My friend says the primordial soup, the soup that from where all life came from, is nothing more than myth. He says it's a myth because the odds of such a primordial soup are astronomical to make it completely impossible for life to form from it, and therefore, the primordial Soup is a myth.
Is he correct?
Yes and no.
The so-called "primordial soup" is just an oversimplification of the process by which abiogenesis is hypothesized to have occured. It's accurate enough to get the basic idea, but loses accuracy in the details.
Your friend is most
definitely wrong about any estimation of probability. We don;t even know yet all of the conditions required for abiogenesis - it's impossible to estimate the probability of conditions you can't even yet fully
define. That's something like estimating the probability of a dice roll when you don't know how many dice are being rolled or how many sides each die has.
We do know some of the basics, at least, and nature has already shown us that some of the prerequisites for life
do occur naturally in a lifeless environment. The moon Titan, for example, is
covered in organic compounds, like natural gas and methane - there are literal
oceans of the stuff. We know that water occurs naturally, of course, being the second most prevalent molecule in the known Universe (after Hydrogen). We know that planets do occur in the "habitable" zone, where liquid water exists naturally (Earth being the obvious example). The "building blocks," the general ones that we know are necessary (though not yet all of the specifics, since we haven't yet fully unraveled the process), are all there, as known observed facts in nature.
The "primordial soup" term evokes imagery of a bubbling puddle of magic pre-life goo, out of which (perhaps after a dramatic lightning strike) life emerges. Again, it's an oversimplification. It correctly communicates that there must be a mixture of pre-biotic organic compounds...but one important detail is that abiogenesis doesn't have to happen in one dramatic moment, and the barrier between "not alive" and "alive" is pretty blurry.
Current abiogenesis hypotheses suggest that pre-biotic organic compounds spontaneously self-assembled into self-replicating molecules. This sort of thing has been observed to happen in nature - just off the top of my head, prions (nasty little things, one sort of which is responsible for Mad Cow Disease) are basically proteins that cause other proteins to form into more prions (this being rather bad for the living thing that's using those proteins). They aren't alive, they aren't cells, they don't even have DNA or RNA, but they do replicate (I'm not suggesting that life arose from prions, just illustrating that abiotic self-assembly and self-replication does occur, and that the division between life and non-life isn't an easy-to-define line).
The genesis of what we would call "life" was very likely a slow, incremental process, beginning with imperfectly self-replicating nonliving molecules, and "ends" with a primitive proto-cell.
Your friend is both right and wrong - the "primordial soup"
is a myth, but only in that it's a gross oversimplification of an extremely complex and not yet fully unraveled process.
Your friend is completely and utterly wrong about the mathematics of probability, however. You can't estimate the probability of an event you can't even yet fully define.
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