[shevy-java]

Yep, you are 100% correct. In fact, it is much more likely they were originating on Earth itself than a random hobo asteroid.

> The missing part is how do they form self-replicating mechanisms capable of evolution.

Well, there are some missing parts, yes, but RNA can self-replicate already; at the least some RNA can. Ribosomes also contain RNA so its is a ribozyme.

[pfdietz]

RNA can replicate in highly artificial conditions that would seem to already require life to occur.

[asdff]

https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002...

[pfdietz]

That's not replication, that's polymerization. There's nothing template-directed about it, and as far as I can tell the experiment depends on pure initial conditions (the guanosine monophosphate is not mixed with a plethora of other chemicals that could copolymerize with it.)

That purity is the kind of artificiality I was talking about. A bad habit of OoL research is to show that some chemical shows up in trace amounts, then starting the next stage of experiments with a pure batch of that chemical. Robert Shapiro in his 1986 book "Origins" had some very biting things to say about this (the book is not nice to creationists either, btw.)

[asdff]

Once you have that initial polymerization, thats it, game over, now you can template right off that.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7496532/

[pfdietz]

Again, implausible purity there. I'll add the tetramers used as the components are also much larger than the nucleotides in the Ryugu paper, so would be present in much lower concentrations.