Pre-Evolution Evolution....

Oh, that's easy! Surely you've seen Demon Seed?

Gee guys, hate to be the buzz-kill party-pooper and actually make an on-topic comment... I take it by implication that you find this surprising or not well recognized. I might remind you at this point that you're using a very specific, scientific definition of "life".But I agree. The line between "life" and "not-life", in the terms that you're using, is not so great. Evolution, in it's more general sense (not mutation / natural selection, but reproductive change and environmental pressure / selection), could be said to operate on non-life. I think it's an unnecessary distinction.Ben

I think that is fair. What is ironic is that ID chose Evolution rather than stellar evolution as their target for divine design. Stellar evolution stinks of it where-as Evolution is just a soggy biological mess

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.