That's not what was said. "Explanation" and "theory" are not synonymous. There are several possibilities. Here is some information on RNA origins if you are interested. Some of those possibilities may legitimately be called hypotheses. I am not aware of any that have yet met the criteria of scientific theory.
Maybe not directly, but as a consequence of lack of "falsifiability" it is not science. I was making a point. Any mention of the origins of life are not science due to the unfalsifiable nature of the subject.
I had not seen that page, thanks. It is very good in pointing out the possibilities that have been examined. Orgel admits difficulties I pointed out to jennyp long ago.
After years of trying, however, we have been unable to achieve the second step of replication - copying of a complementary strand to yield a duplicate of the first template - without help from protein enzymes. Equally disappointing, we can induce copying of the original template only when we run our experiments with nucleotides having a right-handed configuration. All nucleotides synthesized biologically today are right-handed. Yet on the primitive earth, equal numbers of right- and left-handed nucleotides would have been present. When we put equal numbers of both kinds of nucleotides in our reaction mixtures, copying was inhibited.
All these problems are worrisome, but they do not completely rule out the possibility that RNA was initially synthesized and replicated by relatively uncomplicated processes. Perhaps minerals did indeed catalyze both the synthesis of properly structured nucleotides and their polymerization to a random family of oligonucleotides. Then copying without replication would have produced a pair of complementary strands. If, as Szostak has posited, one of the strands happened to be a ribozyme that could copy its complement and thus duplicate itself, the conditions needed for exponential replication of the two strands would have been established [see illustration on preceding page]. This scenario is certainly very optimistic, but it could be correct