Originally Posted by mo42

Amino acids can be synthesized by a sparker and some ammonia and CO2 in a water bath. Phospholipids, I'm not so sure on existing in a primodial soup; they are VERY high energy compounds that are not thermodynamically favorable. Another major problem is ribose/deoxyribose, both of which are essential to any kind of nucleic acid chain, and are also non-occuring in a theoretical primordial soup. You simply can't create any form of life that we know of without them, and this is the greatest stumbling block for modern origin-of-life theorists.

Then you get into salt concentrations, probability of getting a ribosome or something that could sythesize proteins (ribosomes for simple prokaryotes are 1500 and 2900 nucleotides in length and are highly conserved sequences among all prokaryotes, indicating it's been like that for a looooong time) and that would require something to produce it, since it'd get hydrolyzed fairly easily. So it's really quite tricky to theorize how life could have originated evolutionarily.