"Jan Philips"  wrote in message
>
> Do we know how life originated on Earth?
>
We do know that all current living things are descended from one ancestor,
and we also know that that ancestor was relatively complex.
This is because all living organisms (with a few minor exceptions) use the
same "genetic code" to translate RNA sequences into amino acids. As far as
we know, the genetic code is essentially arbitrary - life could have hit on
any sequence of RNA bases to code for any amino acid. The transfer RNA
molecules define the code, and themselves are fairly complex things. The
most recent ancestor must have had a full complement of them, and so
couldn't have come into being at a stroke, but must itself have been the
product of a long process of evolution.
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