Hungarian research might help understand the origin of life

An article was published summarising the theoretical evolutionary biology research of Hungarian scientists in one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals in the world, Nature Review Chemistry.

One of the most exciting questions of biology and humankind that even has implications beyond natural sciences is how life started; in the words of Albert Szentgyörgyi, “the living state of matter”, 24 reports. It is generally very hard to reconstruct the events that took place about two and a half billion years ago because there are no fossils that survived and there are no traces of early life forms left.

The most important thing in the search of how inanimate materials suddenly became living organisms is the theory of evolution, which plays an important role not only in biological but also in complex chemical systems;

the structures that better adapted to a given environment and could reproduce themselves faster survived.

RNA molecules were probably among the most important elements in the emergence of life. These DNA-like molecules, which still play an important role in almost every organism today, are easy to copy and thus they reproduce. This means that Darwinian evolution theory is already operational in the population of RNA molecules.

With the increase of chemical complexity driven by evolution, highly complex chemical systems emerged, which could easily be called ‘living’. This is the process which leads from chemical to biological evolution, and this is how life appeared on Earth.