ABSTRACT
It is difficult to figure out precisely what molecules may have been present at origins. The advent of catalysis would have enriched the chemical diversity of the primordial World by transforming avail able precursors into products that would themselves be reactants or catalysts for other reactions, ultimately forming autocatalytic cycles. However, the availability of catalysts would have to some extent been limited by the availability of raw materials and the eventual degrada tion of the catalysts themselves. Maintaining chemical diversity would have been extremely difficult under such a regime, as establishing a cycle and acquiring new catalysts would have been at the mercy of quite random fluctuations in the environment. One solution to this problem would have been the development of a system of information storage in which blueprints for the construction of useful catalysts were encoded. Given that DNA and RNA serve this function in modern biology, that phylogenetic data suggests these compounds are quite ancient and that the building blocks of nucleic acids were likely present in the primordial soup, information storage by nucleic acid polymers and subsequent propagation of this information into useful catalysts would have conferred a vast evolutionary advantage on early genomes and the organisms that harbored these genomes. More importandy, the genetic system could have mutated, been selected and led to adaptation to differing environments.
