Stuart Kauffman and Life Origin Models

Stuart Kauffman and his associates have proposed in recent years that organic materials posses some sort of innate "self-organizational" property that constrains simpler organic materials to assemble into the building blocks of life. The basis of these claims are certain "properties" observed in various computer models constructed by Kauffman and his associates. Being an engineer, I have a special interest in the use of mathematical models to describe and predict the behavior of things in the "real" world. But models only are useful insofar as they reflect real conditions and their results can be tested and confirmed.
Although the theories of Kauffman and associates attracted much attention in the popular scientific press when they were first offered, the main criticism of these proposals has always been the fact that they are not based on any factual or observed data. In fact, a leading authority on evolution and former professor of Mr. Kauffman's has accused him of practicing "fact free science" - a rather stern and derogatory description. In a larger sense, one could view the whole field of life origin research since Stanley Miller first published his results in 1953, to be a search for useful "self-organizational" tendencies in organic materials. Through the combination and reaction of various organic materials under a wide variety of conditions, researchers have continually looked for evidence of natural tendencies toward the formation of useful pre-biotic materials. In decades of research, essentially none have been found. This has led many to conclude that Mr. Kauffman's work is little more than an exercise in curious computer graphics - a philosophical treatise with a mathematic explanation. If these tendencies did exist, certainly the argument for a natural origin of life would  be far stronger, however if they did actually exist, they would have been already discovered.	In many ways, something like Mr. Kauffman's proposal needs to be true in order to have a system that leads to a natural origin for life. Something must be responsible for the organization and complexity of pre-biotic forms and structural building blocks. If simple organic materials just naturally tended to form useful proteins, and life building blocks such as things like DNA or RNA naturally tended to form self-reproductive systems, the case for natural origin would be very strong indeed. In this sense, the appearance of  Mr. Kauffman's proposals represent the desperate state of progress within this field. For the  researcher who has made a philosophic commitment to a certain concept, and the existing data fails to meet the expectations of that philosophic commitment, Mr. Kauffman has developed a "synthetic" computer model world where all the tendencies and conditions necessary for fully natural abiogenesis are present. The downside is that his model, sadly lacking in support from science or fact,  has nothing to do with the reality of our world.

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