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.
Well, here is what Woese has to say about RNA world.
| Power shortage Evolutionary biologist Carl Woese of the University of Illinois says the genetic evidence contradicts the RNA world theory. And if that weren't bad enough, he also argues that the RNA world scenario is fatally flawed because it fails to explain where the energy came from to fuel the production of the first RNA molecules, or the copies that would be needed to keep the whole thing going. In test-tube RNA worlds, the elongating RNA molecules are fed artificially "activated" nucleotides, boosted with their own tri-phosphate bond to ensure that they come with an energy supply. In nature, such molecules only exist inside cells, and they have never been created in a Miller-type experiment. "The RNA world advocates view the soup as a battery, charged up and ready to go," Woese complains. On the primordial Earth, that energy had to come from somewhere, and it had to be coupled to production, or else it would quickly disappear into the ether. In Woese's view, the critical step that ultimately spawned life was not a few stray RNA molecules, but the emergence of a biochemical machine that transformed energy into a form that was instantly available for the production of organic molecules. |