From "Chance and Necessity" by Jaques Monod:
"The third step, according to our hypothesis, was the gradual emergence
of teleonomic systems which, around replicative structures, were to
construct an organism, a primative cell. It is here that one reaches the
real "sound wall," for we have no idea what the structure of a primitive
cell might have been.... the simplest cells available to us for study
have nothing "primitive" about them.... The development of the
metabolic system, which, as the primordial soup thinned, must have
"learned" to mobilize chemical potential and to synthesize the cellular
components, poses Herculean problems. So also does the emergence of
the selectively permeable membrane without which there can be no viable
cell. But the major problem is the origin of the genetic code and its
translation mechanism. Indeed, instead of a problem it ought rather
to be called a riddle.
The code is meaniningless unless translated. The modern cell's
translating machinery consists of at least fifty macromolecular components
WHICH ARE THEMSELVES CODED IN DNA: THE CODE CANNOT BE TRANSLATED
OTHERWISE THAN BY PRODUCTS OF TRANSLATION [emphasis original]. It is
the modern expression of omne vivum ex ovo [all life from eggs, or
idiomatically, what came first, the chicken or the egg?]. When
and how did this circle become closed? It is exceedingly difficult
to imagine."
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