What is the simplest form of life?
What is the purpose of this question? Define simple.... because prokaryotic bacteria are even complex, genius.
i'll copy and paste since that what you like to do...
This is what WE BELIEVE so far about how life began on Earth. .....
An often-told origin-of-life story is that complex biological compounds assembled by chance out of an organic broth on the early Earth's surface. This pre-biotic synthesis culminated in one of these bio-molecules being able to make copies of itself.
The first support for this
idea
of life arising out of the
primordial soup came from the famous 1953 experiment by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, in which they made
amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—by applying sparks to a test tube of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water.
If amino acids could come together out of raw ingredients, then bigger, more complex molecules could presumably form given enough time. Biologists have devised various scenarios in which this assemblage takes place in tidal pools, near
underwater volcanic vents, on the surface of clay sediments, or even in
outer space.
But were the first complex molecules proteins or DNA or something else? Biologists face a chicken-and-egg problem in that proteins are needed to replicate DNA, but DNA is necessary to instruct the building of proteins.
Many researchers, therefore, think that RNA—a cousin of DNA—may have been the first complex molecule on which life was based. RNA carries genetic information like DNA, but it can also direct chemical reactions as proteins do.