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A majority of evolutionary biologists believe that we now can envision our biological predecessors—not the first, but nearly the first, living beings on Earth. Life from an RNA World is about these vanished forebears, sketching them in the distant past just as their workings first began to resemble our own. The advances that have made such a pursuit possible are rarely discussed outside of bio-labs. So here, says author Michael Yarus, is an album for interested non-biologists, an introduction to our relatives in deep time, slouching between the first rudimentary life on Earth and the appearance of more complex beings.

 

The era between, and the focus of Yarus’ work, is called the RNA world. It is RNA (ribonucleic acid) long believed to be a mere biologic copier and messenger, that offers us this glimpse into our ancient predecessors. To describe early RNA creatures, here called “ribocytes” or RNA cells, Yarus deploys some basics of molecular biology. He reviews our current understanding of the tree of life, examines the structure of RNA itself, explains the operation of the genetic code, and covers much else—all in an effort to reveal a departed biological world across billions of years between its heyday and ours.

 

Courting controversy among those who question the role of “ribocytes”—citing the chemical fragility of RNA and the uncertainty about the origin of an RNA synthetic apparatus—Yarus offers an invaluable vision of early life on Earth. And his book makes that early form of life, our ancestor within, accessible to all of us.

* Introduction to Your Ancestor

 

1. Before We Begin: A Voluntary Chapter

2. Framing the Problem: The Buffalo and the Bacterium

3. The Big Tree: No Jackalopes Please

4. A Dance of Atoms

5. Allegro Agitato: The Origin of Life

6. The Winds That Blow through the Starry Ways

7. Tornados in a Junkyard

8. Between Genomes and Creatures

9. A Thumbnail Molecular Biology

10. RNA Structure: A Tape with a Shape

11. Intimations of an RNA World

12. The Experimentally Impaired Sciences

13. Test Tube RNA Evolution: First Light

14. Selection Amplification: Interrogating RNA’s Possibilities

15. RNA Duplication: Replicase Activity in Real RNAs

16. RNA Capabilities and the Origins of Translation

17. The Quest for the Peptidyl Transferase

18. A Language Much Older Than Hieroglyphics: The Genetic Code

19. Assume a Spherical Cow: The Ribocyte

20. The Future of the RNA World

 

* Lexicon

* Index