Just because I haven't encountered Szostak before does not show that I know nothing about his line of investigation. He seems (from the YouTube video) to follow the general direction laid out by Harold Morowitz. Morowitz actually made it into A-G's and my book, Timothy —
...Harold Morowitz has done work precisely in this area [e.g., abiogenesis]. He did the probability calculations respecting the chance origin-of-life scenario, and decided that conjecture simply doesn’t hold water. So, [then] he based his origin belief on the self-ordering power of the elements of the periodic table. In other words, he does not regard the “primaeval soup” scenario as a plausible paradigm for the origin of life. It seems he thinks that biological life ... is simply “a natural extension of the laws of physics and chemistry.”Another key objection to Morowitz's model was raised by Dean Overman:... Viewed panoramically, Morowitz’s origin myth has a compelling logic to it. Life, in his view, arose through a series of levels, each more complex than the last. First were empty vesicles dividing and fusing like oil drops, then vesicles with simple chemistries inside. Among these were vesicles with the means for making their own components. When one of these cells “discovered” nitrogen, the next step was enzymes and the richer chemistries they entail. Finally came the enzymatic production of nucleic acids. With this development, the cells had the ability to keep a separate record of their genetic information; they could mutate and evolve. If Morowitz is right, the potentially unending regression … bottoms out in the laws of chemistry, which arise, in turn, from quantum mechanics. In the end, it is simple physics that gives rise to … the vesicles. Providing a buffer against the randomness of the environment, they allow for the formation of the delicate chemical arrangements which otherwise would be unlikely to emerge at all. [Quoting George Johnson here, Fire in the Mind, 1995, p. 225f]
...But you know what — it still doesn’t explain where the physico-chemical laws came from, nor how the periodic table got started. Which as already noted, is seemingly an evolutionary development itself.
The paradigm for the emergence of life contains algorithms which must have at least as much information content as the genetic messages they claim to generate. The method for such generation is not clear. Because the information content or complexity in the laws of physics is much less than the content in the genome, the gap in content must be explained. The information generation is not likely to flow from the laws of chemistry and physics alone.And Hubert Yockey had this to say:
The reason that there are principles of biology that cannot be deduced from the laws of physics and chemistry lies not in some esoteric philosophy but simply in the mathematical fact that the genetic information content of the genome for constructing even the simplest organisms is much larger than the information content of those laws. Chaitin has examined the complexity of the laws of physics by actually programming them. He finds the complexity amazingly small. [i.e., Chaitin estimates it at 103 bits.]Note the statement, "When one of these cells 'discovered' nitrogen, the next step was enzymes and the richer chemistries they entail...." So cells can "discover" things, and then there are "next steps" when they do. The very language implies the pre-existence of information accessible to the cell, and an ordered process (i.e., "steps") already in place — which, one assumes, a model such as this tries to obviate, since information is not a material phenomenon.
And yet Morowitz's hypothesis itself implies the pre-existence of "inversely-causal information," which Williams calls "meta-information."
In the end, the materialist presupposition pre-qualifies the type of scientific findings that would be considered "legitimate." In other words, from that presupposition, only materialist answers are "acceptable."
And this is why materialist biologists interested in origin of life problems "hit the wall" at Level (iii) of the IC/AP model, every time. They try to explain away the information problem or fudge it with fuzzy language — such as cells "discovering" such-and-so, or cells having the ability "to keep a separate record of their genetic information...".
But what do such statements actually mean?
There is a difference between someone who calculates probabilities and says something can't be done, and someone who does experiments that demonstrates it can be done.
I think if you are going to write on the subject of abiogenesis you are going to have to master organic chemistry and study current research. You can’t simply do probability calculations when you don’t know what events form the basis of the calculation.
No one thinks RNA or DNA formed in one step. Calculations that assume this are simply wasted time. This is really in the hands of chemists now.
http://www.exploringorigins.org/nucleicacids.html