Before any progress is made on the origin, I think
we have to first ask the right question.

IMO what came first the chicken or the egg - is the
wrong question.

In reading "Origins, a skeptic's guide to the creation of life
on earth" by Robert Shapiro, he says in the chapter,
The Chicken or the Egg:
"What then should be sacrificed to strip down the comon
ancestor into the original organism : the membrane, the
energy-generating system, the genetic system, or the 
vital catalysts?"
He dismisses all but 2: proteins or nucleic acids.

I think he is making a major mistake.

"Most biochemists are willing to part with the
energy-generating system and to rely upon the benevolence
of the prebiotic soup. this soup ...must not only assemble
a lving organism within its body, but it must also

continue to nourish it afer birth. The chemicals in the
soup will furnish the meals for the first organisms,
supplying both energy and the substances needed for
growth."


Yet that paragraph is nonsense. He , as well as most,
have taken it for granted that  inherent in life is a hunger
and a need for food , and the inborn ability to use energy.
That is an incredible step to take for granted.

How can you take that for granted? If metabolism
and or replication was such an advantage - why wouldn't
rocks, water, salt, or for that matter air have evolved
ways of doing it - surely (as many origin experts suggest)
in all that time the odds would support it?  At least they
too should be hungry for prebiotic soup!

And surely that makes no sense.
Life is only a certain set of chemicals in a certain very
very limited temperature cycle that reacts in a certain
ways to an influx of continual energy.

So now we see that life does not pop up hungry at all.
What hunger it evolves to, is forced upon it by an outside
energy force.

It's not that life developed or evolved a way to use
energy. 

That's absurd (and yet this and many authors
take it for granted that that magically popped up in
our common ancestor but won't dare talk about where
it might have popped up from, or how, or when, or...)

It's that life was those chemicls that had energy
forced on them and so responded and adapted to
its non random cyclic nature, through novel variants
that survived, 
to develop ways of using that onslaught
of forced and endless and non random energy to
advantage for their continual existence  - or to furthher
the existence of replicates.

THEN and only then, when the energy slowed (the sun
cooled) this chemical system then shifted to sun
substitutes and energy substitutes, and other
metabolic and replicative strategies.

Does anyone still think life popped up hungry?
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