Self-starter: Life got going all on its own

"In the beginning there were Ida and Luca. The initial Darwinian ancestor - Ida - and the last universal common ancestor - Luca - assembled themselves from the spare parts sloshing around on the early Earth. Once all the ingredients were in place, it looks like life was all but inevitable... "

What filth!? Blasphemy!

Buy my time share.

They're restating what's been suggested for a long time. The 2009 Constanzo et al. paper is the cool part, where they've managed to demonstrate the suspected affinity between various nucleotide and amine sequences. The part about life arising spontaneously from naturally occuring chemicals - we already thought that was the case, based on about 50 years of experimental data going back to Miller-Urey.

They did make a rather glaring mistake though - "Ida was the first molecule that was able to self-replicate." This is probably not true, it's very likely that other self-replicating molecular systems arose and terminated, probably a very large number of them. Ida was just one that survived.