How chemistry produced the first evolving replicator
In plain words
Somewhere between simple molecules and the first cell, a chemical system began copying itself with variations that natural selection could act on. Which physical and chemical steps achieved this is unknown.
Precise statement
Identify a sequence of chemically and geologically plausible steps, with rates under stated early-Earth conditions (temperature, pH, mineral surfaces, wet-dry cycles), that takes a mixture of small prebiotic molecules to a population of informational polymers that replicate with heritable variation and undergo Darwinian selection. A complete answer specifies each step and demonstrates the chain in the laboratory or in a quantitative model with measured rate constants.
What would settle it
A laboratory demonstration, starting from prebiotic feedstocks, of a polymer population that replicates and adapts under selection without enzymes from modern life.
Related problems
- More general than Escape from Eigen's paradox for prebiotic genomes
- More general than Sustained exponential self-replication by a polymerase ribozyme
- More general than Separating copied RNA strands for repeated nonenzymatic copying