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RNA viruses do exist. After a certain length, the instability issues you point out cause problems, so usually they have a shorter genome. But I'd say that earli
by est31 6y ago
RNA viruses do exist. After a certain length, the instability issues you point out cause problems, so usually they have a shorter genome. But I'd say that earliest life forms had shorter genomes anyways. Also, not every copy has to work out. You can see that with viruses, there are viruses where errors in manufacturing render most created viruses inactive.
- pfdietz 6y agoRNA viruses exist. They exploit the highly "artificial" conditions inside living cells, where these unstable components are constantly being constructed and undesirable chemicals excluded. A primordial soup, without the precision enzymes and constant energy expenditure of this synthetic machinery, will be a grab bag of random glop. In Miller-Urey experiments the concentrations of any particular chemical decline exponentially with the number of atoms in that chemical. I believe ribose has never been seen in any such experiment (and certainly not in any but extremely low concentration), never mind the triphosphorylated nucleotides that provide the energy to drive RNA synthesis.