How does RNA self replicate? Has this been achieved artificially?

Question

chas_chas_123:

"Just like everytime I open my cupboard door I find amazing new machines have been busy evolving."

Evolution takes thousands of millions of years. The fact that there aren't machines in your cupboard hardley disproves evolution.

"Take a reality check, and don't accept everything that evolutionists tell us, without questioning it and testing it against observed scientific principles."

I don't, there are mountains of research in the public domain, and people are free to do their own experiments... and they have.. millions of times!- look it up. People try to disprove it every single day, but it withstands every single test, why?- Because it is true!

"The origin of life is only a mystery to those who willfully deny that creation requires a Creator."- We grow closer and closer to recreating the origins of life all the time. There is no need for a creator to intervene if the phenomenom is proven to occur naturally.

Answer 1

In present living things, RNA does not directly self replicate. DNA replicates. Retroviruses, which have an RNA genome, reproduce by "reverse transcription" to DNA, which is what is actually replicated.

RNA self-copying and evolution has been achieved many times in the lab: do a Google search on Gerald Joyce RNA (he is probably the world expert in this field).  For example,

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1...

Regarding origins of life, RNA is so complicated that there must have been a number of previous stages.

The earlier answer is good, but the website referred to is an "intelligent design" Trojan horse, incorrectly claiming that there are thermodynamic arguments against the spontaneous emergence of life.  If you want a good readable account of current thinking, I recommend "Gen-e-sis" (no relative of the Bronze Age document), by Robert Hazen.

Answer 2

Conceptually RNA should be able to self replicate without the help of proteins.  The original strand serves as a template. New base pairs arrive and form weak bonds with their complement. A can form a bond with U, and G can form a bond with C. After one replication, two complementary strands exist. Another round of replication is necessary to duplicate the original strand. The complement to the original strand is also free to make more copies. While this is still the most promising theory for life's origin, this theory seems to offer more problems than solutions. This is why the origin of life remains a mystery.

Discussed in this link - http://www.theory-of-evolution.net/chap1...

Answer 3

RNA does not self-replicate.

Of course all this amazing complexity just happened to arise out of nothing. Just like everytime I open my cupboard door I find amazing new machines have been busy evolving.

Take a reality check, and don't accept everything that evolutionists tell us, without questioning it and testing it against observed scientific principles. Information does not arise out of disorder. Information implies intelligence. Regardless of evolutionary bluster.

The origin of life is only a mystery to those who willfully deny that creation requires a Creator.

Check out this article.

http://creationontheweb.com/content/view...

here is an extract:

Separating the double helix

For replication, the two strands must be separated so a copy can be made. The strands are separated by a molecular motor called helicase. This is a ring-shaped molecule that lies on the replication fork, where the two strands separate. Helicase pulls one strand through its hole, while the other strand is shuttled away.5

Helicase also doesn’t need to wait passively for the fork to widen; rather, researchers from Cornell University showed that it opens the fork actively.6 One of them, Michelle Wang, said, ‘Basically, it is an active unwinding motor.’7 However, the unwinding is much faster in cells than in the test tube, so Dr Wang suggested, ‘accessory proteins are helping the helicase out by destabilizing the fork junction.’

Since replication is vital for life, helicases are vital to all living organisms. Dr Wang’s colleague Smita Patel pointed out also, ‘Helicases are involved in practically all DNA and RNA metabolic processes’. Further, as Dr Patel explained, ‘Defects in helicases are associated with many human diseases, ranging from predisposition to cancer to premature aging.’ So the origin of such elaborate machinery and the energy source is just one more problem for chemical evolution to solve.