chance.
The odds of assembling a 400-amino acid receptor by chance are nil, but even if you had that receptor, it still is dramatically insufficient to yield a living, reproducing organism. No wonder biochemist Nick Lane observes that the “soup has no capacity for producing the energy vital for life.”
It’s time for a little reality check here: origin-of-life theorists need to explain how a myriad of complex proteins and features arose and self-assembled into a self-replicating life-form by unguided processes, but they are still scraping for mechanisms to explain how an inert primordial soup of organic molecules could have arisen in the first place.
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