Sorry... no prize! NEARLY creating life is not creating life. Nearly only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Also, there is no experiment that shows single-to-multi-cellular evolution. The experiment you cited is not evolution of anything. The grouping of single cell organisms together doesn't constitute a multi-cellular organism.
You can have your theories, I don't dispute there are theories. Evidence is not a theory.
Can't think beyond what is written in the title? To highlight and put together the findings from the articles I linked:
"More accurately, RNA is thought to be a primitive ancestor of DNA. RNA can't run a life form on its own, but 4 billion years ago it might have been on the verge of creating life, just needing some chemical fix to make the leap."
"They mixed the molecules in water, heated the solution, then allowed it to evaporate, leaving behind a residue of hybrid, half-sugar, half-nucleobase molecules. To this residue they again added water, heated it, allowed it evaporate, and then irradiated it.
At each stage of the cycle, the resulting molecules were more complex. At the final stage, Sutherland’s team added phosphate. “Remarkably, it transformed into the ribonucleotide!” said Sutherland.
According to Sutherland, these laboratory conditions resembled those of the life-originating “warm little pond” hypothesized by Charles Darwin if the pond “evaporated, got heated, and then it rained and the sun shone.”
"Specifically, the researchers synthesized RNA enzymes that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components, and the process proceeds indefinitely. "Immortalized" RNA, they call it, at least within the limited conditions of a laboratory."
"Remarkably, they bred.
And now and then, one of these survivors would screw up, binding with some other bit of raw material it hadn't been using. Hmm. That's exactly what life forms do ...
When these mutations occurred, "the resulting recombinant enzymes also were capable of sustained replication, with the most fit replicators growing in number to dominate the mixture," the scientists report."
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"Within just a few weeks, individual yeast cells still retained their singular identities, but clumped together easily. At the end of two months, the clumps were a permanent arrangement.
Each strain had evolved to be truly multicellular, displaying all the tendencies associated with “higher” forms of life: a division of labor between specialized cells, juvenile and adult life stages, and multicellular offspring."
You may continue with the presumption that the scientists don't know what they are talking about as you wish, but personally I have little doubt that they have recreated not only the processes on early earth that started life, but also the process by which cells evolve to multicellular. -- The only reason the RNA experiment /isn't/ considered life as we know it (or a definitive precursor to life as we know it) is because these RNA enzymes didn't spontaneously invent their own survival tricks - which I personally believe is a product of environment adaptation, something they haven't tested yet.
And of course the tie into this particular conversation regarding life outside of Earth, is that such "building block ingredients" exist in interstellar clouds, meaning that it is pretty much everywhere, it simply needs the right environment to start the process, which the other experiments have shown to be not only be remarkably simple, but a spontaneously natural chemical process - not only the beginning, but multicellular evolution.