Rob Stadler News Today

Rob Stadler and Eric Anderson examine a recent paper on the origin of life, “An RNA Polymerase Ribozyme that Synthesizes Its Own Ancestor.”

By RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com, originally filed January 5, 2015

“It’s easy to say things that aren’t true and get people to believe them, especially when they sound science-y and are mixed in with well-known facts.”

Without foresight to solve heterochiral incidents, a primordial cell would quickly perish even if, against all odds, it began homochiral.

What about reports of a radiotrophic fungus near the Chernobyl nuclear accident that can feed off radiation?

This isn’t the sort of hurdle that mindless natural processes can overcome, but it is precisely the sort of problem that a designing mind could solve.

We address the following hypothesis: If purely natural processes produced the first living organism, such processes must have conveniently strung together perfect sequences of monomers (i.e., the basic building blocks of life: amino acids,...