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Notes -
The minimally replicating natural system would need:
Some way of reproducing dynamically in response to mutations. It can’t just be able to reproduce itself perfectly, but otherwise not at all; it needs an information carrier that can vary the assembly instructions in ways that would result in multiple different possible viable offspring. Otherwise, evolution would’ve never happened, because there would only have ever been one organism, or the one organism would have died very early on.
Some machinery for assembly of parts,
a way of reading the instructions,
An outer membrane that holds all of this stuff together,
A way to catalyze it’s own chemical processes
How is RNA sufficient for all of the above?
RNA molecules capable of replicating themselves and other RNA molecules are already known to be possible. The beauty of RNA is that it can both carry information and also catalyze chemical reactions, including the synthesis of other RNA's, and the oldest bit of active chemical machinery within our cells (the ribosomes) use RNA rather than amino acids for their key activity (protein synthesis).
Mutations will occur spontaneously because the replication is inherently imperfect, for RNA more so than for DNA because the molecules are less stable, so it's not something that needs to be accounted for separately. A membrane is not strictly necessary as long as all the components are close enough together. Nearly all of the cellular machinery still works if you take it out of the cell and this is commonly used in the biotechnology industry when we only care about one or two enzymes and not the whole system.
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