ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to develop the Ribotype theory of the Origins. In the Ribotype theory, the critical role is attributed to the ancestors of the ribosomes, not to the ancestors of the genes. The relationship between genotype, ribotype and phenotype cannot coincide therefore with the flow of biological information of the Central Dogma, and it will be shown later that it has indeed a more general nature. Like many other models on precellular evolution, the ribotype theory starts from the hypothesis that various types of organic molecules were formed spontaneously in the solutions of the primitive earth. When a true replication strategy replaced the old mechanism, readjustments were only too natural and the ancestral ribotypes could have been streamlined in various ways. A distinctive characteristic of the ribotype theory is a link between what happened before and after the origin of the cell, a continuum between precellular and cellular evolution.
