via: Reasons to Believe

New Research Rescues RNA World Scenario for Origin of Life, Or Does It?

Sometimes bad things happen in life and the best we can do is pick up the pieces and move on. Recently a team of Italian biochemists did just that, literally.

These researchers claimed to have discovered a solution to a serious problem confronting the RNA world hypothesis, one of the leading evolutionary explanations for the origin of life. They demonstrated a conceivable way that small pieces of RNA could combine to form larger RNA molecules, a necessary step if the RNA world hypothesis is to account for life’s start. From their perspective this advance allows origin-of-life researchers to continue to build a case for the RNA world model.

Ironically, instead of supporting the evolutionary paradigm, this new work actually exposes fundamental problems with the RNA world hypothesis. When the details of the experiments are evaluated with the conditions of the early Earth in mind, the results undermine the model.

Steps to the Origin of Life

From a naturalistic perspective, the emergence of large, complex information-rich molecules is vital to life’s beginning. In contemporary living systems these molecules include proteins, DNA, and RNA, which are collectively responsible for directing and carrying out life’s most basic and central activities.

Proteins serve as the workhorse molecules of life. They play key roles in virtually every cellular function and help form nearly every cellular structure. Even the simplest life-form requires around 2,000 different types of proteins (which often occur as multiple copies) to exist as a free-living, independent organism. The cell’s machinery uses information housed in DNA to make proteins.

DNA has one other property critical for life: the ability to direct its own replication. This characteristic, called self-replication, allows the information needed to guide the cell’s activities to be transmitted to the next generation via cell division. Continue reading . . .