Could RNA start life?

Dear Honorable members of the forumAs we know, still majority of evolutionists believe in an RNA world hypothesis. However, I have a problem in imbibing this theory. Nucleic acids are the information storage system of life. When there was no life, why did nature invent a storage system to store the information about sometning (Life) which was still not existent, and hence there was no information to store. Can we suppose the invention of a floppy disk, a CD or a pen drive before the invention of computer? Can we suppose the invention of bank before the invention of money? Similarly, when there was no lfe, there was no information about it, and hence no question to store it, and hence no question to invent an storage system to store it.regards to all
DayalanandEdited by Adminnemooseus, : Add blank lines.

Thread copied here from the Could RNA start life? thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

In the RNA world, the RNA is NOT "an information storage system". It's the life itself.

Hi dayalanand roy, welcome to the fray. Wrong.Many accept that the RNA hypothesis may be true, many are skeptical of it being true and are waiting for more information. That would appear to be a personal problem, not a scientific one. Whether or not you accept the theory of gravity has no effect at all on the behavior of gravity. Sorry but this is wrong thinking again, they are just imperfect replications of what has survived. Curiously, this should tell you that your premise regarding information storage is false, rather than this being a problem for the development of life. Again, this is poor thinking: none of these things reproduce. And yet, once replicating molecules developed, they could proceed to follow the precepts of evolution: random mutation causing differences, and natural selection allowing the ones better able to survive and reproduce, to become more dominant.Enjoy.

I don't know that. I suspect it is false. The majority are probably those who admit that there is something unknown, yet to be explained.As far as I know, there are several schools of thought about the origin of life. The two main ones seem to be "RNA first" and "metabolism first".Personally, I am not committed to either, but I think "metabolism first" the more likely of the two.

When it comes to biological life there have been no inventions. Nature invented nothing. Stuff happened. Some stuff worked and some stuff did not work.

I'm not sure I follow. Could you expand on this?How do you see metabolism happening without catalysis? How do you see catalysis happening without either enzymes or autocatalytic nucleic acids? How do you see there being enzymes before nucleic acids? If autocatalytic nucleic acids predate enzymes, isn't that "RNA first"?

Chemistry. Given the right conditions, molecules just spontaneously react on their own. Its all according to physical laws. Biology is just complex chemistry and chemistry is just complex physics. There's no inventing or thought process, shit just happens.

You are reading too much into what I said.Metabolism is a matter of chemical reactions releasing potential energy of chemical structure, and making that available as kinetic energy (producing motions). Spontaneously occurring chemical reactions do some of that.

In the same way that Nature is able to give a body of water the information it needs to form puddles that perfectly form themselves to match the shape of the depression in the ground.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

Well, yes, but how does a putative proto-organism exploit any of that without some degree of catalysis?For my own part, I can't imagine how you could have non-catalytic chemical life. But my BS is in biochemistry, so I'm already sort of primed to define life in terms of its ability to create a volume where chemical reactions are controlled to the organism's benefit. It's certainly the case that chemistry predates RNA, but in the context of "starting life" (you know, up there in the thread title) it's just not yet clear to me what you think.Metabolism is a matter of living things using enzymes to catalyze chemical reactions to exploit the change in free energy. Obviously there are many spontaneous reactions that involve a favorable free energy change, as well. But unless an organism exploits the reaction it's not a form of metabolism, and unless the organism is participating in the reaction some way, the energy can't be exploited. So I still don't understand your position. But it's interesting, I'm not trying to draw you into an argument, I'm trying to draw you into being more clear. I'd love for you to expand on your thoughts.

Sure. But, it's not an unreasonable question to ask if we subtract the notion of "purpose" and wonder - what is the selective advantage of evolving storage of enzymes as nucleic acids if enzymes haven't yet evolved? At the Bio 101 level, there's a chicken and egg problem here - organisms require proteins for catalysis, proteins can only evolve when represented by DNA (chemical changes to your proteins themselves aren't heritable), but DNA can't have evolved without proteins.The answer is the world of auto-catalytic RNA, where organisms are using and storing RNA sequences that can mutate and be inherited and exchanged, but also can be used for chemical catalysis. It's pretty good, we've discovered that cells still use RNA as both an information storage molecule and a catalytic molecule, and I've never heard a convincing alternative for how life could evolve from simple chemistry to the Central Dogma.

Perhaps you missed the "I am not committed to either" part of Message 5. I am not making any claim that all of the problems have been solved. Well, okay. If you are committed to life magically popping into existence, then we will have to agree to disagree.I take the view that life was preceded by some earlier systems which had some but not all of what we would today consider life. That allows a possible path for life to evolve out of spontaneously occurring chemistry. If you are going to insist that terms such as "metabolism" are not to be used outside of what we today consider to be life, then you are a priori excluding such a possibility of predecessors.

I didn't miss it, but you were pretty clear that you're leaning towards a position that I'm telling you, doesn't make any sense to me. Even if you were leaning away from it we'd still be talking about it because I don't see how it can even be one of the choices. I'm not committed to life "magically popping into existence", and now I wonder where you got that I was. Again, I'm simply trying to arrive at clarity about your views. How do you have metabolism without catalysis, and how do you have biological catalysis without either enzymes or ribozymes? You insist that I'm overthinking it somehow, but these all seem like stupidly obvious questions to me. I'm wondering maybe if you didn't underthink it. Life certainly evolved out of spontaneously occurring chemistry, but it wouldn't be life until the chemistry was controlled and not spontaneous. Right?Maybe I'm just not making myself clear yet. Let's try some more questions. Start with the first living thing (in your view.) Now, trace back one step to its immediate predecessor which by definition is not life, so let's call it the "last proto-life." What kind of chemistry does the last proto-life do, and how does it do it?

Hi crashfrog & nwr Both replication and metabolism -- replication needs raw materials being consumed to make the next (imperfect) copy. This would likely be enclosed in a lipid shell, so we have a ways to go before getting back to the "first" system\aspect of life. Why? There could be whole slews of different chemical systems, and what we call life could come from one and then dominate\consume all others.Edited by RAZD, : added