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

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===== - Chemistry of the building blocks – ''closer''.  Powner’s network chemistry and follow-on work have reduced the “clutter” objection. Subsequent studies now give one-pot purine + pyrimidine ribonucleotides at useful scale pubs.acs.org<ref>{{cite web|title=pubs.acs.org|url=https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.1c07403|publisher=pubs.acs.org|access-date=2025-11-16}}</ref> and have shown that selective crystallisation or evaporation can enrich biologically relevant stereochemistry. =====
'' Information & coding – ''further away* (at least for a pure RNA scenario).  Wills & Carter’s modelling claims a fatal instability for an RNA-only coding world; no published rebuttal has dismantled their maths. Until someone demonstrates a ribozyme that replicates itself and its error-rate stays below the Eigen threshold, that critique stands.
* Bridging chemistry to genetics – still unbridged.  No paper in this trio delivers a self-sustaining polymer system that copies sequence information with adequate fidelity, nor any encoder-code-decoder triad.

Net effect:  the path to abiogenesis looks narrower if you insist on RNA-only coding, but slightly wider if you permit early peptide-RNA cooperation. The overall hypothesis of life from chemistry has gained empirical footing on the feed-stock-to-monomer end, yet the monomer-to-genome leap remains speculative.

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No paper to date demonstrates:
* a self-replicating genetic polymer system with error-rates below the threshold, and
* a coupled translation apparatus that turns sequence into catalysis.

Until those appear, the central information gap that Bernhardt conceded—and Wills & Carter spotlighted—remains.

===== - Building-block chemistry: convincingly closer. =====
* Origin of a coded information system: still beyond current experiment; for a pure RNA world arguably less plausible after Wills & Carter.
* Overall abiogenesis hypothesis: inching forward on the chemistry front, but its most difficult hurdle—the spontaneous rise of a low-error, tri-partite genetic system—has not been cleared.

If one’s bar for “plausible” is demonstrated lab pathway all the way to Darwinian evolution, we are not there. If the bar is steady empirical erosion of individual obstacles, progress is real but uneven.

====== 1. High-fidelity non-enzymatic RNA replication experiments now underway in microfluidic thermal-gradient setups. ======
# Direct peptide-mediated amino-acid charging assays aimed at measuring primordial aaRS error rates (needed to test PRCW).
# Geological-scale cycling reactors (UV, wet-dry) being run for months rather than days, probing longevity and coupling of reaction networks.

Those results—not rhetoric—will tell us whether the chemical pathway to life is truly within reach.