The June 04 issue of Discover has a lead article called "How
Life Began. What Came Before DNA" It's mostly about the
research of Jack Szostak Harvard Medical School.
Here in an open letter to Szostak are reasons I disagree
with his ideas.
You seem to be trying to evolve a ribozyme "We realized that
if we were really going to have a chance to have an RNA
replicase, we were going to have to evolve it."
Yet the best ribozyme in the world will be burned up in the
heat cycle of earth at the origin. What you should look at
is what will survive the heat cycle, and how could that
survivor be replicated with possible variants to perfect
that heat surviving technique. That is what life is. (Look
at its temp boundaries = liquid water = -100C)
Then we see that: Everything on earth is a heat survivor (or
it is burned up) Life is a heat survivor that then was
forced through the sun selection pressure, to go further and
develop a way to replicate that heat surviving code.
Every aspect of life is initiating ways to survive a heat
cycle. LIfe is the thermally stable chem. system that can
alter through descent.
Life is NOT metabolism It's a respone to a heat cycle (that
later uses that heat for work)
Life is NOT a self replicator It's an environmentally
induced denaturing annealing process forced by the heat
cycle (If it was a self replicator it could self replicate
inside the heat of the sun, or at absolute zero). The
environmentally induced replication process probably went on
for ions with time for perfecting every step.
Heat cycle using RNA would in many ways mimics the PCR
denaturing annealing cycle.
Don't look for a single short lived catalyst. Look instead
for the constant sun heat cycle that forces heat energy into
the system builds monomers, pushes selection on them forces
polymerization etc. etc. etc. etc.
Random life cannot begin in a non random heat cycle
environment.
And finally even if you develope a great ribozyme that can
survive the environment - why would it need protein? (If
protein is such a nice ad on - why doesn't water, or gold,
or silver, or rocks use it?)
Life is the echo, not the voice.