[erichocean]

Yes, and useful proteins are basically the equivalent of "oscillators" or "spaceships" in the game of life. But must runs of the game of life are not oscillators or spaceships, just like most proteins are useless.

That's why the "initial condition" is so important, and why DNA is so important: without a good "start state", you get useless results—just like in the game of life.

What we are trying to find is not Conway's rules for the game of life, but this: how do we produce useful starting states (DNA) with a physical system? And more importantly, how do we create those starting states preferentially (i.e. non-randomly)?

We still need a model for how useful DNA (which corresponds to the "initial state" in the game of life) gets created. And we have no model for that right now, other than assuming unique random initial states are continually occurring and letting the law of large numbers eventually "find" winners.

[Cogito]

For DNA, at least, it could have come from RNA (as per the link in my last post).

While I don't think the pre-biotic problem is solved at all, we have a lot more models of how it could have happened than you seem to credit - this is after all a huge research area.

For example, here is one [0], and here is a whole journal issue on the subject [1].

I found these by searching for 'evolution of DNA' and 'evolution of RNA'.

Now, these models all include some randomness, but in no way does anyone assume "unique random initial states are continually occurring... letting the law of large numbers eventually "find" winners"

The models show plausible environments where pre-biotic synthesis of RNA (or RNA pre-cursors) can occur, and stabilise.

This model you keep bringing up - randomly selecting a molecule from all possible combinations of atoms and saying 'enough time will get you one that works' - is not mentioned anywhere that I have seen. Perhaps some lay-people (of which I am definitely one!) believe it, but as you point out it is so obviously implausible it falls down on first inspection.

There are other models (lots of them!) and they don't rely on this pure randomness.

[0] https://phys.org/news/2018-01-chemical-evolution-dna-rna-ear...

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/journal/life/special_issues/evolution-R...

[c1ccccc1]

Minor side note, but most runs of the game of life actually will produce spaceships and/or oscillators, even starting from a random configuration. (Initialize a 100 x 100 box of cells randomly, and you're virtually guaranteed to get several gliders flying off of the resulting mess.)