Here’s an interesting interview with some origin of life researchers (Craig Venter and others
Robert Shapiro:
In the interim, looking for topics to get amused with, I got into the question of the origin of life, and knowing the DNA chemistry that I did know — and helped write — I looked at the papers published on the origin of life and decided that it
was absurd that the thought of nature of its own volition putting together a DNA or an RNA molecule was unbelievable.
I’m always running out of metaphors to try and explain what the difficulty is. But suppose you took Scrabble sets, or any word game sets, blocks with letters, containing every language on Earth, and you heap them together and you then took a scoop and you scooped into that heap, and you flung it out on the lawn there, and the letters fell into a line which contained the words “To be or not to be, that is the question,” that is roughly the odds of an RNA molecule, given no feedback — and there would be no feedback, because it wouldn’t be functional until it attained a certain length and could copy itself — appearing on the Earth.
Christian de Duve, the Nobel laureate, once wrote a letter to Nature which was headed, ‘Did God Make RNA?’ Because it’s hard to think of any other manner in which RNA out of purely abiotic chemistry would assemble itself on the early Earth. Seeing this area called prebiotic chemistry, I decided, my major attention still being funded by National Cancer Institute, and devoted to how chemicals can rip apart DNA as a hobby essentially, I started publishing papers which disassembled — deconstructed, if our German friend wants — so-called prebiotic chemistry, and showed that in every case the result was due to the flagrant
interference of the investigator in biasing the results to attain the results that he wanted.
So, shifting the focus to the spontaneous creation of RNA molecules doesn’t help much. And Mr. Shapiro’s “scrabble” analogy certainly looks he is talking about a language.
These same researchers are a little worried that the difficulties they face in explaining the origin of the 53 protein/ 3 plyneculeotide structure of the ribosome will lead some to conclude that it is irreducibly complex, and thus give support to “people who do intelligent design”.
VENTER: But using these tools, it’s my hope we can do something similar to what you suggest. We can extrapolate back once we have the database of Planet Earth genes to what might have been a precursor species, and then we should be able to build that in the lab and see if it was really viable, and then start to do component mixtures to see if you can spontaneously generate such things.
CHURCH: But isn’t it the case that, if we take all the life forms we have so far, isn’t the minimum for the ribosome about 53 proteins and 3 polynucleotides? And hasn’t that kind of already reached a plateau where adding more genomes doesn’t reduce that number of proteins?
VENTER: Below ribosomes, yes: you certainly can’t get below that. But you have to have self-replication.
CHURCH: But that’s what we need to do — otherwise they’ll call it irreducible
complexity. If you say you can’t get below a ribosome, we’re in trouble, right? We have to find a ribosome that can do its trick with less than 53 proteins.
VENTER: In the RNA world, you didn’t need ribosomes.
CHURCH: But we need to construct that. Nobody has constructed a ribosome that works well without proteins.
VENTER: Yes.
SHAPIRO: I can only suggest that a ribosome forming spontaneously has about the same probability as an eye forming spontaneously.
CHURCH: It won’t form spontaneously; we’ll do it bit by bit.
SHAPIRO: Both are obviously products of long evolution of preexisting life
through the process of trial and error.
CHURCH: But none of us has recreated that any.
SHAPIRO: There must have been much more primitive ways of putting together catalysts.
CHURCH: But prove it.
…
LLOYD: I would be a little bit worried. If I look at Freeman’s two steps that precede formation of ribosomes, ribosome is step three, with collaboration and intervention of the ribosome and you have these two steps prior to that. Before is the parasitic stage and use of ATP, and then prior to that just the kind of garbage bags on their own. There could have been a lot of events of natural selection going on to get to the stage — it could be a very very very long process, with Avogadro’s number of events. There are not enough graduate student lifetimes in the world, even with lots of private money invested in it to actually try to explore all those. Even if life just happened here on Earth, it is something that happened globally, and it went on for quite a long time. I’m saying this is a positive sense — the fact that you can’t do this in the lab, even though people who do intelligent design will say, ‘ah ha, see, irreducible complexity’ — it might in fact be that it was very complex in the sense of requiring a long and complicated process or computation to arrive at.
edge.org/documents/life/Life.pdf
). So, a refined, but sadly not as strong version of Coolduude’s idea: