This article shows that C could have spontaneously happened. It's not at all meaningless. Is it the whole story? Of course not. But it's an interesting part of the chain. Science is slow. Don't throw out the transistor because it's not an iphone.

The origin of life is very much a speculative area of science. I thought Nick Lane's The Vital Question was an interesting take on how life could have gotten started. I'm not qualified to comment on the validity of the chemistry behind it, though.

[0] https://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2014/03/from-geolo...

This is also how I see it, and I'd like to know the counter-argument.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, what "purpose" narrative?

Is contradicting the Neo-Darwinist model of life somehow not allowed?

Does contradicting it make me a closet Christian, in your eyes?

Because I don't see an answer in Neo-Darwinism or any religion.

I'm happy not knowing, just as I'm happy to criticize people who claim to know.

I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you're genuinely curious.

But we've been down this road of chemical soups before ~ and gotten nothing out of it.

I'm just frustrated that they seem to keep chasing the same failed ideas.

It's time to look for other explanations... not a religious one, at that.

Some biologists look towards a meteoric explanation of life, but punting it off-planet isn't an explanation, either...

Saying that the idea of "a primordial soup produced the building blocks that eventually led to all life on earth" has failed because some extraordinarily limited experiments (spatially, chemically, temporally, and complexity limited) haven't produced cellular life is about like saying that the "fusion of hydrogen produces the heat of stars" theory has failed because we haven't been able to produce stable fusion here on earth. The scope of the effect that was likely produced in the primordial environment over billions of years is beyond basic human comprehension.

Most here seem to reason the other way around - it must have happened, so we'll just keep looking until we figure out how. I'd like to think that we could reach a point at which we could confidently say "this universe doesn't have the probabilistic resources to make it happen" instead of kicking the can down the road indefinitely.

All you can do is build bigger vats, just like physicists build bigger supercolliders, hoping for a result.

Given such complex lifeforms, even a billion years wouldn't suffice to explain going from a RNA bases to a modern day human.

And no, I don't buy the Christian fairytale, either.

It's fine for me to accept that we humans have no answer as to life's origins.