alt Hacker News> The petri dish differs from the rat differs from the human and that is a part of what makes biology harder to progress.
They all use DNA.
But I agree that nobody has shown in the lab how any of this leads to a genetic system that can self-reproduce reliably and assemble biomolecules/metabolites. This is a missing link. 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.
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>They all use DNA.
I really really recommend looking up Michael Levins bio work on intelligence at the cellular and organ level.
His most recent work is starting to touch on some pretty far out concepts. And I should note, that he does not state they are true or not, but they are attempting to make empirical methods on testing them.
One of the concepts they are looking at is "math as an actual thing" and that some simple algorithms have new deeper behaviors that we're just finding now. The hypothesis is that over the eons life has probed mathematics at scales humanity cannot even begin to imagine and is exploiting this deep algorithmic efficiency in accomplishing any number of tasks. These algorithms could help explain the missing links.
I'd suggest starting with some of his older work to see they are a credentialed research scientist and not making up 'woo' whole cloth.
The goal of the suggested "origins of life" problem, as written, isn't to guess at history - it's to create some similar plausible self-emergent system in the lab.
Seems a bit of an ambitious goal for a language model though! There are presumably dozens of steps before you get to an RNA-based full-blown cell, and it's only been very recently that humans have managed to make an artificial self-replicating "cell" (container) of any type in the lab.