> Just showing how RNA or amino acids arise, says nothing about any genetic system. They can not even answer whether RNA or DNA viruses existed first; and wheth

> Just showing how RNA or amino acids arise, says nothing about any genetic system. They can not even answer whether RNA or DNA viruses existed first; and whether these existed before organisms/cells did. Actually, we have quite a bit of evidence to evidence pointing at the order of development based on how strongly conserved some critical features of biochemistry. The core component of ribosomes (which make proteins) is made from RNA called ribozymes. Other things like RNase P, self-splicing introns, the RNA cores of the spliceosome, and the fact that most central metabolic cofactors (ATP, NAD, FAD, coenzyme A) have ribonucleotide handles points to RNA as the initial building block, before viruses or archae or prokaryotes were even born. It wasn’t until ribonucleotide reductase gets involved that RNA becomes DNA. DNA swaps uracil for thymine making the genome more error-resistant and a double helix to get stability over reactivity, as a clear evolutionary strategy because DNA doesn’t form like RNA does. The core of the RNA world hypothesis is a ton of experiments that find that RNA and amino acids are stable in many different chemical conditions which cover a wide range of what the early earth would have looked like along with observed amino acids on outer space objects like comets and asteroids. What we don’t have is an experiment demonstrating how RNA becomes self replicating with the addition of amino acids, which would be one of the last steps to showing how life likely formed.