[Reach]

How is he comparing amino acids to prokaryotic cells? I know I missed out on some of this discussion, but,

Amino acids would have necessarily been the first coherent structures to arise because they're the building blocks of life. From there prokaryotic cells could have formed in numerous ways and I already detailed one aspect of that development, e.g. the cell wall. Ribosomes and basic functional organelles can also form spontaneously once you have amino acids. Everything else builds itself from amino acids.

Also, yeah, the tornado in a junkyard argument is a very bad argument. Physical atomic interactions are not even close to equivalent to the behavior of...disassembled metals. In the former you're going to get all kinds of physical effects (sterics, reactivity, electron exchange) that make that a completely void analogy.