Could you show me that preponderance of evidence for these two assertions?
It's difficult to show evidence from a field that is spread across several journals and many fields, but I can point you to a few places to start.
There have been some papers over the past twenty years by Woese etal (one of which is Woese, C, The Universal Ancestor, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 95, 6854-6859 (1998)). He provides a decent overview in 6 pages as anyone can of the period after the first self-replicating molecule.
There is another paper by Woese just last year, also in the PNAS that should be a good start. On the evolution of cells, Vol 99 p 8742, 2002. When you've read those papers, and the references there in, let me know and we can have a talk.