Readers may remember Harry Lonsdale, a self-made millionaire who privately funded origin of life research via a prize contest. Suzan Mazur interviewed him for her new book, The Origin of Life Circus.
It’s an interesting interview because he defines life according to a hoary NASA definition that has come under serious attack from within the discipline: “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.” That latter point aims, clearly, to appease Darwinists. What if a life form evolved by horizontal gene transfer (non-Darwinian evolution). Is it then not alive?
But while Mazur learns a number of interesting things in her interviews with Lonsdale, who has more than 100 papers to his credit as well as various patents, she cannot get him to discuss whether so narrow an approach is wise.
His approach favours RNA World (RNA preceded DNA because it is “a much simpler molecule.”)
He also acknowledges,
Even the experts I drew together a month or so ago, even they don’t have a single, clear model of how life began.
If we lack a model, what can we test? 
Incidentally, Lonsdale’ s purpose in discovering the origin of life was
My goal in supporting Origin of Life research is to help scientists solve one of the great remaining problems in biology. A solution will give every science teacher in the world, from high school to college, a fundamental understanding of how life probably began on the Earth. In time, the world will learn that the laws of chemistry and physics, and the principle of evolution by natural selection, are sufficient to explain life’s origin. – Harry Lonsdale
The metaphysical naturalist basis of his quest may have precluded his examining the “cash value” of Darwinism in the project.
See also: Welcome to “RNA world,” the five-star hotel of origin-of-life theories
Follow UD News at Twitter!