"Susan Mazur, a reporter welcome to new ideas about evolution, interviewed Steve Benner (U of Florida) for the Huffington Post about a Gordon Research Conference he is chairing in January called “Origins of Life.” She and Benner agree that “the time is calling for more transparency” in the field.
Benner was quite transparent about four hurdles he called “paradoxes” that still challenge theories for getting from chemicals to a Darwinian replicator. He transparently admitted failure in all four of them:
'We have failed in any continuous way to provide a recipe that gets from the simple molecules that we know were present on early Earth to RNA. There is a discontinuous model which has many pieces, many of which have experimental support, but we’re up against these three or four paradoxes, which you and I have talked about in the past.
The first paradox is the tendency of organic matter to devolve and to give tar.
If you can avoid that, you can start to try to assemble things that are not tarry, but then you encounter the water problem, which is related to the fact that every interesting bond that you want to make is unstable, thermodynamically, with respect to water.
If you can solve that problem, you have the problem of entropy, that any of the building blocks are going to be present in a low concentration; therefore, to assemble a large number of those building blocks, you get a gene-like RNA — 100 nucleotides long — that fights entropy.
And the fourth problem is that even if you can solve the entropy problem, you have a paradox that RNA enzymes, which are maybe catalytically active, are more likely to be active in the sense that destroys RNA rather than creates RNA.'
Benner went on to say that “We are finding all sorts of problems in getting behavior that we find useful, let alone Darwinian out of this.” All he can do is hope that the Gordon Conference will turn up something. From there, the interview devolved into matters of funding. “Our group actually sells origins-of-life jewelry,” he quipped. “The minerals that create the borate and the alkali and the phosphate are minerals like tourmaline and apatite and peridot.” Hopefully the jewelry was intelligently designed." CEH
He hath made the earth by his power,
Jeremiah 10:12
