( Worth reading article, in plain simple language – why First Living Cell theory still has unanswered questions., and was Intelligence Design still at play in First Living Cell?).
Some excerpts;
“There is an important distinction between the genetic code and the information in DNA or RNA: The genetic code is essentially the language in which the genetic information in the DNA or RNA is written. In order to evolve into the DNA/protein-based life that exists today, the RNA world would need to evolve the ability to convert genetic information into proteins. However, this process of transcription and translation requires a large suite of proteins and molecular machines — which themselves are encoded by genetic information. This poses a chicken-and-egg problem, where essential enzymes and molecular machines are needed to perform the very task that constructs them.
To appreciate the obstacle this poses to materialistic accounts of the origin of life, consider the following analogy. If you have ever watched a DVD, you know that it is rich in information. However, without the machinery of a DVD player to read the disk, process its information, and convert it into a picture and sound, the disk would be useless. But what if the instructions for building the first DVD player were only found encoded on a DVD? You could never play the DVD to learn how to build a DVD player. So how did the first disk and DVD player system arise? The answer is obvious: Intelligent agents designed both the player and the disk at the same time, and purposefully arranged the information on the disk in a language that could be read by the player.
The Proper Machinery
In the same way, genetic information could never be converted into proteins without the proper machinery. Yet the machines required for processing the genetic information in RNA or DNA are encoded by those same genetic molecules — they perform and direct the very task that builds them. This system cannot exist unless both the genetic information and transcription/translation machinery are present at the same time, and unless both speak the same language. A functional living cell therefore can’t evolve in a piecemeal fashion, but the likelihood of it arising all at once by unguided natural processes is far too low to be considered a viable model.
Biologist Frank Salisbury explained this problem in American Biology Teacher in 1971, not long after the workings of the genetic code were first uncovered:
“It’s nice to talk about replicating DNA molecules arising in a soupy sea, but in modern cells this replication requires the presence of suitable enzymes…[T]he link between DNA and the enzyme is a highly complex one, involving RNA and an enzyme for its synthesis on a DNA template; ribosomes; enzymes to activate the amino acids; and transfer-RNA molecules…How, in the absence of the final enzyme, could selection act upon DNA and all the mechanisms for replicating it? It’s as though everything must happen at once: the entire system must come into being as one unit, or it is worthless. There may well be ways out of this dilemma, but I don’t see them at the moment.3“
posted by f.sheikh