Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life

Obviously, any RNA or DNA molecule can serve as a template for the polymerization of another nucleic acid molecule.

However the polymerization cannot proceed spontaneously. The nucleotides polymerize by condensation, i.e. by releasing water.

It should be obvious that such a reaction cannot be spontaneous when the molecules are already surrounded by water. You need some molecule able to extract the water from the nucleotides, for example an acid anhydride, like ATP.

That anhydride must have also been produced by water extraction and in the water environment you need an energy source for that.

So if you will complete the analysis you will reach the conclusion that you need an existing living being for the replication, no replication can occur otherwise.

Obviously, in a lab you can yourself substitute the role of that living being, by providing adequate supplies of monomers and of energy sources, so you can replicate nucleic acids in abiotic conditions. Nevertheless, that could not happen in natural conditions.

For example we know for sure that all the chemical reactions required to assemble the components of a living being required the same amount of energy then as they require now, so either there was a source of energy large enough to enable them, or they were impossible.

Other things may not be completely certain, but they are overwhelmingly plausible, for example if we know that the transition from a more primitive structure to a more complex structure required 5 improbable mutations, we can be pretty sure that there is no chance that all those changes happened simultaneously, but they must have happened in a certain sequence, one by one.

If moreover, there are some causal links between those events, so that some of them cannot happen unless others already happened, then we may be able to determine which was the sequence of those 5 events, with considerable certainty.

While we are unable yet to estimate confidently which of many possible things really happened in the distant past, we can actually exclude with great certainty many other things, about which we can say for sure that they did not happen, because they contradict fundamental laws, like the conservation of energy.

Among these things that certainly did not happen are some previously popular theories about the origin of life, whose authors did not attempt to analyze them in enough detail to see if they are compatible with the known chemistry and physics, e.g. the ancient theory of the "organic soup" or the more recent theory of the "RNA world".

The 3 requirements that I have listed do not contain any analogy, they just give a precise expression of the conventional meaning of the words "genetic material" as applied to a component of the living beings, now known to consist of nucleic acids for the life on Earth.

While not all biologists would be able to define precisely what they mean by "genetic material", the listed requirements correspond to the actual use of the word, in the most general sense.