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[[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.]]

This is al lwell and good, but once this low level informaiton arises- He is not going to be able to demonstrate higher level metainformation arising in the clay- he can’t. There simply is not a source for the higher level metainfo available to the lower level in nature- He’ll have to make hte arguement that htis higher level metainfo is somehow capable of arising from this lower level info over billions of years as it supposedly progressed via mistakes and as this lower level somehow managed to beat all the odds and impossibilities and law breaking processes while it was locked away in it’s clay coccoon.

Here again is just another attempt to take pre-existing ID/IC already established, and deconstructing it, and inventing intelligently designed ‘natural processes’ that defy natural, biological, mathematical and chemical laws, and claiming that since ‘lower levels of assembly exist, then higher levels can’t be argued as IC’. Of course they won’t be able to show that any of hteir intelligently designed, carefully controlled, and carefully directed ‘natural processes’ ever occured in nature, but they’ll be quick to attack IC in this manner when they invent their intelligently designed, natural law violating process of simple construciton of lower level info assembly.

This is al lwell and good, but once this low level informaiton arises- He is not going to be able to demonstrate higher level metainformation arising in the clay- he can’t.

Precisely so. But he is not concerning himself with such things - he is merely trying to demonstrate that a particular abiogenesis story is feasible. No doubt "true believers" will extrapolate from such a success (if it happens) that ipso facto all the other stories (e.g. complexification) are therefore also feasible. But they were already "tree believers" anyway.

Nevertheless, we know that even though a particular event may have been feasible it doesn't mean that it actually happened. For Elizabeth Taylor to have forsaken her beauty, wealth and career and have fallen in love with hosepipe may have been feasible, but it didn't happen. Isn't that right, hosepipe?

The big question is whether others would be influenced by the true believer's "spin" on whatever he accomplishes (if he does.)

Like Wimmer, he begins with a message albeit a tiny fragment. So he stacks the deck in his favor. I find his work interesting but not illuminating and nowhere near as significant as Crick/Watson or Wimmer.

As they say, the proof is in the pudding - or in his case, the montmorillonite clay. For if the phenomenon was widespread enough in montmorillonite clay in a prebiotic world to bootstrap life from non-life in sufficient numbers to account for what we see in the time frame involved - it should be there still today.

Even so, as you suggest, he doesn't lay a glove on inversely causal information (successful communication) in biological life - or temporal non-locality (as I prefer to call the phenomenon.)

For newly arriving lurkers, the term refers to the organism becoming informed of something that hasn't happened yet, e.g. the need to do maintenance or repair.