alt Hacker NewsWhen I read about self-replicating RNA I always think about the equivalent in the protein world, the prions. One can make many parallelisms with these scary proteins, responsible of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Of course, the are too many limitations for evolving into some more complex, but they can self-replicate and they can infect other organisms. If we could give them an oceanic soup of PrPC and enough time, who knows?
Prion "replication" seems rather different from self-replicating RNA.
Isn't the building block that a prion requires to create a copy of itself essentially a chemically almost-identical protein that is just folded differently?
How about an alternative analogy of the prion folding pattern spreading through chemically-similar molecules like a meme through a population of similarly conditioned brains?