>> It is another wall that lets us see the next hill. It is an important breakthrough but it does not purport to say anything other than what is reported — that it is giving us more information on what may have happened. <<
Yeah, it’s also the 17,320,119th time the media has claimed to have just about created life in a laboratory. Mind you, in this case, it’s at least far more interesting than the time they set up “plausibly natural” conditions to synthesize uracil and reported for a solid decade that “the building blocks of life” had been created in a lab.
A little skepticism is perfectly acceptable. In fact,it is necessary in science. That is why findings need to be peer-reviewed and stand up to merciless attacks.
As long as someone doesn't say "well, the fact that a human did so-and-so means an intelligent agent (for whom the human stands in) was responsible for the effect being seen," which is, of course a non sequiter, then you can pooh-pooh the results all you want.
But if those results can be replicated and then lead to OTHER results, then you have to look at the entire body of research in this area -- not just this latest stepping stone.
I am not abiogenesis expert -- frankly even the idea of trying to reproduce this experiment is so far above my head that I can't even see the soles of the shows of the experimenters. But I do understand the methods being used and how they are applied. And, until someone scientifically knocks this down, I think it adds to the sum knowledge of the one of most esoteric life science areas.
As a final thought -- can you scientifically attack this research and its findings? Or is this just curmudgeonly cane waving?