Let’s face it: this is the question. Bigger than “Who will win the IPL?” Bigger than “Why does Netflix cancel shows after Season 1?” Bigger than “Why did Elon buy Twitter?”
Where the hell did life come from?
For decades, scientists thought they had it nailed. A heroic molecule appeared one sunny afternoon on a boiling, rocky Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago. It figured out how to copy itself. Just like that kid in class who photocopies homework for everyone, this molecule started the chain reaction of existence. Copying → variation → evolution → boom: mango trees, giraffes, and TikTok thirst traps.
These miracle molecules were dubbed replicators (Crick, 1968; Orgel, 1968). For a while, they strutted on stage like rockstars. The Beatles of chemistry. But, as with all rockstars, reality eventually pointed out: “Mate, you’re not that special.”
RNA World: DNA’s Mischievous Cousin
Enter RNA. Think of DNA as a dusty, uptight librarian who never leaves the archive. RNA, meanwhile, is the party cousin—part data storage, part handyman, part chemistry DJ (Gilbert, 1986).
In the swinging ’60s, Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel pitched: “Life began with RNA. First came RNA that could copy itself. Then came the rest—proteins, DNA, pizza delivery apps.”
Then in 1982, Cech and Altman found ribozymes—RNA molecules doing chemistry without supervision (Kruger et al., 1982; Guerrier-Takada et al., 1983). Boom. Nobel Prize. Case closed.
Except… it wasn’t. RNA had diva problems.
- Problem 1: It doesn’t form easily (Smith et al., 2021). You need lab setups fancier than a Michelin-starred kitchen.
- Problem 2: It falls apart faster than a celebrity marriage. UV light? Heat? Water? Poof. (Smith et al., 2021).
- Problem 3: Copying itself without errors? Forget it. Like WhatsApp rumors, mistakes spread faster than truth (Bartel & Szostak, 1993).
So maybe RNA wasn’t Beyoncé after all.
Metabolism-First: Chemistry as a Team Sport
While RNA was hogging the limelight, a German chemist named Günter Wächtershäuser had a different vibe. Maybe life started not with a clever molecule, but with messy, looping networks of chemical reactions—autocatalytic cycles (Wächtershäuser, 1988).
Picture a circle: A makes B, B makes C, C makes A again. It’s the chemical version of “Eat. Sleep. Rave. Repeat.” Toss in hydrothermal vents—those deep-sea, mineral-spewing chimneys—and you’ve got a chemical soup party (Wächtershäuser, 1990).
Team sport chemistry. No solo rockstars. Just jam sessions.
But metabolism-first had issues too. Sure, cycles can run forever. But how do they remember improvements? It’s like a factory with workers but no manager—busy, but clueless (Noller et al., 1992).
The Plot Twist: Managed Metabolism
Cue the rom-com ending: “Why not both?”
Some scientists now say metabolism and replication started separately—like rival gangs in a Bollywood film. Then, one fateful day, they teamed up (Smith et al., 2021).
Replicators brought instructions. Metabolic loops brought steady energy. Suddenly, you had a system that could:
- Eat sandwiches.
- Store instructions.
- Evolve memes.
This is the Managed Metabolism hypothesis. Think of it as a company. The metabolic loops are factory workers. The replicators are managers—sometimes incompetent, often bossy, but necessary. Together, they keep the business alive.
And Life Said “Hello, World”
This unlikely marriage was explosive. Evolution, the world’s most relentless tinkerer, started fiddling nonstop. Some partnerships worked better than others. Those survived. Membranes wrapped around them like tiny soap bubbles. Soon enough, these bubbles could copy themselves. And after billions of years of trial and error, voilà: humans arguing about pineapple on pizza.
Life, at its core, is just patterns that persist. A structure of information that stubbornly refuses to disappear, like your uncle’s conspiracy theories on Facebook.
The mystery remains. How did dumb chemistry become stubborn biology? We don’t know the full recipe yet. But one thing is certain: life is what happens when the universe decides to run a never-ending improv show with molecules as the cast.
And somehow, against all odds, the show is still running.
References:
Bartel, D. P., & Szostak, J. W. (1993). Isolation of new ribozymes from a large pool of random sequences. Science, 261(5127), 1411–1418. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7683683
Callier, V. (2025, April 10). At the dawn of life, did metabolism come first? Knowable Magazine. https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2025/evolution-of-life-metabolism-first
Crick, F. (1968). The origin of the genetic code. Journal of Molecular Biology, 38(3), 367–379.
Gilbert, W. (1986). The RNA world. Nature, 319(6055), 618. https://doi.org/10.1038/319618a0
Guerrier-Takada, C., Gardiner, K., Marsh, T., Pace, N., & Altman, S. (1983). The RNA moiety of ribonuclease P is the catalytic subunit of the enzyme. Cell, 35(3 Pt 2), 849–857.
Kruger, K., Grabowski, P. J., Zaug, A. J., Sands, J., Gottschling, D. E., & Cech, T. R. (1982). Self-splicing RNA: Autoexcision and autocyclization of the ribosomal RNA intervening sequence of Tetrahymena. Cell, 31(1), 147–157.
Lazcano, A. (2015). The RNA world and the origin of life: A short history of a tidy evolutionary narrative. BIO Web of Conferences, 4, 00013. https://doi.org/10.1051/bioconf/20150400013
Noller, H. F., Hoffarth, V., & Zimniak, L. (1992). Unusual resistance of peptidyl transferase to protein extraction procedures. Science, 256(5062), 1416–1419.
Orgel, L. E. (1968). Evolution of the genetic apparatus. Journal of Molecular Biology, 38(3), 381–393.
Smith, H. H., Hyde, A. S., Simkus, D. N., Libby, E., Maurer, S. E., Graham, H. V., Kempes, C. P., Sherwood Lollar, B., Chou, L., Ellington, A. D., Fricke, G. M., Girguis, P. R., Grefenstette, N. M., Pozarycki, C. I., House, C. H., & Johnson, S. S. (2021). The grayness of the origin of life. Life, 11(6), 498. https://doi.org/10.3390/life11060498
Wächtershäuser, G. (1988). Before enzymes and templates: Theory of surface metabolism. Microbiological Reviews, 52(4), 452–484.
Wächtershäuser, G. (1990). Evolution of the first metabolic cycles. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 87(1), 200–204.
