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 =
0-100C)

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.
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