5. On the RNA-world:

There is little doubt that the RNA-world has written some of the most significant and outstanding pages of modern molecular biology - and also, quite generally, shows the importance of macromolecular evolution. However, the importance and success of the RNA-world is restricted to the field of synthetic biology, whereas it impact in the field of the origin of life it is negligible. The question “who/what made RNA?” is in fact still un-answered and, presently, no generally accepted routes to the prebiotic synthesis of mononucleotides have been described, nor their prebiotic 3’-5’ stereospecific polymerisation, let alone the question of the prebiotic synthesis of specific long RNA sequences in many identical copies. Do you agree with these statements, and in general with the point, that we have learned very little or nothing about the origin of life from the RNA-world?

There is a lot of emphasis in the RNA literature about a possible self-replicating RNA as the primary motor for the origin of life. However, when one puts chemical constraints to this view, one realizes that self-replication cannot be achieved by one single molecule (it needs at least two), and generally for any workable chemical system one needs RNA local concentrations of at least fantomoles - which still means billions of identical copies of this compounds (and larger concentrations of the mono-nucleotides). Do you agree with this statement, and with the corollary that even in such hypothetical scenario such amount of RNA can only come from an active previous cellular metabolism.