Yeah it sounds like God hired a malicious freelance programmer who put in a self-propagating backdoor huh.

I suppose one could go on a wild tangent here and argue that - given they're significantly more stable - prions are the correct-er form of proteins.

They just do not get any work done within how known biological life works, but that could perhaps also be read as said whole tree of life relying on a misconfiguration of that building block?

This is wildly unqualified rambling on my part, but I wonder if life could develop that is based on that prion form of proteins.

From my understanding, no. But maybe "life developing" is the wrong metric for correctness?

FWIW, The universe itself seems to be dead-set on entering the most stable configuration of everything.