So one of the main requirements of life to come about is reproduction, and it needed a class of molecules able to reproduce, and these are the nucleic acids. Proteins can't do that. Proteins can do catalysis, proteins can do special ways of reproduction, but not inherent. You needed a class of molecules which reproduces regardless which sequence you have. Proteins can't do that job. So the proteins might have been on earth before the nucleic acids because they are the simpler... chemically the simpler structures, but they couldn't optimise, they could not start an evolutionary process while the nucleic acid could have done. And nowadays one thinks of an RNA world, one even found that nucleic acids also develop catalytic properties, RNA, ribozymes ‒ which is a word which is in analogy to enzymes but with ribonucleic acids, therefore ribozymes. So that is the...
[Q] First condition...
... first condition is you need reproduction. The second, you need erroneous reproduction. You have to make errors sometime. You have to remain below the error threshold, otherwise your information evaporates and you have... it's gone. But you couldn't bring about any evolutionary change if you don't make something new and that is... one doesn't call it error, one calls it mutation to give it a positive...
[Q] Yes, but this happens automatically because you cannot reproduce 100% accurate. So this is something automatic...
You have always thermal noise in your system, you have the building blocks are stitchy so sometimes the wrong one comes in. And later on the machinery has to refine it. The first nucleic acids of the lengths of tRNAs, seventy to hundred building blocks, they could have an error rate of percent, that's the natural chemical stability of these complexes. If you want to reproduce the genome of a man with its three billion nucleotides you need much more precise... you need an error rate small compared to 10-12, and for that you need enzymes and you need correction systems which do proofreading... and as you do with language.
