frankv:
KiwiTim:
If I dump a load of building supplies on some land, nobody would expect them to self assemble into a house.
Right... but your building materials aren't alive. One of the features of life is the ability to extract energy from the environment and use that to alter the environment.
If you put a live monkey amongst your building materials, it will build a rudimentary house.
I'm alluding to abiogenesis, non-life to life, de novo. The systems of organic molecules required for a rudimentary, primitive, self-replicating cell. It would be absurdly improbable for the molecular machinery required for photosynthesis or chemosynthesis to self assemble, concomitant with the ability to self replicate, as well as the molecular machinery for all the other essential cellular functions, to spontaneously self assemble in the same location and at the same time. That goes against everything we know about probability, chemistry and thermodynamics.
I have no problem with living beings being capable of retaining order and complexity, and being capable of increasing that complexity via natural selection.