ohnhai writes:
Expecting self-replicators to appear in a single bound is not how we know the natural world to work. What we expect is lots of small improvements over a long period of time, but how can that happen if the things we expect to see an improvement in can’t themselves replicate (with error)? If they cant duplicate them selves how do they preserve any incremental change?
Perhaps the first set of incremental changes occurred in the progenitor non-life reactions, a second set in non-replicating products, and a third by replicating life.
It seems reasonable to suggest that as the earth aged, the surface became more chemically complex. Over the abiotic ages, both the possible number of chemical interactions and the complexity of the environment in which they occurred increased. Energy poured into that thin planetary skin where life would be concentrated.
In time, products arose that facilitated the process which created them; that process might then "out-compete" other resource-consuming processes.
Then a membrane, bubble, or pocket that contained both the progenitor process and its useful product would be another step closer to life.
The step to full self-replication could be asexual, "accidental" reproduction via mechanical splitting, spilling; perhaps budding would be the next step.
An internal, "genetic" means of reproduction wouldn't be necessary to allow selection to operate: the "soggy" nature of the necessary environment would assure many slight differences (impurities) between similar processes/products.
So, yeah, I guess it seems fair to say that non-life must have evolved before life could, in some sense, though I'd call it the natural history of increasing complexity, rather than evolution--at least until some reproducers were outcompeting others.
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What I refuse to accept is your insistence that your beliefs about your beliefs constitute evidence in support of your beliefs.