The part I can never figure out is how do you get the entire mechanism required to self-replicate, which is not just a couple molecules, to get to the point whe

The part I can never figure out is how do you get the entire mechanism required to self-replicate, which is not just a couple molecules, to get to the point where it actually does what it "was intended" to do? Meaning, what is 1/4 of that system? At some point, it had to start evolving towards the end result, but the in-between stages would give no survival advantage and likely useless. So why are they starting to form a self-replicating mechanism? It's not like it knows it needs to try to hang onto these currently useless parts because one day after enough generations it'll turn into its "final form" and be amazing. And obviously the entire mechanism required to self replicate doesn't just come into existence randomly at some point and "just works". There must have be many, many years of some sort of "work in progress". I can't fit that into the theory of evolution at all. Yet here we are. I ran it by GPT-4 and it doesn't know either. Gave some theories, but ended it as expected. > The precise mechanisms by which self-replicating mechanisms emerge and evolve are still not fully understood, and it remains an active area of research in the fields of biology, evolution, and artificial life.