Whodda thunkit!
“What they have found is that the molecules necessary for life are found exclusively within cells that are already living.”
Exclusively?
From “Darwin’s Ghost” by Steve Jones, I have ... (on page 208) ...
“A few discoveries from an unknown land prove that biology’s supposed preface, the Cambrian, is in fact well into its plot. So deficient was the evidence of earlier times that nobody guessed it was there. Single-celled creatures stretch back even further. The balance of isotopes in carbon trapped in Greenland rocks three thousand eight hundred million years old resembles that of the modern bacteria that live on methane. They evolved when earth was in its infancy and show that it took several times longer to develop a cell with a nucleus than it did for life to appear. Chemistry hints three billion year’s worth of fossils older than the Chinese seaweed are waiting to be discovered.”