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Chemists May Be Zeroing In On Chemical Reactions That Sparked the First Life (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit quotes a report from Scientific Magazine: DNA is better known, but many researchers today believe that life on Earth got started with its cousin RNA, since that nucleic acid can act as both a repository of genetic information and a catalyst to speed up biochemical reactions. But those favoring this "RNA world" hypothesis have struggled for decades to explain how the molecule's four building blocks could have arisen from the simpler compounds present during our planet's early days. Now chemists have identified simple reactions that, using the raw materials on early Earth, can synthesize close cousins of all four building blocks. The resemblance isn't perfect, but it suggests scientists may be closing in on a plausible scenario for how life on Earth began. The study has been published in the journal Nature.
Evolution can happen but it is always devolution (things getting worse not better). Natural selection is the exact opposite of evolution. You may need to understand a little bit here such as evolution is the actual building or increasing of genetic information which is the opposite of natural selection which is the reduction of the genetic information or the selection of existing genetic information.
Look, just because it happened to you doesn't mean it happened to everyone else.
Ezekiel 23:20
Don't go pushing bad analogies - you'll be talking about cars next.
The fun thing about nucleic acids is that they can hold data (genetic information) and act as catalysts by folding into specific shapes. RNA in particular can fold into complex 3D structures by itself or paired with some simple molecules like ligands. The "RNA Hypothesis" generally holds that an RNA - like molecule both encoded information to repeat itself
All a primitive 'living' structure had to do was make more of it's primitive self and in the process make enough errors to allow for evolutionary change. You don't really need an 'interpreter' - it is a function of the molecule itself. Yes, evolutionary drive pushed the creation of all sorts of ancillary functions, but in the beginning it may well have just been a nucleic acid string trying to make a nucleic acid string.
The process that made the individual nucleic acids is presumed to be abiotic - just a series of chemical reaction that managed to take place with some frequency on primordial earth (or wherever). TFA is the first (according to them, don't really follow this line of research) proposed reaction to make both types of RNA precursor bases. While not strictly necessary - billions of years allows for several distinct unlikely processes to happen simultaneously (think bowels of petunias, or rather, don't) it seems 'cleaner' to have a single, tweak able pathway to create the pool of chemicals that will turn into RNA, then the underlying precursor to all like, then slime molds, then politicians.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Success is often just a bunch of the right kind of failures strung together.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!