Is Abiogenesis a fact?

Hi Hoot Mon! Welcome to EvC! While I'm not quite clear on your question, I think that the focus on "digital information" is just a sign of the times. The origins of life research crowd is generally divided into two camps: replication-firsters and metabolism-firsters (there are a few other camps as well, like membrane-firsters, but in general that's around about it). Depending on who you talk to you will receive different perceptions of the origin of life- some propose it began with a replicator, others state it's a series of quasi-metabolic reactions. A large proportion of origins of life research is in fact focused with the replication-first paradigm in mind. Other research in the metabolism-first paradigm is sometimes viewed as "renegade" or even worse.The field of origins of life research arose around about the same time as the Watson-Crick discovery of the structure of DNA, and was clearly affected by this discovery. Pre-DNA the origins field focused on the formation of amino acids, sugars, membranes, and other biological components of life. Post-DNA the origins field focused on nucleobases, ribose, and polymerization pathways. One sees a similar change of focus in the biological and biochemical studies.In recent times, the origins of life field has gotten more messy, and it may soon abandon the metabolism-first vs. replication-first paradigms. It's hard to say where it's going, but we shall see.

I think that you're pretty much on to it- it is difficult to really define the debate from the "replication-first" or "metabolism-first"; essentially these ideas define what chemicals a researcher tries to make by "prebiotic methods." Part of the debate centers around the definition of life, which itself is a pretty abstract concept. I've been to talks where the whole discussion gets hung up on the difficulty of "what is life?"There are a number of recent books out that attempt to define life beyond chemistry- try "The Origins of Life" by Freeman Dyson to see an approach by a physicist. He's got an interesting model for the origin of life, and he also tends to use computer analogies. Although he gets a bit of the chemistry wrong, it's still a very interesting (and cheap!) read. There's also a book by Bob Hazen entitled "Genesis:" the Scientific Quest for the Origin of Life or something similar, which deals with the idea of emergence- tyhe origin of complexity from chemical systems.Some have even gone so far as to propose that life may result from an unknown thermochemical law, though the research into that starts entering the philosophical and there haven't been many actual experiments. All in all, it's a quite complex question.