Except, of course, for the many species that did not adapt...the standard evolutionist line to explain extinction.
And except, of course, for those species that remained unchanged for millions of years since their first fossilized appearance, in spite of enormous changes in their environment. They persisted through their environment; their lack of change -- their stasis -- does not attest to their having "adapted" to their environment.
There is nothing wrong with creationism, because it all had to ‘begin’ somewhere, sometime.
That's true. Hardcore Darwinists, however, will invoke abiogenesis -- life having evolved from non-living matter -- as the only "scientifically acceptable" explanation.
I still don’t see why there is a big argument.
Darwinism was the official creation-myth of the 20th century. The big argument is over whose God is more powerful: God-the-supreme-intellect-and-intelligent-designer vs. Chance-plus-lots-of-time.
Unfortunately for the Darwinists (as has been pointed out to them many times), mere chance -- even when helped along by a mysterious "natural selection" -- cannot create even simple functional arrangements of amino acids to form proteins, let alone functional arrangementsof proteins to form higher-order biological structures -- in a mere 10^17 seconds. The 12 billion years since the putative Big Bang are not enough time for Darwinism ("random mutation + natural selection") to work its magic.
So how does this shape up with the prebiotic Earth? On the early Earth it is likely that the ocean had a volume of 1 x 1024 litres. Given an amino acid concentration of 1 x 10-6 M (a moderately dilute soup, see Chyba and Sagan 1992 [23]), then there are roughly 1 x 1050 potential starting chains, so that a fair number of efficent peptide ligases (about 1 x 1031) could be produced in a under a year, let alone a million years. The synthesis of primitive self-replicators could happen relatively rapidly, even given a probability of 1 chance in 4.29 x 1040 (and remember, our replicator could be synthesized on the very first trial).
Assume that it takes a week to generate a sequence [14,16]. Then the Ghadiri ligase could be generated in one week, and any cytochrome C sequence could be generated in a bit over a million years (along with about half of all possible 101 peptide sequences, a large proportion of which will be functional proteins of some sort).
Although I have used the Ghadiri ligase as an example, as I mentioned above the same calculations can be performed for the SunY self replicator, or the Ekland RNA polymerase. I leave this as an exercise for the reader, but the general conclusion (you can make scads of the things in a short time) is the same for these oligonucleotides.
Search spaces, or how many needles in the haystack?
So I’ve shown that generating a given small enzyme is not as mind-bogglingly difficult as creationists (and Fred Hoyle) suggest. Another misunderstanding is that most people feel that the number of enzymes/ribozymes, let alone the ribozymal RNA polymerases or any form of self-replicator, represent a very unlikely configuration and that the chance of a single enzyme/ribozyme forming, let alone a number of them, from random addition of amino acids/nucleotides is very small.
However, an analysis by Ekland suggests that in the sequence space of 220 nucleotide long RNA sequences, a staggering 2.5 x 10112 sequences are efficent ligases [12]. Not bad for a compound previously thought to be only structural. Going back to our primitive ocean of 1 x 1024 litres and assuming a nucleotide concentration of 1 x 10-7 M [23], then there are roughly 1 x 1049 potential nucleotide chains, so that a fair number of efficent RNA ligases (about 1 x 1034) could be produced in a year, let alone a million years. The potential number of RNA polymerases is high also; about 1 in every 1020 sequences is an RNA polymerase [12]. Similar considerations apply for ribosomal acyl transferases (about 1 in every 1015 sequences), and ribozymal nucleotide synthesis [1, 6, 13].
Similarly, of the 1 x 10130 possible 100 unit proteins, 3.8 x 1061 represent cytochrome C alone! [29] There’s lots of functional enyzmes in the peptide/nucleotide search space, so it would seem likely that a functioning ensemble of enzymes could be brewed up in an early Earth’s prebiotic soup.
So, even with more realistic (if somewhat mind beggaring) figures, random assemblage of amino acids into “life-supporting” systems (whether you go for protein enzyme based hypercycles [10], RNA world systems [18], or RNA ribozyme-protein enzyme coevolution [11, 25]) would seem to be entirely feasible, even with pessimistic figures for the original monomer concentrations [23] and synthesis times.