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Comment by uplifter | Hacker News Reader

I trained as a biochemist and you nailed it. The submission title's claim is wildly more extraordinary than the actual result. It's like claiming "Lines of humans spontaneously appear on a hot tin roof" when what happened was "humans spontaneously link arms when placed upon a hot tin roof."

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The original title is much less clickbaity ‘ Catalytic Synthesis of Polyribonucleic Acid on Prebiotic Rock Glasses’. Maybe one of the mods could change it since it’s not following the site rules anyways.

Seems more reasonable a claim than life was breathed into clay to form man.

I mean, if you imagine life on earth originated as a petri dish experiment by some advanced species the whole "breathed life into clay" might not be so far fetched, given some allowance for numerous translation context changes.

You're saying scientific processes (petri dish experiment) may have created life because we can't yet explain what scientific processes may have created life? And ancient, unscientific mythological fairy tales may somehow have encoded this event, despite having always been taken at face-value up until they were scientifically and rationally disproven?

But is that original title going to properly convey significance to non-biologists/the lay audience?

Coming up with good titles that will survive the HN thoughtchamber is not easy.

The existing, clickbaity title claims a significance that doesn't exist.

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