Self-organization of the protocell was a forward process

Yockey's (1981) interpretation of information theory relative to concepts of self-organization in the origin of life is criticized on the ground that it assumes that each amino acid residue type in a given sequence is an unaided information carrier throughout evolution. It is argued that more than one amino acid residue can act as a unit information carrier, and that this was the case in prebiotic protein evolution. Forward-extrapolation should be used to study prebiotic evolution, not backward-extrapolation. Transposing the near-random internal order of modern proteins to primitive proteins, as Yockey has done, is an unsupported assumption and disagrees with the results of experimental models of the primordial type. Studies indicate that early primary information carriers in evolution were mixtures of free alpha amino acids which necessarily had the capability of sequencing themselves.