Well, since nucleotides form a natural polymer (they inherently link to one another) they are far, far, far more likely than scrabble pieces, which only assort randomly, don't polymerize, and don't have the complex properties that a polymer has, to form meaningful arrangements.Just like the scrabble pieces being dumped out onto the parking lot, the nucleotide bases would, if the process was left entirely to mindless chance, not be arranged in any meaningful way.
--Stultis... there was nothing about either the backbone of the molecule or the way any of the four bases attached to it that made any sequence more likely to form than another. Later I found out that the noted origin-of-life biochemist Bernd-Olaf Kuppers had concluded much the same thing. As he explained,
"The properties of nucleic acids indicate that all the combinatorially possible nucleotide patterns of DNA are, from a chemical point of view, equivalent."In sum, two features of DNA ensure that "self-organizing" bonding affinities cannot explain the specific arrangement of nucleotide bases in the molecule:--Stephen C Meyer, Signature in the Cell
- there are no bonds between bases along the information-bearing axis of the molecule and
- there are no differential affinities between the backbone and the specific bases that could account for variations in sequence.
But they would be arranged in various specific ways. Then, so long as the polymers can reproduce, the relative ease and fidelity with which differing sequence can and do reproduce represents meaningful information.
Scrabble tiles can't and don't encode structural information the way a biopolymer does. We can READ the scrabble tiles, and determine if they are words or gibberish, but they are structurally the same -- just wooden tiles -- either way.
The scrabble tiles only have primary structure (the simple sequence of subunits) and all the information is soley in that sequence, only in the primary structure.
All biopolymers also have secondary structure (local hydrogen bonding) and tertiary structure (3-D molecular shape). Even randomly generated primary structures will have different secondary and tertiary structures, and inevitably some secondary and tertiary structures (and thereby some primary structures) will reproduce better than others. Thus there is meaning ("how well do I reproduce myself?") even to random primary structures (random sequences) provided only that they do reproduce.
Scrabble tiles just don't work like that.