Is there really information being conveyed within a cell?

[Dan_Eastwood]

I am promoting @Nesslig20 comment to a new topic; it’s too good to be buried 250+ comments deep in discussion.

RNA World Update

The fact that ribosomes are transcribed from DNA doesn’t mean it isn’t evidence for the RNA world hypothesis. You seem to confuse evidence with proof. That the ribosome is a ribozyme doesn’t prove the RNA world hypothesis, but it’s central roles in translation (not just that peptidyl transferase is a ribozyme) are best explained as byproducts of an earlier stage in life’s evolution where RNA served much more central roles in replication and catalysis. Indeed, also the fact that the PTC (and rRNA in general) is produced in a manner that relies on DNA as the template, that doesn’t imply that DNA was always the template for rRNA. We already know that DNA isn’t the only thing that can serve as a template for RNA. RNA can be a template for itself. As pointed out before, non-reverse transcribing RNA viruses (Baltimore groups III, IV, and V) do this all the time. The RNA strands of their genomes act both as mRNAs to make viral proteins, such as RdRps, AND these strands also act as templa…