It should be mentioned that the Prantzos article (post #462) includes formulas to satisfy any mathematician or physicist.
For comparison of the Miller-Urey experiment (~1952-1959), we first excerpt what Hedin says about it:
'Origin of Life Theories. One of the iconic arguments for a naturalistic origin of life is the Miller-Urey experiment, performed in 1952. Stanley Miller and Harold Urey sought to reproduce the beginning stages of how life might have arisen on the early Earth....sought to reproduce the components of the early Earth atmosphere and to see what would happen if they subjected this mixture of gases to energy in the form of an electric spark (to simulate lightning), or hot silica (to simulate lava), or ultraviolet light.
For their experiment, they assumed an "atmosphere" made of gaseous compounds that all contained hydrogen (methane, H2, and ammonia), a mixture chemists refer to as "reducing." Subsequent research has shown that the actual mixture of gases in the early Earth atmosphere would have been a more neutral mix of CO2 and nitrogen, plus some water vapor.
The original Miller-Urey experiments produced a few types of amino acids, and apparently exciting result, since these are known to be the chemical building blocks of biochemical molecules. However, if one repeats the experiment with the correct mix of gases, it yields significantly fewer biologically relevant molecules (Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life [1999])
The Miller-Urey results were acclaimed as a grand breakthrough, until further research undermined their significance. The experiment's results do not support a naturalistic model for life's origin. Subsequent research has not achieved more success. As biochemist Fazale Rana states, "When more realistic conditions are employed in simulations, experiments fail to provide validation. It appears as if the atmosphere of the early Earth could not have supported the chemistry needed to form prebiotic compounds."
Why, then, is the Miller-Urey experiment consistently featured in even the latest astronomy textbook chapters on the origin of life? I can only guess. It once stood as a beacon of hope for those who believed that natural processes along could produce life out of non-living material. But nothing has come along to replace the Miller-Urey experiment, making it especially hard to give it up as a beacon of hope, even after it's been discredited.
Over the course of more than six decades of intensified origin-of-life research, efforts to demonstrate the plausibility of an unguided origin of life are proving increasingly futile. As Rana notes, "To date researchers have found neither conceivable nor realistic chemical routes from a prebiotic soup to life".....Biologist Eugene Koonin remarks on the inadequacy of one of the hopeful proposals, the RNA-first mechanism for the origin of life:...."The RNA World concept might offer the best chance for the resolution of this conundrum but so far cannot adequately account for the emergence of an efficient RNA replicase or the translation system" (The Cosmological Model of Eternal Inflation and the Transition from Chance to Biological Evolution in the History of Life, Biology Direct 2 [2007]: 8).'
(Hedin, op cit, p. 147-8)
Hedin's argument forces an alternative gaseous atmosphere when repeating the experiment, which is contrary to scientific protocol because it is not repeating the original experiment. Who else repeated the Miller-Urey experiment to validate it?