Can Natural Selection Begin Before the First Cell?
Intelligent Design discussions sometimes argue that natural selection cannot help explain the origin of life because natural selection requires reproduction and heredity, which themselves had to originate.
But chemical systems can undergo competition, differential persistence, replication, and selection-like processes before anything resembling a modern cell exists.
Why This Matters
This matters because it would be incorrect to assume that natural selection suddenly appeared only after a fully developed cell already existed.
The boundary between prebiotic chemical selection and biological evolution may have been gradual rather than abrupt.
Response
The objection is substantially correct.
Researchers investigate several forms of chemical and molecular selection that could operate before modern cellular life. Once molecules or molecular systems possess sufficiently reliable heredity and differential reproduction, Darwinian evolution can begin acting upon them.
This means that origin-of-life research does not necessarily require a modern cell to appear before evolutionary processes can operate.
However, invoking selection does not by itself explain the origin of the system upon which selection acts. Researchers still must investigate how replicating or self-maintaining systems arose, how heredity became sufficiently reliable, and how those systems became integrated with compartments, energy use, and other functions.
Natural selection may therefore become part of the explanation before cellular life is complete, while the origin of selectable and heritable systems remains part of the problem being investigated.
Question That Remains
At what stage does ordinary chemical selection become sufficiently heritable and productive to support sustained Darwinian evolution?