There are people at UCL, Ian Crawford, who's doing a great deal for , but it's not something which is happening through my department. It's happening… - Nick Lane

[B]iochemical pathways that produce the basic building blocks of life are... conserved across practically all cells.

The is riddled with redundancy.

Life as we know it has both, and the people who say s first are in effect saying, "Well, there's plenty of s, there's plenty of RNA. The environment's providing it for free," without worrying themselves too much about what kind of an environment is going to provide all of that for free, and by definition, an environment which is effectively metabolically sophisticated enough to provide s is non-living and therefore not part of the question, so they're just pushing it aside. I would say that the whole metabolic side is needed to give rise to genetic information and nucleotides in an RNA world in the first place, that it would be a dirty RNA world contaminated with s and s, and s and things...