theomorphic writes:
...so we always see these absurdly large improbability numbers for the spontaneous generation of self replicating molecules.
Unfortunately this may mean nothing more than whoever is doing the computing does not actually know all the mechanisms, or how to properly quantify/formulate the mechanisms.
In grad school I started into computational chemistry. I was modelling activity within small molecules. That was so fricking simple a system, yet the formulas necessary to model the full complexity of the system (and mind you I am talking about a single molecule) were not "simple" and not necessarily "perfect".
While the experiment you suggest is possible, it will depend on our current knowledge regarding all possible chemicals, mechanisms between those chemicals, and the environment their interactions would take place in.
I have yet to see any "information theorists" give any evidence that they fulfill the above. The closest has been saying that they used general laws regarding chance of interaction, which of course is meaningless inside chemistry where random chance interaction is skewed by environment and what is doing the interacting.
I think science would be much better off continuing to investigate mechanisms between certain "basic" organic chemical systems which could lead to the complex ones which are necessary for life as we know it, and seeing what environments aid that process.
Of course this assumes that there was not a chemical system we no longer see (or recognize) that acted as an intermediary between the basic chemical systems and the ones we see making up life today.
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holmes