Frozen Evolution. Or, that’s not the way it is, Mr. Darwin. A Farewell to Selfish Gene.

In Chapter I, we have already demonstrated that systems capable of participating in biological evolution must exhibit certain general properties, including the ability to reproduce, variability and heredity.It is not a simple matter to imagine how systems that exhibit all these basic properties, which are essential for biological evolution, could have been formed from simple chemical components formed during chemical evolution through an abiotic route.

            All present-day organisms are based on the same functional principle, the principle of coexistence of nucleic acids and proteins.Nucleic acids store and accumulate genetic information and provide a material vehicle for its vertical transfer between subsequent generations of organisms.This information consists mainly of instructions for the synthesis of proteins.Proteins basically perform, directly or indirectly, all the biological functions of the organism, including those that are necessary for copying the information encoded in the nucleic acids and for their translation into the aminoacid sequence in the proteins.Even the simplest system that is capable of ensuring similar cooperation between nucleic acids and proteins is so complicated that it is very difficult to imagine that it could be formed by random combination of nonliving components.Thus, it is almost certain that the original living systems must have looked very different than contemporary living systems.