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Thank you so much for the links!

Jeepers, but the author is a devoted acolyte of Darwin - beginning the second essay with his profession of faith that the theory of evolution is a physical law above the physical "laws" of Newton, i.e. that gravity is merely an "agent" of evolution. Talk about a horse/cart error and zero consideration of geometric physics - though he could be excused because relativity may not have been in currency in his day.

He is quite the story teller - then again historical sciences are story telling, e.g. archeology, anthropology, Egyptology. Indeed, scientific theories are stories - ditto for political ideology, etc.

Sir Karl Popper famously criticized Marx and Freud because their theories were unfalsifiable. And I suspect the same should be said of many if not most story tellers. But one day science, technology and reality (both physical and most importantly, Spiritual) will catch up with their spin.

In this case for instance, Osborn bets the abiogenesis farm on energy. And in the 1950's Urey/Miller went down that path simulating lightning strikes. They had some success in creating amino acids that way but their experiments went no further.

About the same time, Crick/Watson discovered DNA - the message of living biological organisms - but neither they nor Urey/Miller understood the full import to molecular biology of information theory, founded on Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communications (1948.)

Although "information theory and molecular biology" has been used successfully in both cancer and pharmaceutical research - it wasn't evidenced until the Wimmer experiment in approximately 2002 (bootstrapping polio from a message, e.g. off the internet) the relevance of information (successful communication) to any theory of abiogenesis.

And on this thread, Szostak is touted as being on the leading edge of abiogenesis experiments. And what is his focus but the same "information theory and molecular biology."

HHMI: Jack Szostak

We are interested in applying directed evolution to nonstandard nucleic acids, as a way of asking whether life could have evolved using genetic polymers other than RNA. TNA (threose nucleic acid) is a particularly interesting nucleic acid synthesized by Albert Eschenmoser's group (Scripps Research Institute) in a search for possible progenitors of RNA. The sugar-phosphate backbone of TNA uses the four-carbon sugar threose, which might have been easier to come by prebiotically than the ribose of RNA. Despite the one-atom-shorter sugar-phosphate backbone repeat unit, TNA oligonucleotides can base-pair with themselves and with RNA and DNA. We have recently devised an approach to the enzymatic synthesis of TNA libraries, and experiments aimed at the in vitro evolution of TNA aptamers and catalysts are in progress.

The origin of information (successful communications) in the universe will no doubt remain an open question no matter what abiogenesis theories might become a paradigm to biologists. Simply put, Shannon's theory is mathematics, a universal that would be applicable to any form of life anywhere in the universe, e.g. artificial intelligence on earth, non "carbon based" life in the cosmos.

And of course the origin of (biological) life is directly hinged to that question - and requires an origin for autonomy and semiosis (language) as well because the message in information theory requires both sender and receiver as well as encoding and decoding. And in the theoretical prebiotic "soup" without autonomy, the message is a broadcast and the soup remains a soup.

Evidently, Szostak is aware of this and trying to address these points at once in his experiments:

We have recently begun to study the properties of membrane vesicles built from simple amphiphilic molecules such as fatty acids. Such vesicles are models for the compartment boundaries of primitive cells. Since the first cells had no biochemical machinery to mediate the growth and division of their membrane boundaries, there must be purely physical and chemical processes that allow membrane vesicles to grow and divide. Our goal is to find out what those processes could be. Growth turns out to be relatively simple, and Pier Luigi Luisi's lab (then at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich) has shown that fatty acid vesicles can grow by incorporating additional fatty acid supplied in the form of micelles. By combining that process with a procedure for division that forces large vesicles through small pores, we have demonstrated multiple generations of vesicle growth and division. We are currently exploring alternative division processes that might be more prebiotically realistic.

Here he is trying to simulate the spontaneous rise of an undirected, meaningless pre-cursor "message" in lieu of a coherent message fragment, i.e. the RNA. And to affect the message, Szostak proposes the spontaneous rise of autonomy in montmorillonite clay. Notably, I do not see him addressing the Pattee/Rocha concern: Rocha's theory began with an RNA world - message fragments floating around with a (to become) biological thing toggling back and forth between non-autonomous and autonomous to gather and then use those message fragments.

Szostak's model will eventually have to come to terms with this need to gather (non-autonomous) messages while not losing the ability to toggle back to being autonomous.

And here:

One fundamental question that we are attempting to address through RNA aptamer selections is the relationship between information content and biochemical function. It seems intuitively obvious that more information should be required to specify or encode a structure that does a better job at performing some function, such as binding a target molecule. We have recently provided the first quantitative demonstration of such a relationship. We approached the problem by isolating a set of distinct aptamers, all of which bind the same target (GTP), but with a wide range of affinities. Our results show that the high-affinity aptamers are much more structurally complex than the low-affinity aptamers. By measuring the amount of information that is required to specify each structure, we were able to show that, on average, it takes about 10 bits of additional information to encode structures that are 10-fold better at binding GTP. Our current work is aimed at understanding the underlying physical basis for the observed relationship between information and function.

BTW, for the proposed montmorillonite clay to be prebiotically realistic for the rise of autonomy - then it should be likewise realistic for the same event today. IOW, if that is the case then we ought to be able to observe abiogenesis - or at least autonomy and precursor messages in montmorillonite clay today.

Obviously, Osborn's story is obsolete. And Szostak's story may end up becoming obsolete as well.

But that's what science does: a theory is a story which only has value to the extent it is falsifiable (Popper.)

The more a theory (e.g. relativity) survives attempts to falsify it, the more confidence we can have in the theory. But to the author of the articles you linked, the theory rarely is elevated to the status of a physical law (e.g. the second law of thermodynamics.) Though indeed, in some disciplines - particularly historical disciplines like evolution biology - the theory is elevated (wrongly in my view) to the status of a paradigm. For them, it may as well be "holy writ."