How are self-replicating molecules, such as RNA molecules in the “RNA World” hypothesis, essential to the most popular hypotheses about the origin of life on Earth?
Be as basic as possible

Question

anonymous · Answer

You can only get so basic with a topic like that.
Basically it is thought that RNA came first then DNA in an evolutionary perspective.

anonymous · Answer

Once DNA came in the picture it started telling everyone else what to do and soon came the first prokaryote and then more complex eukaryote. So RNA was first. That is about as basic as you can get for that explanation.

anonymous · Answer

16-year-old critique for the curious http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od171/rnaworld171.htm

anonymous · Answer

rna acted as repository of information for eg:16s rrna is a well conserved sequence...so for evolutionary studies 16 srrna is the major part studied...and rna can act as catalyst for biologically significant reactions .there is a hypothesis that rna like trna, rrna are cleaved  from precursors that are formed from non coding sequences of dna. study about the "abiotic formation of bio molecules" experiment by miller and urey ...u can understand the importance of rna in the formation of the simple bio molecules like amino acids, HCN, etc..