[NonLinear]

Our hypothesis is that the FeS membrane, laced with nickel, acted as a semipermeable catalytic boundary between the two fluids, encouraging synthesis of organic anions by hydrogenation and carboxylation of hydrothermal organic primers....

....
The starting point is our model, derived from current RNA activity, of the RNA world just prior to the advent of genetically-encoded protein synthesis. By focusing on the function of the protoribosome we develop a plausible model for the evolution of a protein-synthesizing ribosome from a high-fidelity RNA polymerase that incorporated triplets of oligonucleotides.

Nice write-up.

Did I miss the part where they were able, using accepted and established scientific method, to produce the results hypothesized and then subjected the experiment to peer review wherein the same results were reproduced independently by experimentation?

[Ichneumon]

Did I miss the part where they were able, using accepted and established scientific method, to produce the results hypothesized and then subjected the experiment to peer review wherein the same results were reproduced independently by experimentation?

Did you miss the part where that paper was putting forth a hypothesis?

No one's claiming that all the questions about abiogenesis have been answered already. But the point is that those who try to imply that the process is entirely baffling, impossible, or has not proceeded beyond the Miller-Urey experiment are grossly ignorant of the huge amount of research and work that has been done in this field in the past few decades. In fact, the problem now is not that there are no plausible scenarios for the various stages of abiogenesis, the problem is that there are so *many*. They need to be tested and compared so that they can be narrowed down to the best candidates.

And if you read the papers, including the ones that are just putting forth new models to be tested, you'll find that a huge amount of evidence already points very strongly to specific events in abiogenesis, including a the existence of an RNA-based world. This would not be the case if life had actually been "poofed" into existence in its modern form, by a designer or some other method. So while a lot of the details are yet to be fleshed out, the evidence already points very, very strongly to the kind of natural "bootstrapping" sequence that the creationists love to ridicule and falsely claim that there is no scientific support for, or plausible scenarios for.