Evolution Preceded Life Itself

Two Harvard biologists have shown that a rudimentary form of natural selection acting on the chemicals present in Earth's prebiotic primordial soup preceded the origin of life itself and probably made the origin of life more likely to occur.

According to New Scientist:

"To examine how this might occur, Martin Nowak and Hisashi Ohtsuki, mathematical biologists at Harvard University, used simple equations to model the growth of such chains of building-blocks.

The model shows that because longer chains require more assembly reactions, they should be much less common than short chains. And if some assembly reactions run
faster than others, then chains built from these fast-assembling sequences of building blocks grow to be most abundant."

In such a system, molecules might form that have attributes tending to make them more likely to make copies of themselves. The prebioltic selection posited by the Harvard scientists would ensure that the molecules that most efficiently made copies of themselves became more common. As New Scientist explains:

"At some point, Nowak's model predicts, the best replicator may get fast and accurate enough to dominate the population, sucking up all the resources and driving all the other prebiotic sequences extinct. This is the threshold of life."

In other words, life destroys what preceded it.