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This planet abounds with many different life-forms. What mechanism accounts for this, I do not know.
However, looking at the fossil record, I observe that it didn't happen via infinitesimally small modifications accumulating in descendants over vast stretches of time. The fossils show an overwhelming pattern of stasis (conservation of forms) over tens or hundreds of thousands of years, punctuated by mass extinctions apparently due to planet-wide catastrophes, followed by the rapid appearance of strikingly new forms.
Darwinism predicted all the wrong things: exceedingly gradual, incremental modifications, accompanied by even more gradual extinctions of "progenitor" species, evidenced by an inconceivably large number of intermediate forms.
We have no experience with genetic mutations accumulating in organisms and causing them evolve complex, efficient new organs and systems. To use one example: if DNA can be compared to a library containing a huge amount of information recorded in books, ionizing radiation --- a significant cause of genetic mutation --- functions like a maniac who runs through the library, pulling out books at random and ripping out the pages. This we know from abundant experimentation and observation.
Our experience shows that random mutations are almost invariably destructive; and that natural selection overwhelming acts as a conservative force, eliminating mutants.
After nearly 150 years of serious efforts, humans have still not been able to produce "life" via abiogenesis; and even when we succeed, as I suppose we will, its explanatory power in terms of evolution is not obvious unless we can also explain how our intensely "designed" laboratory efforts were duplicated 3.5 billion years ago in the nurturant, warm tidal-pool, so familiar to us from the stories our parents told us.
Darwin did, in fact, predict this. And even if he hadn't, I'd still have no idea why this gainsays Darwinian evolutionary theory. Sometimes the environment is in a steady state, and the creatures change only very gradually, sometimes the environment changes very suddenly and selection naturally becomes much more aggressive. No surprises here.
Darwinism predicted all the wrong things: exceedingly gradual, incremental modifications, accompanied by even more gradual extinctions of "progenitor" species, evidenced by an inconceivably large number of intermediate forms.
Darwin was correct. You just don't get to see all forms that evolved and quickly failed, because they weren't optimal for the environments they found themselves in. You only get to see the big winners.
We have no experience with genetic mutations accumulating in organisms and causing them evolve complex, efficient new organs and systems.
Just as we have no experience with stable planetary systems fully evolving from intersteller dust under watchful human eyes. And just as we have no experience of quantum events that humans can directly experience. If you are going to take science seriously, sooner or later you will have to come to grips with the inherent frailty of inductive reasoning under conditions of incompete information--or give science up.
To use one example: if DNA can be compared to a library containing a huge amount of information recorded in books, ionizing radiation --- a significant cause of genetic mutation --- functions like a maniac who runs through the library, pulling out books at random and ripping out the pages. This we know from abundant experimentation and observation.
No, that's not really a very good analogy on a number of scores. Transcriptase corrects most single-bit induced errors as it transcribes mRNA from the DNA strands. And when a change slips by that screen, the changed gene still must overcome a long winnowing process before it can become a dominent gene. As it happens, it is also the case that many mutations are neutral, and there is no particular reason they should be fished out. Much of what enzymes do is not highly dependent on the exact amino acid chemistry, so much as on the folded geometry of the protein, and you can make a wide set of substitutions without significant effect. Many variations can and do co-exist (due to the recessive/dominent dance) in a population without significant effect--until the environment changes in such a manner as to give one particular variation an advantage.
Our experience shows that random mutations are almost invariably destructive; and that natural selection overwhelming acts as a conservative force, eliminating mutants.
Except for an occasional favorable mutation.
After nearly 150 years of serious efforts, humans have still not been able to produce "life" via abiogenesis;
Darwinian evolutionary theory does not address this question, nor depend upon an answer to it. Darwin himself was scrupulous in pointing out that he had no idea where the original spark of life might have come from. Darwin was attempting to answer the question: why are the creatures we see now different from the creatures whose bones we dig up. You do not need to figure out the origin of life to answer this question in a satisfactorily scientific manner.
Instantaneous abiogenisis, by any means, has not been on the science table for a very long time.