The First Cells?

Harvard scientists believe they are closer to understanding how cells arose, nearly 3.5 billion years ago. Under just the right conditions, fatty acids (which were stirred up by the ever-popular hydrothermal vents) would spontaneously arrange themselves, or self-organize, into small vesicles. These vesicles could have led, then, to what researchers have endearingly dubbed "protocells". This protocell theory has been around for quite a while, but the Harvard team took it a step further by modeling a protocell that is "capable of building, copying and containing DNA". This seems to imply that once DNA is accounted for within a cell, then the question becomes merely one of time; given enough of it (time, that is), all other, more complex, forms of life can be easily explained through the process of natural selection. While the protocell theory is an interesting one, perhaps the question of increasing complexity should not be merely waved away with the convenient wand of natural selection.