...
Just as wrong as the survival-of-the-fittest types, and, otherwise, identical.
While we're on the subject of thought experiments, consider existence itself. Anything existent. This includes nothing, because a cosmos of beginningless, endless, unlimited nothing, while you might want to object that that's not a cosmos, is precisely a cosmos, the cosmos, the thing that exists.
So what if there was never anything, pure unadulterated nothing? What would that be like? Blackness everywhere. There is no possibility of stripping it down further than this, because even with nothing extant nothing's extant, so to speak, the only possible firstness is nothing extant.
Thing is, even if it's completely insentient all-pervading nothing, given that we in some sense are sentient, I can't imagine cosmic nothingness staying insentient. At some point it knew itself. At or near that point it would have started dreaming, and I think all the maniacs trying to crack the genetic code or making their outrageous claims based on what they think they've figured out about DNA, are so much sound and fury miserably signifying nothing.
I think DNA is the stuff of nothing's dreams.
always and any time....
