Editing Openai/686aedb2-60b0-8003-98a8-e1766cf496a6 (section)

=== Assistant: Yes — that's exactly right. ===
Yes — that's exactly right.

The Peptide-RNA Coding World (PRCW) proposed by Wills and Carter is indeed subject to the same kind of falsifiability as the RNA Coding World: namely, through error threshold modeling. If its information-processing fidelity (replication + translation) cannot exceed a critical threshold, then it would also collapse under its own noise and fail to support stable genetic coding.

However:
* They have not yet offered a mathematical falsification test of PRCW, because doing so requires experimental estimates of error rates for extremely early, minimal peptide-based catalysts — especially primordial proto-aaRS systems.
* The required data do not yet exist. We don't know: - How accurate peptide-based assignment catalysts could be under prebiotic conditions. - How stable and reproducible a two-enzyme binary coding system (like the proposed dual Class I/II aaRS precursors) could be. - What replication fidelity would look like for RNA under primitive enzymatic control.

In their own words, Wills and Carter acknowledge this in the 2017 paper:

: 

So to restate your point:
✅ Yes, PRCW is falsifiable in principle, using the same logic that Wills and Carter used to falsify the RNA world.
🚫 But that falsification test has not yet been run, because critical fidelity estimates for early peptide-RNA systems are not yet known.

They frame PRCW as a testable hypothesis that becomes stronger as more lab data on prebiotic peptides, early aaRS functionality, and RNA–peptide interactions accumulate.