From RealClearScience:
The Primordial Soup Was Edible
Back in 2005, when I was a first-year microbiology graduate student, I enrolled in a course on bacterial physiology. One of our guest lecturers, Dr. Franklin Harold, was an esteemed researcher in bioenergetics, a field that examines how cells derive and utilize energy. One evening, outside of class, I happened upon Dr. Harold at a seminar, and I asked him a question: “What is your opinion on origin of life research?”
He responded, “It has been an abject failure.”
Ten years later, it is still difficult to argue with him.
True. There is no shortage of theories but
Put simply, a field with so many different interpretations is wandering lost in the long grass.
The author, Alex Berezow, takes comfort in an update of the famous Miller-Urey experiment but concedes,
Finally, their experiment does nothing to solve the biggest questions of all: How did complex molecules form (e.g., DNA), and how did life evolve?
The answers to those questions remain as murky as the Miller-Urey goo. More.
The answers will remain murky because the researchers are trying to get information out of matter. Great physicists have said it was the other way around.
If the researchers are not prepared to consider that possibility, well, there is always another theory to propose, right?
See also: Maybe if we throw enough models at the origin of life… some of them will stick?
With Enceladus the toast of the solar system, here’s a wrap-up of the origin-of-life problem
Also note: What IS information, when so many sciences disagree?