I thought this was interesting:
Basically, we've understood DNA very well for years as the 'computer code' that replicates itself and, thus, allows life to continue on Earth. We also knew that DNA is too complicated to have been the code for very early replications, and we suspected that RNA (which today helps DNA work within us) had performed that function in the very distant past; but even RNA is too complicated to have been there at the beginning. Biologists postulated that a very basic chemical with the unusual ability to replicate itself must have existed, and they even made it artificially, calling it AEG.
Now AEG has been discovered to exist in nature, as a component of cyano-bacteria (foul scum on water).
I'm not sure that it pushes the BBC's problems down the pile, but it's not bad...
Basically, we've understood DNA very well for years as the 'computer code' that replicates itself and, thus, allows life to continue on Earth. We also knew that DNA is too complicated to have been the code for very early replications, and we suspected that RNA (which today helps DNA work within us) had performed that function in the very distant past; but even RNA is too complicated to have been there at the beginning. Biologists postulated that a very basic chemical with the unusual ability to replicate itself must have existed, and they even made it artificially, calling it AEG.
Now AEG has been discovered to exist in nature, as a component of cyano-bacteria (foul scum on water).
I'm not sure that it pushes the BBC's problems down the pile, but it's not bad...
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