I have seen the foolish taking root: Job 5:3
"Bubbles of fat molecules enclosing genetic material might have given
rise to a primitive form of natural selection, they say; the more
effective at replication the RNA inside a lucky bubble, the more osmotic
pressure it would create, causing the bubble to grow.
Bubbles battled
for supremacy in this primordial soup till Darwinian selection took
over, and that’s where we came from.
The scenario was published in Science and summarized on 
EurekAlert..
They actually did test the idea in the lab. “We tested whether fatty
acid vesicles … osmotically stressed by encapsulated contents would
increase in membrane area at the expense of unstressed vesicles,” they
say.
They had to set boundary conditions so that the bubbles did not
rupture (i.e., pop). In scientific lingo, that translates into: “We
therefore determined the maximum sustainable membrane tension of oleate
(C18:1) vesicles under osmotic stress.”
They experimented with sugar
inside the bubbles, then RNA with nucleotides. Sure enough, the winning
bubbles grew by stealing membrane material from those with lesser
contents. Given any charged genetic polymer inside a fatbubble, they believe bigger would win the competition.
The paper has the customary tables, graphs and incomprehensible
jargon, then ends with a summary of their own materialistic,
naturalistic origin of life scenario that requires nothing but “simple
physical principles” properly applied. Once upon a time,
We suggest that the phenomenon of osmotically driven, competitive vesicle growth could have played an important role in the emergence of Darwinian evolution during the origin of cellular life. The present results suggest that simple physical principles may allow a direct connection between genome and membrane. RNA replicating within vesicles could confer a substantial growth advantage to the membrane by creating internal osmotic pressure. The faster replication of a superior replicase would therefore lead to faster vesicle growth, at the expense of cells lacking RNA or containing less efficient replicases. A faster replicase genotype would thus produce the higher-level phenotype of faster cellular growth, a prerequisite of cellular replication (supporting online text). Darwinian evolution at the organismal level might therefore have emerged earlier than previously thought—at the level of a one-gene cell.
EurekAlert, in its summary titled “Battle between bubbles might have
started evolution,” says they proposed this scenario as an alternative
to the reigning popular “RNA World” theory.
They like it because it is
not as complicated." CEH