Chicken or The Egg

[TFMF]

Life - without life there is nothing that can be evolved

[angree]

birds evolved from the reptiles (or had common ancestor) so it would be the egg :P (reptiles lay eggs)

[angree]

btw are you trying to create another feedback loop in doctor's holomatrix? ;p

[xtremeskiing]

So what came first, metabolism, the proverbial chicken or the means to store and replicate to information to metabolise.

 

Lets look at the scenario. We are comparing a primitive closed system, a mycelle of fatty acids with some low level organic molecules trapped inside. To what is most likely RNA. Considering the spontanious formation of fatty acids is far more probable then the formation of nucleotides I will have to say the chicken came first. While my look on this picture is that the necessary componants of both the chicken and the egg formed together. However, a functional organic mycelle probably formed one day trapping an inactive and useless RNA molecule. It took many random attempts of this till a translation matrix formed in this cell which would have to had simontanously happened with the RNA mutating to something legible. The RNA, now containing useful heritable traits self replicated, as RNA does regardless of what it codes for, eventually coding for the entire functional aspect of this new Cell. At this moment our egg formed, but for millions of years nature was probably already playing with the metabolic funtiions within. At some point down the road, one of these cells mutated to code for a primitive Reverse Transcriptase, forming the double stranded helical DNA that we traditionally represent now as the Egg.

 

Possibility two - capsule proteins amazingly formed without assistence from a metabolic body. This protein capsule trapped a molecule of RNA forming the first retrovirus. Regardless of what some experts say, virii is alive, and even if it did not a host to invade yet, it was still there first, again...the chicken.

 

Ockham's Razor says - stick with possibility 1, complex proteins do not form spontainously.

[TFMF]

Now it's just getting silly - entering MosEisley territory here :)