==Brian Thomas, M.S., has outdone himself this time: a lie in the first part of his first sentence. “Scientists attempting to demonstrate random evolution in the laboratory...
What are you talking about? Joyce’s “origin of life” research is an attempt to demonstrate how life could have arisen from non-life.
“What we’ve found could be relevant to how life begins, at that key moment when Darwinian evolution starts.”
—Gerald Joyce, 2009
Unfortunately for Joyce et al, all they succeeded in doing was to strengthen the argument for intelligent design.
I wouldn't say "demonstrate," I'd say "examine," but that's not really the point. Joyce does not pretend to be demonstrating "random evolution," whatever that is. There's no claim that this was random, or that it exactly represents prebiotic chemistry. Thomas sets the story up as though Joyce was trying to show something and failed, and that's not what happened at all.
Hypotheses of how life began involve multiple processes. One of them is that RNA copied itself. Joyce was investigating if RNA--any RNA, not something he claimed was the original RNA--could do that. If it couldn't, that would have been a step toward falsifying that hypothesis. But that's not what happened.
Ever seen Mythbusters? They break problems down in the same way. They figure out what individual parts of the myth would have to work for the whole thing to be true, and they test each part. What Joyce managed to do was declare RNA duplication "plausible."
Also note in his quote that he refers to the beginning of life as "that key moment when Darwinian evolution starts." See, no life = no evolution. Abiogenesis not part of evolution. Evolution covers back to the beginning of life, not before. Can we stop claiming otherwise now?