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Scientists May Have Found How Life Began - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News - FOXNews.com
While this may be controversial among a number of people, it's still very interesting regardless. The publication can be read in the latest issue of Nature or online here: Access : Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions : Nature
I personally believe that faith is different from science, and those who believe can certainly point to their Creator as the ultimate cause for all this. This is certainly no 'smoking gun' against any religious belief, and hopefully will not be taken as an attack against those who are devout.
British scientists said on Wednesday that they had figured out key steps in the process by which life on Earth may have emerged from a seething soup of simple chemicals, according to Agence France-Presse.
Genetic information in living organisms today is held in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the famous "double helix" molecule of sugar, phosphate and a base.
But DNA is too sophisticated to have popped up in an instant, and one avenue of thought says its single-stranded cousin, ribonucleic acid, or RNA, came first.
RNA plays a key role in making proteins and, in viruses, is used to store genetic code.
It is chemically similar to DNA but is simpler and tougher in structure, and thus looks like a good candidate for Earth's first information-coding nucleic acid.
But for all its allure, the "RNA first" theory has run into practical problems.
Now a paper published in the British journal Nature by University of Manchester chemists, led by Professor John Sutherland, ventures that an RNA-like synthesis took place through a series of chemical reactions and an important intermediate substance.
While this may be controversial among a number of people, it's still very interesting regardless. The publication can be read in the latest issue of Nature or online here: Access : Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions : Nature
I personally believe that faith is different from science, and those who believe can certainly point to their Creator as the ultimate cause for all this. This is certainly no 'smoking gun' against any religious belief, and hopefully will not be taken as an attack against those who are devout.