DarkSun
:eltiT
What do you consider the "right" RNA?
The odds are there were dozens if not more early self replicating strains of RNA competing with one another. There could easily have been millions of false starts in such basic chemistry happening around the globe every day.
Honestly we have only started to be able to produce self-replicating RNA in the lab this year (or was it last?)... It's too early to say what the odds were like back then.
wa:do
Yeah, it was this year some time, I think. It would have been earlier on.
I can remember because I was in the car, and all of a sudden, the radio was talking about a researcher at some university who claimed to have discovered a means of producing a self-replicating ribozyme (ribonucleic macromolecule with template activity). I was fascinated!
Anyway, I guess my point was, it just seems a bit unlikely that you'd have all of the purines and pyrimidines in exactly the right spot to make them bond together in the volatile conditions to begin with... but then it'd be an even greater jump to have exactly the right ones bond together to ensure that they can self replicate and maintain themselves... and it seems even more unlikely that these ribozymes would somehow find themselves chucked inside a lipid bilayer / liposome...
I can understand that it would have occured over a billion years or so, and I can understand how millions of combinations would have been happening each second... but can you see what I'm saying? It sounds just as likely that a bunch of salt would precipitate in the ocean while you're swimming there and maintain itself long enough for you to be carried out to sea. You would need everything to be in exactly the right place at the right time.
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