Uh, no. They simulated conditions from 4 billion years ago. To simulate requires intelligence. It is like saying that it requires intelligence to demonstrate gravity, since an intelligent entity dropped a ball.
Now if they left some primordial soup on the counter and it sprang to life, that would be a different story.
So to prove geological epochs, they need to build a planet amnd observe it for a few billion years?
No - we simply ask Slartibartfast how old the Earth is.
Rad the article. They took existing RNA.
Nucleic acids spontaneously developing has been compared to having a billion billion billion billion chimps pounding for a billion billon billion billion years, under the assertion that one would eventually compose the works of Shakespeare.
This doesn’t change that problem (unless they’ve held back some big results, but these Deus-ex-sludge types seem unlikely to do that), nor does it solve the problem of where did all those typewriters come from. But it does, intriguingly, show that Chimps like to type random keys on a typewriter.
In fact many of them have numerous gas giants near their central stars. Just a matter of time until some sort of solar wind blows the gas away, which will also expand the orbits of the residual rocky cores, and something might pop up close enough to visit us someday.