<story><title>Algorithm discovers how six molecules could evolve into life’s building blocks</title><url>https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/algorithm-discovers-how-six-simple-molecules-could-evolve-into-lifes-building-blocks/4012505.article</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sthnblllII</author><text>The big question isn&amp;#x27;t how simple molecules (building blocks) come about. The big question is how these building blocks organized themselves into the complex structure of even the most primitive microbes.&lt;p&gt;Every new form of life tends to fill successively smaller niches. There are more prokaryotes than eucaryotes, more singe celled than multi celled etc. but there is nothing in between the primordial chemical soup and the simplest life forms. I would expect a huge mass of simple RNA based life forms simpler than prokaryotes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonplackett</author><text>I remember reading about what it’s actually like inside a cell - that it’s not the smooth and organised world you see in biology animations. It’s a mess of molecules moving around at hundreds of miles an hour.&lt;p&gt;That’s what life is inside all our cells. Just a bunch of molecules bashing around randomly but because it’s all the right ingredients in there, the right things find each other and fit together and somehow it still works.</text></comment>
<story><title>Algorithm discovers how six molecules could evolve into life’s building blocks</title><url>https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/algorithm-discovers-how-six-simple-molecules-could-evolve-into-lifes-building-blocks/4012505.article</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sthnblllII</author><text>The big question isn&amp;#x27;t how simple molecules (building blocks) come about. The big question is how these building blocks organized themselves into the complex structure of even the most primitive microbes.&lt;p&gt;Every new form of life tends to fill successively smaller niches. There are more prokaryotes than eucaryotes, more singe celled than multi celled etc. but there is nothing in between the primordial chemical soup and the simplest life forms. I would expect a huge mass of simple RNA based life forms simpler than prokaryotes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yes_man</author><text>Conway&amp;#x27;s game of life shows how small building blocks randomly create giant crazy complicated formations that have the capability to do astonishing things, like replicate themselves in an organized way. Kind of implying that logically functional structures arise from randomness given enough time. The rules in Conway&amp;#x27;s game of life are simpler than real world physics, but it is enough to convince me that in a reasonable time frame (Earth&amp;#x27;s timeline), given enough building blocks and iterations, there&amp;#x27;s not really any reason to not assume the chemical building blocks of life happened to create all sorts of complicated structures that constantly failed to replicate or survive.&lt;p&gt;On Earth, there was a lot of primordial soup, and there were a lot of chemical reactions. On a span of millions of years, complex data structures (such as RNA) may have occurred constantly somewhere on the planet. Every now and then, a cell randomly formed. Sometimes prokaryotes with RNA formed, like weird things in Conway&amp;#x27;s game of life. And then maybe once upon a time, a cell with just the right RNA to make it be able to reproduce in the ooze formed.&lt;p&gt;That or life on Earth is panspermic and we have skipped the pre-prokaryotic evolution altogether</text></comment>