There's a very interesting hypothesis about the origin of life that puts a primitive ribosomal assembly of amino and nucleic acids at the center. The idea is t

There's a very interesting hypothesis about the origin of life that puts a primitive ribosomal assembly of amino and nucleic acids at the center. The idea is that these amino chains and nucleic acid chains (protein and RNA) kept self-assembling until a version was created cabable of self-replication. This posits abiological generation of nucleic and amino acids and linked chains as well. Once these primitive ribosomes were capable of reproducing themselves (presumably with a very high initial mutation rate), biological evolution began. Such ribosomes would have two jobs: reproduction of nucleic acid chains, and translation of some fraction of those nucleic acid chains into protein chains. Not all the amino acids would have been used at this early stage. This is perhaps a more manageable analogy to coding than looking at something as complex as the human genome, which I think is a real error in the article (though of course humans are more interested in their own genome). It'd make more sense if the author had used one of the smaller independent bacterial genomes as the model.