DNAunion: The following is from SeJones' "RE: 47 aspects of evolution
simulation programs (was Schutzenberger)", posted 10/19/2000.
[...]
>>CC: However, much about evolution can be studied *without* many of these
features.
>>RW:Yes. It's in the nature of a simulation that it's based on an abstracted
model of reality. For total accuracy, we would have to simulate every
sub-atomic particle, which is clearly impossible.
>>SeJones: Not really. In the case of the origin of life, starting with
amino and nucleic acids will do fine.
DNAunion: But "allowing" OOL researchers to START with nucleic acids - and
not requiring them to show purely-natural routes to their abiotic creation
and accumulation - is not advisable since RNA is not prebiotically plausible.
If OOL researchers ignore this fact - and start off assuming that many vast
pools of homochiral (all right-handed) furanosyl ribonucleotides, bonded with
3'->5' phosphodiester bonds into long polymers, were actually present on the
prebiotic Earth - then any successes they might achieve that are based on
such assumptions - even the creation of a self-sustaining, self-replicating
molecule - would be *practically* meaningless in that they still would not
have demonstrated the ability of life to arise from non-life by
purely-natural means. The appearance of such dream pools of nucleid acids is
a big hurdle that abiogenesis needs to explain and IDists should not be so
willing to accept OOL researchers' unsupported assumptions that they would
have been present.
[...]
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