And the origin of such information-rich molecules is precisely what Oparin needed to explain. Thus, many rejected his postulation of prebiotic natural selection as question-begging. As the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky insisted, “Pre-biological natural selection is a contradiction in terms.”27 Or as Christian de Duve explained, theories of prebiotic natural selection “need information which implies they have to presuppose what is to be explained in the first place.”28
