Completing the Abiogenesis jigsaw

I noticed this little story yesterday, on the surface it doesn't look like much but when you read the detail you quickly realise that this line of enquiry has the potential to fill in a hugely important piece of the abiogenesis puzzle. Abiogenesis is the branch of science that concerns itself with working out how life could have emerged from inorganic matter 4 billion years ago. It is distinct from Evolution which concerns itself with how life evolved via natural selection from simple forms to present day, something that I often find people are confused about.

You can read the full story here.

This seemingly impossible task inched a step closer toward a potential solution with this discovery that RNA molecules could be created via a set of straightforward chemical steps that given the right conditions could have occurred in nature spontaneously. RNA is a very important chemical, it is a close relative of the DNA molecule, in fact some viruses have RNA instead of DNA as their main information carrying molecule.

Here's an exert from the article.

Scientists have long suspected that the first forms of life carried their biological information not in DNA but in RNA, its close chemical cousin. Though DNA is better known because of its storage of genetic information, RNA performs many of the trickiest operations in living cells. RNA seems to have delegated the chore of data storage to the chemically more stable DNA eons ago. If the first forms of life were based on RNA, then the issue is to explain how the first RNA molecules were formed.

This discovery could finally close the loop in terms of explaining, soup to nuts, how we got here and why we are like we are, and some people still say that science can't answer the "big questions".