dhw: They interpreted this as an attack on religion itself, which it was never meant to be. Hence the additions and the explicit reassurances that he was NOT attacking religion. Why else would he have made such insertions and statements? His theory IS compatible with religious belief. That is why I rail against those from both sides of the fence who deliberately distort the theory to serve their own agenda. Maybe his private writings would tell us more, but I don't have time to delve.-Every side misuses him. I believe his private writings, letters, etc., indicate he was pretty much agnostic. However all sides must accept that origin and evolution are inextricably linked together. One cannot be explained without the other.

I've shown over and over that the attempts to figure out the start of life have all been dead ends. Starting with advanced forms like RNA doesn't seem to offer any road to success. Now a Science article which I cannot get, making the same point is reviewed elsewhere:-http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/06/origin-of-life_1102900.html-Direct article quote:-"How can matter transition from the nonliving to the living state? The answer is essential for understanding the origin of life on Earth and for identifying promising targets in the search for life on other planets. Most studies have focused on the likely chemistry of RNA, protein, lipid, or metabolic "worlds" and autocatalytic sets, including attempts to make life in the lab. But these efforts may be too narrowly focused on the biochemistry of life as we know it today. A radical rethink is necessary, one that explores not just plausible chemical scenarios but also new physical processes and driving forces. Such investigations could lead to a physical understanding not only of the origin of life but also of life itself, as well as to new tools for designing artificial biology. [Emphasis added]-"In one fell swoop, Cronin and Walker have cast doubt on essentially the whole history of origin-of-life research. Whether from Oparin, Miller, Orgel, Benner, Hud, Russell, Cairns-Smith, Wachtershauser, Shapiro, or maybe even "warm little pond" Darwin himself -- it's all inadequate and probably misguided. Otherwise, why would a "radical rethink" be necessary? -***-"Such thinking is flawed for a number of reasons, some of which we can glean from the paper and summarize here:-•Dilution and entropy: "Left unattended, sophisticated chemistry becomes more dilute and disordered."-•Oversimplification: "A quick route to complexity and enrichment that could lead to the development of evolvable units seems to be required to avoid this serious issue."-•Ends without means: "Yet, most research efforts have focused on detailing precise chemical mechanisms for producing high yields of individual bio-inspired products, without addressing the processes necessary to form increasingly complex molecules and networks."-•Improbability: "The molecular constituents of simple networks are more likely to arise by chance than the highly evolved molecules of extant life."-•Begging the question: "how did evolution begin if the complex machinery for evolution was not in place?"-***-"A concept of information relevant to biological organization may be essential to identifying these networked processes. Adami and LaBar have described life at a basic level as "information that copies itself". Given that life not only copies information but also uses information to construct itself, we might instead describe the start of life as "simple machines that can construct slightly more complicated machines." Focusing on information in this way moves the narrative even further from a chemistry-specific mode than focusing on networks alone but may perhaps provide our best shot at uncovering universal laws of life that work not just for biological systems with known chemistry but also for putative artificial and alien life. For example, Walker et al. have recently shown that information-theoretic measures distinguish biological networks from random ones," (my bold0-Comment: I'm not surprised at the reappraisal. Note the bolded area that emphasizes information at the basis of life. I couldn't reproduce a vast amount of the long article. It is worth a review.

David: A review article about how varied they are, and the strange types of energy they use:

https://www.the-scientist.com/features/life-thrives-within-the-earths-crust-64805?utm_c...

"These expeditions are just one part of a rapidly expanding field of research focused on documenting microbial and even eukaryotic life dwelling hundreds of meters deep in the Earth’s crust—the vast sheath of rock encasing the planet’s mantle. Researchers are now exploring this living underworld, or deep biosphere, not only in the ancient, slow-changing continental crust beneath our feet, but in the thinner, more dynamic oceanic crust under the seafloor.

***

"To date, studies of crustal sites all over the world—both oceanic and continental—have documented all sorts of organisms getting by in environments that, until recently, were deemed inhospitable, with some theoretical estimates now suggesting life might survive at least 10 kilometers into the crust. And the deep biosphere doesn’t just comprise bacteria and archaea, as once thought; researchers now know that the subsurface contains various fungal species, and even the occasional animal. Following the 2011 discovery of nematode worms in a South African gold mine, an intensive two-year survey turned up members of four invertebrate phyla—flatworms, rotifers, segmented worms, and arthropods—living 1.4 kilometers below the Earth’s surface.

***

"A key area of research now is understanding how such life survives. Devoid of sunlight, “these systems are typically energy-poor,” says Sherwood Lollar. Compared to surface communities, microbes in the deep biosphere are thought to be relatively slow-growing and sparsely distributed, she adds. While surface soil may contain in excess of 10 billion microbes per gram, oceanic crust usually contains around 10,000 cells per gram, and continental crust—where water is unsurprisingly in shorter supply—holds fewer than 1,000 cells per gram.

***

"When geomicrobiologist Lotta Purkamo of the University of St Andrews and her colleagues characterized the ecosystem of a 600-meter-deep borehole in northern Finland, for example, they found evidence of metabolic pathways based on reducing or oxidizing sulfate, nitrate, methane, ammonia, and iron, as well as fixation reactions involving carbon.(Bold Mine)

Additionally, thanks to metatranscriptomic analyses, “we’re learning that these organisms have a lot of potential metabolisms that they could be expressing,” says Huber, who recently carried out this sort of assay on the Axial Seamount community.12 “But depending on the conditions and the geological setting, just a small subset of those genes are being used.” Such results hint at flexible and opportunistic lifestyles, she adds, where microbes make use of whatever they can, whenever they can.

***

"Researchers are far from agreeing on the extent of this underworld—one 1990s paper controversially suggested that deep life constituted 50 percent of the Earth’s current biomass, though most estimates are now below 15 percent. Before the rise of land plants around 400 million years ago, though, deep biomass could have outweighed life on the surface by an order of magnitude, according to calculations published this summer by McMahon and the University of Aberdeen’s John Parnell.

***

“'When we think about how life on Earth has changed over time, and how it’s interacted with the chemistry of rocks, sediments, groundwater, oceans, atmosphere, we shouldn’t be thinking just about charismatic animals and plants,” says McMahon. “We should be thinking about this huge quantity of microorganisms, most of which are living on the surfaces of mineral grains and interacting with them.'”

Comment: This type of research makes it seem that given the right planet, life is easy to begin in many different ways on many different substrates.

Tony: Terraforming bacteria. Unsurprising as it fits with my speculation that early microbes were designed to terraform the planet.

It certainly does, as it seems life can handle any conditions

Very slow living cells described:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21823-buried-microbes-exist-at-limit-between-lif...

"Everything happens slowly in the North Pacific gyre, one of the five largest ocean gyres in the world. Sand and mud washing off the continents rarely finds its way there, so the seafloor accumulates sediment at a sluggish rate. The clay just 30 metres below the seafloor was deposited 86 million years ago, almost 20 million years before Tyrannosaurus rex graced the Earth.

"That clay contains so little energy in the form of nutrients that it should be incapable of supporting a living community. Microbes have been found in other, only slightly more energy-rich communities below the seafloor, though.

"In a bid to hone in on the lower energy limits for life, Hans Røy at Aarhus University in Denmark probed the clays below the North Pacific gyre. Under the microscope, he found a community made up of bacteria and single-celled organisms called archaea in vanishingly small numbers.

“'There are only 1000 tiny cells in 1 cubic centimetre of sediment, so finding just one is literally like hunting for a needle in a haystack.”

"The microbes rely on oxygen, carbon and other nutrients in their deep environment to live, but Røy’s team found that carbon is so limited that the cells respire oxygen 10,000 times slower than bacteria in lab-grown cultures.

"Røy thinks the microbial community is so sparse, and the metabolic rates so low, that the nutrient levels probably represent the bare minimum required to keep cellular enzymes and DNA working. “It looks like we have reached the absolute lower limit for the metabolism of cells,” he says.

"Yuki Morono at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Nankoku, Japan, recently studied similar low-energy microbial communities below the Pacific seafloor near Japan. Under a microscope, he says, the microbes show few signs of life. “They appear to be dead by our time scale.”

"But when Morono’s team treated the cells to what he calls a “luxury meal” of glucose and other nutrients, most of them incorporated some food – suggesting that they are, in fact, alive. “Their lives are just very slow compared with ours,” he says.

"Because of their remarkably slow metabolic rates, individual cells may have extremely long life spans, says Røy. The cells Morono’s team examined looked intact, yet it would take each of them hundreds or thousands of years to generate enough energy to go through cell division and produce daughter cells. That means some of Morono’s cells could be thousands of years old.

"Røy says his cells could be older still. Elsewhere on Earth, life is primarily concerned with building up enough energy to fuel reproduction. In extremely energy-poor communities, though, reproduction makes less sense because it creates new rivals that also need to feed. “If you can just barely meet your energy requirement, then it is suicide to divide into two,” he says. He thinks it makes more sense for the cells to use the energy they gather to repair cellular molecules that have been damaged over centuries of use instead of fuelling cell division."

Comment: Apparently living a slow form of life. An other example of the extreme limits of the
environment that will support life. Consideration dichotomy: if life is as complex s it seems, and if origin of life on a barren planet seems so improbable, why is life popping up in every seemingly inhospitable spot? Is it so hard to imagine it is guided?

They can exist without light, without water, without oxygen, and may metabolize carbo

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/inside-earth-microbes-approach-immor...

"Last month, the Deep Carbon Observatory announced an astounding fact: the mass of the microbes living beneath Earth’s surface amounts to 15 to 23 billion tons of carbon, a sum some 245 to 385 times greater than the carbon mass of all humans. That’s amazing. It wasn’t so long ago we weren’t even sure life at depth was possible.

"But buried in the press release was a detail I found much more surprising and interesting than the mass of subterranean life: its age.

***
"Back in the late 1920s, a scientist named Charles Lipman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, began to suspect there were bacteria in rocks. Not fossil bacteria. Alive bacteria.

"Lipman did not believe that the bacteria he coaxed from coal were alive in the sense that the bacteria in your gut are alive. Rather, he believed that during the process of forming coal, the bacteria had dried up and entered suspended animation.

***

“'It is my view that here and there scattered through the masses of the coal measures an occasional spore or some similarly resistant resting stage of a microorganism has survived the vicissitudes of time and circumstance and retained its living character, its power to develop into a vegetative form, and its power to multiply when conditions are rendered propitious for it.”

"This dessicated condition we now call anhydrobiosis, and it is in such a state that organisms like water bears can withstand the vacuum of space and bombardment with radiation.

***

"A 2017 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found low densities of bacteria (although “low” is still 50-2,000 cells per cubic centimeter) in 5 to 30 million-year-old coal and shale beds located two kilometers beneath the floor of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan.

"They were still actively, if extremely slowly, living. Their generation times ranged from months to over 100 years. But this estimate was likely low, the authors conceded. The generation time of E. coli in the lab: 15 to 20 minutes.

***

'Evidence is also accumulating that such nutrient-deprived, superannuated bacteria are not “microbial zombies”. On the contrary, numerous studies have found that when deep subsurface microbes are placed in more moderate environments, they quickly revive.

"Taken together, these findings aren’t as ludicrous as they may seem when you also consider that microbes buried deep beneath Earth’s surface are protected from cosmic radiation – a frequent killer of the preternaturally aged – by thick overburdens of water, sediment, and/or rock (Muons, the form in which cosmic radiation reaches Earth’s surface, can only penetrate tens of meters into rock). Such radiation steadily mutates the DNA of organisms living on Earth’s surface.

***

"To sum up, Earth’s crust appears to be simply lousy with idling, ancient bacteria parked in power-save mode, ready at nearly a moment’s notice to throw the gearshift into drive. But what a life! Eons spent entombed in a dark, airless, silent matrix, barely eating, barely breathing, barely moving, barely living. But not dead. Not dead.

"If Charles Lipman was right, there are also bacterial cells inside our planet that began life 50 million years before dinosaurs evolved that could begin dividing again tomorrow. That … is breathtaking."

Comment: Wow!! What this means is that the process of life is exceedingly tough and can last though any type of trial. If they date back to before dinosaurs (250 myo) they were alive deep in the Earth at 300 myo!

Another invented molecule in the lab from proteins that are imagined to exist based on proteins in life today:

https://phys.org/news/2018-09-life.html

"Evolution by Darwinian natural selection is immensely powerful—both in nature and within laboratories. Using 'laboratory evolution', we can take an enzyme which combines random mutations and functional selection, and improve its function by more than 1000 times. You can see evidence of science taking advantage of evolution across the field, from synthesised medications used to prevent the reoccurrence of heart attacks (beta blockers) to the development of tumor-targeting antibody therapeutics.

"However, nothing evolves unless it already exists. When life started more than three billion years ago, what was the spark that created something from randomness? (my bold)

"Researchers from the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI), have identified what they have termed 'Structural Capacitance Elements' in mutated proteins that are associated with many different types of human diseases, in particular a range of cancers.

"Structural Capacitance Elements are localised regions of disorder within proteins, which retain the potential to coalesce into 'micro-structures' following the introduction of a mutation. They act as nucleating seeds, or 'feedstock' for evolution to proceed, providing the basis of an accelerated mechanism of Darwinian evolution by natural selection, supplementing the slow and incremental process of classic Darwinian evolution.

"This discovery has recently been published in the Journal of Molecular Biology. Lead researcher on this paper, Associate Professor Ashley Buckle, explained the significance of this discovery.

"Up until now, the prevailing belief amongst structural biologists has been that mutations that are implicated in disease act by disrupting protein structures—typically referred to as the 'loss-of-structure-function' paradigm. However it has recently been uncovered that more than 40 per cent of proteins have no well-defined structure at all," Associate Professor Buckle said.

"'This prompted us to ask a very different question, and to turn the prevailing belief on its head," he said.

"The research team analysed many of these disease-associated mutations and found that these 'Structural Capacitance Elements' may allow mutations to trigger a 'gain-of-function' by inducing structure where none existed before."

Comment: The key is their statement in bold that proteins have to exist for life to appear and develop. Early Earth was a planet with few if any protein molecules available, so how did life start?

Simple forms created by simple reactions, providing nothing that might start life:

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/martian-organics-arose-on-the-planet-but-not-through-b...

"An electrochemical process resulting from the interaction of particular minerals, sulfides and brine explains the presence of organic compounds found in Martian meteorites, researchers reveal.

"The findings – the results of an extensive microscopic analysis led by Andrew Steele of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, US – strongly imply that the compounds are evidence of geophysical processes, not biological ones.

"They also suggest that organic material can be created indigenously on the planet, rather than being deposited by either asteroids or interstellar dust – a finding, Steele and colleagues say, that “has profound implications for our understanding of other Martian phenomena, including the presence of methane in the atmosphere”.

"The researchers explored three Martian meteorites, dubbed Nakhla, Tissint and NWA 1950. Nakhla fell to Earth in Egypt in 1911 and was the first to hint that it might have been exposed to water at some stage. The second landed in Morocco a century later. NWA 1950 was also found in Morocco, in 2001, although exactly where is unknown.

'In particular, they looked at a class of minerals known as spinels found within the three meteorites – including titano-magnetite, magnetite, pyrite, and pyrrhotite – and found evidence that they had very likely interacted with a brine containing carbon-dioxide to produce organic compounds and sulfides.

"The results closely match conclusions drawn from the discovery of organic material in ancient sedimentary rocks in situ on the planet by NASA’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument on board the Curiosity rover.

“These two datasets together represent a mutually confirming analysis of the presence and provenance of organic material in Martian materials conducted using state-of-the-art analysis tools on two planets,” the scientists write in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.

"Steele and colleagues suggest further analysis on more samples will be required to fully confirm their results – and suggest that they could be very important not only in the field planetary geoscience, but also in astrobiology.

"The evidence suggests that the Martian organic compounds had an abiotic – that is, non-biological – origin, and are certainly not proof of life. However, they may indicate the existence of conditions conducive to it.

“'While found here in Martian samples, a similar process would occur wherever igneous rocks encountered brines, and therefore may be a dominant process for the production of organic phases and essential prebiotic molecules and their precursors on early Earth, Europa, and Enceladus,” the researchers conclude."

Comment: This study demonstrates that the early Earth might have had these simple compound but does not answer the question of where did the necessary amino acids required for life come from?

Still debated:

https://www.livescience.com/64115-oldest-fossils-of-life-dispute.html?utm_source=ls-new...

"Scientists will gather in a remote and snowy part of southwestern Greenland next summer to try to determine if rocks from 3.7 billion years ago contain some of the oldest fossils of life on Earth.

"Tiny, triangular structures found in these rocks have been a source of controversy, with some scientists now saying they are not evidence of early life on Earth. The scientists who first reported that they were fossilized evidence of life are defending their claims.

"In a paper published online Oct. 17 in the journal Nature, planetary scientist Abigail Allwood and colleagues, who examined the ancient rocks in Greenland, reported that purely geological processes could explain the triangular rock formations — and that while they might still be formed by microbial life, there was not enough evidence to show definitely that they were.

"Allwood, who works for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, is the principal investigator building an instrument called PIXL, based on x-ray fluorescence of rock samples, which will be used by the Mars 2020 rover to search for fossilized evidence of life in Martian rocks.

"Allwood’s team used the PIXL instrument to test rock samples from Greenland and reported that concentrations of titanium, potassium, and carbonate chemicals in the rocks did not show that the triangular structures had been formed by microbial life. [The 7 Most Mars-Like Places on Earth]

"Scientists think that about 3.7 billion years ago, the environment on Mars was very similar to the environment on Earth at that time, and that early forms of life might have evolved at the same time on both planets — although the very cold and dry Martian environment is now thought to be lifeless.

"The Isua Greenstone Belt in southwestern Greenlandis thought by geologists to contain some of the oldest exposed rocks on Earth. Until recently, much of the area was covered by snow — only in the last few years has the snow melted enough for scientists to examine many of the rocks.

"In 2016, geochemist Allen Nutman of Wollongong University in Australia and his colleagues reported in a paper published in the journal Nature that triangular structures seen on the surface of some of the Isua rocks were cross-sections of cone-shaped stromatolites — tiny, fossilized structures built by microbial colonies on the floors of bodies of water.

"Nutman told Live Science in August 2016 that the concentrations of titanium and potassium inside the triangular structures were different than in the rock outside the structures — a possible chemical “biosignature”. His team also reported that the concentrations of carbonate chemicals suggested the microbial colonies were drawing carbonates out of the surrounding seawater.

"Until the discovery in Greenland, the earliest known stromatolites had been found at Strelley Pool in the Pilbara region of Western Australia and dated to about 3.4 billion years ago. Nutman's find, if verified, would push back the earliest evidence for the appearance of life on Earth by about 300,000 years.

"Allwood visited the same rocks in the Isua region of Greenland this summer and took samples for laboratory testing with the PIXL instrument, which will be attached to the rover to carry out X-ray fluorescence analysis on rock on Mars.

"She said that after examining the rocks and studying the geochemistry of the rock samples, she did not believe that the triangular structures were fossilized evidence of very early microbial life: "I think the evidence is very much not in favor of that interpretation," she said.

"As well as finding that the supposedly conical structures actually formed long triangular ridges within the rock, Allwood said that the geochemistry of the structures was the same as in some other patches of weathered rock nearby that did not appear to contain any stromatolites.

***

"Because Allwood and her colleague had analyzed different rock samples than the ones his team had analyzed, they had inevitably found that their observations did not exactly match those of his team. "This is a classic comparing apples and oranges scenario," he wrote.

"Nutman said that his team had found the structures could not be purely geological in origin, and that their shape and geochemistry indicated they were created by "extremely rare stromatolites in the Isua rocks, preserved in a tiny relict of a 3,700-million-year-old shallow sea environment."

***

"The dispute over the Greenland rocks means that the oldest established fossils of life on Earth may again be the stromatolites found at Strelley Pool in Western Australia.

***

"Another recent study has suggested that an outcropping of primitive ocean crust in Quebec in Canada could contain fossils that are even older — between 3.77 billion and 4.29 billion years old — but that study also needs more scientific scrutiny, Allwood said."

Comment: Whatever the exact time for life to appear, it is amazing that it developed so soon after Earth's formation

More intelligent design in the lab using membraneless globules to contain supplied chemicals which then react in a way mimicking supposed early life:

https://phys.org/news/2019-01-membraneless-protocells-clues-formation-early.html

"Membraneless assemblies of positively- and negatively-charged molecules can bring together RNA molecules in dense liquid droplets, allowing the RNAs to participate in fundamental chemical reactions. These assemblies, called "complex coacervates," also enhance the ability of some RNA molecules themselves to act as enzymes—molecules that drive chemical reactions. They do this by concentrating the RNA enzymes, their substrates, and other molecules required for the reaction. The results of testing and observation of these coacervates provide clues to reconstructing some of the early steps required for the origin of life on Earth in what is referred to as the prebiotic "RNA world."

***

"'RNA—or something similar—has been thought of as a key to solving this dilemma," said Raghav R. Poudyal, Simons Origins of Life Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn State and first author of the paper. "RNA molecules carry genetic information, but they can also function as enzymes to catalyze the chemical reactions needed for early life. This fact has led to the notion that life on Earth went through a stage where RNA played an active role in facilitating chemical reactions—"the RNA World"—where self-replicating RNA molecules both carried the genetic information and performed functions that are now generally carried out by proteins."

"Another common feature of life on Earth is that it is compartmentalized in cells, often with an outer membrane, or in smaller compartments inside cells. These compartments ensure that all the components for the chemical reactions of life are in easy reach, but in the prebiotic world the building blocks for RNA—or the RNA enzymes needed to drive the chemical reactions that could lead to life—would probably have been scarce, floating around in the primordial soup.

***

"'It was previously known that RNA molecules can assemble and elongate in solutions with high concentrations of magnesium," said Poudyal. "Our work shows that coacervates made from certain materials allow this non-enzymatic template-mediated RNA assembly to occur even in the absence of magnesium."

"The coacervates are composed of positively charged molecules called polyamines and negatively charged polymers which cluster together to form membraneless compartments in a solution. Negatively charged RNA molecules are also attracted to the polyamines in the coacervates.

"Within the coacervates the RNA molecules are as much as 4000 times more concentrated than in the surrounding solution. By concentrating the RNA molecules in the coacervates, RNA enzymes are more likely to find their targets to drive chemical reactions.

"'Although all the polyamines we tested were able to participate in formation of RNA-rich droplets, they differed in their ability to support RNA elongation," said Christine Keating, professor of chemistry at Penn State and a senior author on the paper. "These observations help us understand how the chemical environment within different membraneless compartments can impact RNA reactions."

"'Although we can't look back to see the exact steps taken to form the first life on Earth, coacervates like the ones we can create in the laboratory may have helped by facilitating chemical reactions that otherwise would not have been possible," said Poudyal."

Comment: More waste of fund money. The 'RNA world' is formed in human scientific imagination and work like this creates salaries for some science folks, but proves nothing that helps us truly understand how life might have started. But it must have had a containing wall.

All studies have to supply intelligent designs and intervention. Nothing works from scratch as it would have on early Earth:

https://evolutionnews.org/2019/01/latest-acts-in-the-origin-of-life-circus/

"But one of the most famous candidate molecules, HCN (hydrogen cyanide), often considered a stepping stone to life, is not prebiotically plausible, Benner argues. Why? Because “current theory holds that Earth’s native atmosphere was more oxidizing than the Miller atmosphere.” [Miller-Urey lightning in a bottle]

"Thus, the prebiotic plausibility of HCN, the other molecules, and adenine long ago vanished as Earth-made species, even though literature too voluminous to cite here continues to assume otherwise.

"This creates a paradox. If one premises that life originated via an RNA-First prebiotic process that used adenine as a precursor and that adenine was formed from HCN from a Hadean terran atmosphere, then the premises that view HCN as an impossible product of our early atmosphere force the conclusion that life could not have originated on Earth. An unacceptable conclusion follows by the force of logic from seemingly acceptable premises.

"Organic chemists, if not all experimentalists in the field of prebiotic chemistry, are faced with a similar dilemma. We do our best to perform experiments that we believe re-enact possible steps of prebiotic evolution, but we know that we need to intervene manually to obtain meaningful results. Simply mixing chemicals and watching for a living system to appear from the broth seems unreasonable to me. This approach has never worked, and it is not expected to work, at least not if one is limited to the lifetime of a human, let alone the duration of a funding period or a Ph.D. thesis. So, what is a reasonable level of intervention by the experimentalist in prebiotic chemistry, and what are “plausible prebiotic conditions” in this context?

"Richert identifies numerous sources of intervention in the lab that would never happen in the real world: using pure chemicals from a supplier, breaking up a series of reactions that need to be sequential, using high concentrations of chemicals that would be implausible in nature, eliminating contaminants that would ruin the reaction, inserting enzymes to get steps to run faster, purifying the products of one reaction, then putting the products into another process with a drastic change in conditions for the next stage, and more.

***

" Can Richert rescue OOL from reckless use of human intervention? He agrees with Benner that it is not easy to gauge the plausibility of prebiotic scenarios. He gives several more examples of how the subjective judgment of the investigator can creep in. But “plausibility is important,” he says. “So, perhaps it is time to think about ways out of the ‘Hand of God’ dilemma.”

***

"A final word of caution. Life is a non-equilibrium phenomenon. It requires an energy source that drives its reactions. Assuming that simple heating/cooling cycles could have driven the formation of functional biomacromolecules that were then able to harness the energy emitted by the sun via photosynthesis, seems unrealistic to me. Achieving the level of specificity required to successfully operate a protocell with genetic apparatus, metabolism, and cell division under strongly denaturing conditions is not easy, certainly when it comes to enzyme-free replication relying on the intrinsic specificity of small molecule interactions. So, the periodic addition of a chemical condensing agent may be unavoidable to drive biochemical reactions that are endergonic, even in “minimal intervention” experiments. Without the chemical activation, equilibrium (death) sets in. So, some level of human intervention may always be required for complex, multistep processes. After all, what the dominant activation agent was before enzymes began to use ATP will remain an enigma to many of us for the foreseeable future."

Comment: These comments are from two prominent OOL researchers. They are Steven A. Benner and Clemens Richert. It is going nowhere. But grant money will continue in huge amounts.