Did Life Begin in an RNA World?

(quantamagazine.org)

12 points | by acossta 2 days ago

1 comments

  • zmgsabst 0 minutes ago
    I don’t understand the objections:

    Most mutations are negative dead-ends, not unlikely DNA now where most pregnancies spontaneously abort due to errors. But life has many, many chances — especially at the molecular scale. So what’s the actual problem?

    Similarly, if you have a soup of 10-15 nucleotide sequences, what are the odds actually that they’d link into larger segments?

    Let’s suppose that density is a million times lower than blood, so you have one picogram per gram of water. There are 10^24 grams of water on Earth’s surface and 10 base pairs weighs 10^-20 grams, giving us approximately 10^32 segments of that length.

    Feel free to play with my numbers, but I’m supposed to believe that with 10^30+ pieces, we can’t have ten of them form the right sequence?