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Bibliographic Note The analogy in chapter 5 between the U.S. transportation system and the metabolic pathways of a cell is borrowed from James Trefil, Harold J. Morowitz, and Eric Smith, “The Origin of Life,” American Scientist 97 (2009): 206–213. For recent evidence of RNA molecules as catalysts (ribozymes), see Saba Valadkhan, Afshin Mohammadi, Yasaman Jaladat, and Sarah Geisler, “Protein-Free Small Nuclear RNAs Catalyze a TwoStep Splicing Reaction,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009): 11901–11906; and Samuel E. Butcher, “The Spliceosome as Ribozyme Hypothesis Takes a Second Step,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009): 12211–12212. For experiments showing how information -coding nucleic acids may have arisen spontaneously, see Jack W. Szostak, “Systems Chemistry on Early Earth,” Nature 459 (2009): 171–172; and Matthew W. Powner, Béatrice Gerland, and John D. Sutherland, “Synthesis of Activated Pyrimidine Ribonucleotides in Prebiotically Plausible Conditions ,” Nature 459 (2009): 239–242. For additional information about the topics in chapters 1–4 and 6, see Francisco J. Ayala, Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion (Joseph Henry Press, 2007). An extended in-depth treatment of human origins can be found in Camilo J. Cela-Conde and Francisco J. Ayala, Human Evolution: Trails from the Past (Oxford University Press, 2007). ...

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