Question

46.	n order to give rise to more highly complex structures, what capabilities did the first biological molecules have to have

Answer 1

There are, in fact, multiple theories that suggest how life may have originated from base organic ingredients. Basicly, it breaks down into the "RNA first", or the (infinitely more likely imo) "metabolism first" thoeries. I'm not going to go into detail when a quick google of wikipedia search can break it down for you far more easily, but rest assured that we have many, many, physically sound thoeries for how this may have occured.

So you might ask, how did these organic ingredients come to be? Well here, the answer is even better. We know, and have demonstrated in the laboratory, that basic organic compounds can be spontaneously synthezied in the right conditions, if provided with an electrical charge.

Next, you posit that random mutations would not result in adaptation, likening the process to trying to write a computer program by randomly mashing buttons. Your analogy is essentially flawed. Most mutations are nuetral or harmful in some way, but those that are helpful have a higher chance of being passed on.

Imagine you have a roomfull of thousands of monkeys jamming on keyboards, and that once they type out, say... twenty characters, the line is saved and processed by a computer. Every time the computer finds a line that makes sense, it adds it to a working database. Only lines that add to the whole in a beneficial way are stored subsequently.

The computer in my analogy represents natural selection, the tendency for beneficial traits to be carried over into successive generations. Like it or not, after enough iterations of this process, the monkeys will develop a sensible program.