11 May '12 08:06>4 edits
Originally posted by KellyJaybillions of RNA threads would have spontaneously formed before life and with random sequences of RNA bases.
Not sure why you think that is a big deal. You could be jumping up and
down because someone figured out a way to create a letter "r" and claim
that is beginning of language. It isn't the pieces, it is how they are put
together! So getting everything that should be left handed, those that should
be right handed, the specific orders required to form whate ...[text shortened]... om living things that has the proper arraignment already
built into their life forms.
Kelly
Note I say RNA and not DNA; the first protocell/protocells would have almost certainly have been an RNA cell with no DNA ( nor complex proteins for that matter -none needed for a protocell )
The current evidence is very strongly in favour of the RNA world hypothesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis
also:
http://www.panspermia.org/rnaworld.htm
“...RNA has the ability to act as both genes and enzymes. This property could offer a way around the "chicken-and-egg" problem. …
…..
…It was prescient of Crick to guess that RNA could act as an enzyme, because that was not known for sure until it was proven in the 1980s by Nobel Prize-winning researcher Thomas R. Cech (2) and others.
…
….”
there are other alternative theories to the RNA world hypothesis but they all have major problems that the RNA world hypothesis doesn't so the RNA world hypothesis is currently by far the most credible.
http://www.postmodern.com/~jka/rnaworld/nfrna/nf-index.html
and more recently:
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090513/full/news.2009.471.html
“...An elegant experiment has quashed a major objection to the theory that life on Earth originated with molecules of RNA.
John Sutherland and his colleagues from the University of Manchester, UK, created a ribonucleotide, a building block of RNA, from simple chemicals under conditions that might have existed on the early Earth.
The feat, never performed before, bolsters the 'RNA world' hypothesis, which suggests that life began when RNA, a polymer related to DNA that can duplicate itself and catalyse reactions, emerged from a prebiotic soup of chemicals.
"This is extremely strong evidence for the RNA world. We don't know if these chemical steps reflect what actually happened, but before this work there were large doubts that it could happen at all," says Donna Blackmond, a chemist at Imperial College London.
...
…
...”