The free-living ribosome hypothesis of the origin of life seems the most likely, was introduced over a decade ago, and isn't even mentioned in this article. Th

The free-living ribosome hypothesis of the origin of life seems the most likely, was introduced over a decade ago, and isn't even mentioned in this article. The basic idea is there wasn't an RNA world or a protein world, but that abiotic genesis of nucleic acid and amino acids took place concurrently, and those entities (which may have formed short polymers) organized into various structures based on the well-known amino acid / nucleic acid association mechanisms (based on hydrogen bonding). Somehow, this proto-ribosomal-association developed the ability to self-replicate. Ribosomes today are engaged in the process of linking one amino acid to another using an mRNA template as the blueprint (and a complex association of amino-acid binding tRNAs which 'read' the mRNA template, and a suite of enzymes that correctly link tRNAs and amino acids, the critically important amino-acyl tRNA transferases.). In the origin-of-life model, the protoribosomal RNA becomes the very first functional RNA to self-replicate, but it's already associated with abiotically formed amino acids (a much smaller set than what life uses today). It's something like a virus that can self-replicate without any help from a cell. Practically, this means the earliest ribosomes must have also been RNA polymerases, an activity which later was separated into a separate entity by evolutionary processes. Even if you can make something like this in a lab [1], it doesn't really 'prove' that this is how life started, there might be multiple different routes to a living self-replicating cellular entity, but time and evolution have erased much of the evidence. As far as the origin of DNA, the main benefit is having two copies of the information which allows for error-correction, and the disadvantage is having to translate the DNA to mRNA to feed to the ribosome to make the proteins, so perhaps it took place after cellularization [1] "The Ribosome as a Missing Link in Prebiotic Evolution" Root-Bernstein & R-B https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6337102/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6337102/