I think that this question requires no detailing, because any detailing would be the answer to it.
In my opinion it's both because nucleic acids and proteins function as a symbiotic system.
To Alexandar Simeonov: But the DNAs are capable of being within ices or soils for milleniums. This means that the living matter could exist in the frozen state, isn't it? If so, the origination of DNAs is equvalent to origination of life but its development can be put off. Thus, just the event of the DNA formation is the event of life origination and just the DNAs represent the quintessence of life. Isn't it?
There is a body of thought that proposes that the first nucleic acids were in fact RNA followed by proteins and then DNA.
There is an old but interesting commentary by Walter Gilbert in Nature as far back as 1986 when I still had teeth and hair and could fit into jeans......
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v319/n6055/pdf/319618a0.pdf
A more recent expansion of these ideas is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis
A lot of the argument hinges upon what one defines as "life" . Given time and the right conditions, chemical compounds can form polymeric structures, crystals can "grow" and bits of these structures can in turn be used to "seed" the formation of new structures. The ability to make copies from a template (or replicate?) may not necessarily conform to our ideas of "life" . An alternative is to take a reductionist approach starting with a number of known life forms and keep on reducing them to their basic constituents to a point of commonality from which the process can be reversed (i.e going back through a chemical "phylogenetic tree"?). I can see no easy way that one can distinguish between "life" and the "potential for life" forms
Must stop talking such b/s......
According to a paper by Karo Michaelian - Thermodynamic dissipation theory for the origin of life, nucleobases and then nucleic acids started spontaneously proliferating on the surface of the early ocean because of their extraordinary UVC-dissipation characteristics. In a recent experiment Michaelian and Santillan-Padilla have also demonstrated that double strands of DNA denature without damage when exposed to UVC light. I have also written a paper together with Dr. Michaelian in which we hypothesize how primitive polynucleotides entered very early in their evolution some kind of symbiotic relationship with aromatic amino acids and polypeptides to increase photon dissipation and entropy production on the sea surface.
To Alexandar Simeonov: I advise you the "Life origination hydrate theory" ("LOH-Theory"), for example, the paper published in the "Global Journal of Science Frontier Research; Physics and Space Sciences", 2012 and other papers, where this theory is presented. You could find them in my pages at the ResearchGate site.
Regards.
Replication + natural selection, though the recent examples have shown that natural selection doesn't always mean competition+ frozen forms of life (which later can become viable), which we talk about in our papers.
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