For the invisible things of him
from the creation of the world are clearly seen,
being understood by the things that are made,
......so that they are without excuse:
Romans 1:20
"The first bad, and fairly common, assumption of origin-of-life researchers is that the question can be answered in terms of chemistry. That is, if one can deduce ways in which natural conditions produce life's chemical building blocks, then this would solve the problem. Not so, says a new paper on the subject, which appears in the Royal Society journal Interface. The researchers wrote,
We need to explain the origin of both the hardware [biochemical] and software [coded information] aspects of life, or the job is only half finished. Explaining the chemical substrate of life and claiming it as a solution to life's origin is like pointing to silicon and copper as an explanation for the goings-on inside a computer.
The authors recognized that living cells need more than just their parts—they need at least two levels of information.
One level is the blueprint specifying the construction of a new cell.
Another level is a "supervisory unit" that specifies when the blueprint's information should be accessed and when the blueprint should be copied.
These roles, and many others, are filled by an array of biological machines in living cells.
"In a nutshell, the authors shift attention from the 'hardware'—the chemical basis of life—to the 'software'– its information content," according to Arizona State University News.
It is nice that evolution scientists are finally
The second bad assumption in the question, "How did non-living chemicals become the first living cell?" is that natural processes alone can explain life's origin. This stems from religiously-held beliefs, not from scientific observation. The study authors wrote,
While we have stressed that Darwinian evolution lacks a capacity to elucidate the physical mechanisms underlying the transition from non-life to life or to distinguish nonliving from living, evolution of some sort must still drive this transition.
Why must evolution drive the supposed "transition" from disorder to specified, coded information in cells? The researchers gave no answer but wrote, "How this transition occurs remains an open question." Apparently, they were only open to Darwinian answers." ICR