  The thermosynthesis concept, biological free energy gain from thermal
cycling, is combined with the concept of the RNA World. The resulting overall
origin of life model gives new explanations for the emergence of the genetic
code and the ribosome. The first protein named pF1 obtains the energy to
support the RNA world by a thermal variation of F1 ATP synthase's binding
change mechanism. This pF1 is the single translation product during the
emergence of the genetic machinery. During thermal cycling pF1 condenses many
substrates with broad specificity, yielding NTPs and randomly constituted
protein and RNA libraries that contain (self)-replicating RNA. The smallness of
pF1 permits the emergence of the genetic machinery by selection of RNA that
increases the fraction of pF1s in the protein library: (1) a progenitor of rRNA
that concatenates amino acids bound to (2) a chain of 'positional tRNAs' linked
by mutual recognition, yielding a pF1 (or its main motif); this positional tRNA
set gradually evolves to a set of regular tRNAs functioning according to the
genetic code, with concomitant emergence of (3) an mRNA coding for pF1.
