Scientists assume that the "as yet unknown" will eventually succumb to the scientific method of experimentation and reasoning.
Right, "scientists
assume", they don't
know. Their assumption that the answer that they seek will be a natural answer discoverable by the means at hand is a working assumption, a heuristic.
It's certainly one that I personally share (more or less, since some necessary information about the ancient Earth may be unavailable by its nature, and there's the possibility that our current organic and biochemistry isn't advanced enough), but in order to be intellectually honest I have to admit that it's just my assumption at this point.
And Paddoboy's apparent belief that the scope of natural science is coextensive with the limits of reality itself looks to me to be an article of metaphysical faith.
As for me, I think that it's entirely possible that there might be aspects of reality that human beings are in no better position than a dog to understand. We might just lack the necessary cognitive capacity. (Albert Einstein seems to have raised this possibility.) Obviously we can never imagine what those unknowable aspects of reality might be, any more than the dog can imagine higher mathematics, molecular genomics, black holes and relativistic singularities.
Any one with a smattering of knowledge of chemistry can dream up scenarios in which, given the existence of, say, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen and a sufficient source of energy, ribonucleotides could form.
Only if one ignores the technical details, in which case the story resembles a myth more than science.
When one considers the technical details, it gets very complicated very fast. Most of the literature is suitable only for professional researchers and graduate students, but here's a comprensible little 16 page undergraduate level survey from the University of Texas that should be understandable by laymen.
http://www.as.utexas.edu/astronomy/education/spring05/scalo/lectures/309L-2DOriginLife.pdf
Then you are pretty much home and dry, since, again with energy, these could polymerize and you get a self-replicating molecule. That would be life (but not as we know it, Jim), because with RNA and DNA so formed all the rest can be encoded.
Cell biology is
incredibly complex. There's the genetic code, there's
regulation of the genetic code that turns genes on and off in the proper order, there's thousands of proteins, each with its own precise functional shape, including most of the ubiquitous enzymes that catalyze pretty much all of the chemical reactions in the cell, there's cell membranes with their very selective chemical permeabilities and last but certainly not least, there's energy metabolism that powers all of it. Each of those topics, if one pokes into them, is exceedingly complex in its own right.
Getting from the first crude chemical replicators to the first functioning cells is a tremendous leap, one that much like the origin of the first chemical replicators (see link above) still isn't really understood.
The current abiogenesis literature consists largely in identifying questions regarding all of this stuff (there's no end of those) and speculating about hypothetical answers.
I personally expect (but don't know) that humanity might make make considerable progress on these questions. But I don't expect that we will ever reach a final answer. What might be more likely is that many possible pathways will be imagined, different steps in different orders. But absent the invention of time machines (unlikely) that enable researchers to go back and observe (and perhaps contaminate, causing the mother of all grandfather-paradoxes), we might never know which of our abiogenesis hypotheses might be the correct one.
