Why are we here? It’s a question that’s puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. “Every human society has its story of how everything began,” says William Martin, who studies evolution at the University of Düsseldorf. “Scientists do, too. It’s a fundamental human need. We want to know where we belong in the bigger picture.”
One of the biggest unknowns is how the first self-replicating molecules formed. Most scientists think that RNA was the earliest macromolecule that could be acted upon by evolutionary processes, but how did it arise? “How could you create information without any previous information?” asks Ernesto di Mauro of the Università La Sapienza di Roma, who spends his days investigating this very question. “The easiest things [to ask] are the most difficult to solve,” he says. It is the paradox of the chicken and the egg: before polymerases and ribosomes existed, how were nucleic acid and proteins ...
