Scientists have replicated Earth's earliest form of evolution in the lab

Scientists have been working for generations to untangle the mysteries of how life began on Earth, and one previously fringe theory just gained a lot of ground. The'RNA World' theory says that the so-called primordial soup of the early Earth was teeming with DNA's single-stranded sister RNA, which carries the instructions for sustaining life. Now, a team of researchers at The Salk Institute have unlocked a crucial piece of that puzzle and even built it in the lab: an obscure but essential class of molecules called RNA polymerase ribozymes. RNA polymerase ribozymes are not well understood, but scientists now suspect that these substances made it possible for RNA to not just replicate but actually evolve in the gel and muck of the early planet. These scatterplots show how, across multiple rounds of evolution, new RNA polymerase ribozymes emerged.