"TomHendricks474"  wrote in message
news:c5vgi0$ec$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> << Maybe circa 3.8 billion years ago, but any record of such early
> principles-in-action has been entirely overprinted by subsequent life.
>
> It's romantic to think that, within some relict "microbial Galapagos"
there
> may still exist some primordial population of cells with only catalytic,
> self-replicating RNA's to do their tricks with...
>
>
> TH
> No no no no no. Stop right there. First tell me
> why it has to be SELF replicating?
> Would an environmentally induced replication
> through heat that lasted for a million years not
> work? IMO that was what happened - the self
> part was a late edition.
>
> A post of mine today talks of a paper that talks about
> this very thing - an environment cycle pushes
> a PCR type replication on paired RNA.
>
> Dump the self in self replication - replace
> it with environmental replication, then we can
> talk.
>
> And PS, an environmentally induced replication,
> can be recreated without ribozymes.

I was simply doing top-down postulating (that is, from the present
backwards) about a hypothetical RNA world.  I'd certainly agree with you if
you are wanting to push the envelope of speculation back even earlier;
there's nothing new or far-fetched about your arguments.
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