"If there were some deep principle of nature which drove organic systems
toward living systems, the existence of the principle should easily be
detectable in the laboratory. This applies whether the principle is one of
'seeing' and 'recognition' in the sense described above, or of concealed
intelligence in other forms. One might seek for instance to claim that when
amino acids polymerize into chains their orderings are not random, and
likely enough it is true that the orderings are not completely random. But
orderings that are not completely random remain a far cry from supposing
that amino acids 'know' how to link themselves together so as to produce
the enzymes and other critical polypeptides. Such a notion of
self-instruction by amino acids is an obviously wild proposal, but to
disprove it decisively one must again turn to experiment. The ratio of the
volume of the whole ocean to a chemist's test-tube is a number with only
some 22 digits, so that using a test-tube of organic soup instead of the
whole ocean of organic soup postulated in conventional biology, should
merely lop 22 digits off the 40,000 digits which represent the information
content of the enzymes, leaving 39,978 digits, essentially the same number
as before. Nor does the length of time of an experiment matter
significantly, even if the process of the origin of life were very strongly
accelerating, say like the hundredth power of the time, (time)^100. Thus
the reduction in the information accumulated in an hour instead of 1,000
million years would then be a number with some 1,300 digits, which would
merely reduce the original 40,000 digits to 38,700, an information content
that should be overwhelmingly detectable. An experiment done in
half-a-morning, starting from simple organic ingredients, should therefore
generate most, if not all, of the explicit structures of the enzymes.
Needless to say, no such experiment has been successfully performed,
showing that the enzymes did not arise by self-instruction or self
recognition, if indeed a disproof of these rather absurd ideas were needed."