Theoretical origin of life; hot puddles (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, July 20, 2015, 17:18 (3414 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Amino acids in hot puddles that dry out can create polymerization into polymers. Note only eight essential amino acids ha e been found in meteorites than have hit the Earth, but these scientists spin a just so story:-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150720094522.htm-"The research supports the theory that life could have begun on dry land, perhaps even in the desert, where cycles of nighttime cooling and dew formation are followed by daytime heating and evaporation. Just 20 of these day-night, wet-dry cycles were needed to form a complex mixture of polypeptides in the lab. The process also allowed the breakdown and reassembly of the organic materials to form random sequences that could have led to the formation of the polypeptide chains that were needed for life.-"Experimentally, graduate student Sheng-Sheng Yu put the amino and hydroxy acid mixtures through 20 wet-dry cycles to produce molecules that are a mixture of polyesters and peptides, containing as many as 14 units. After just three cycles, and at temperatures as low as 65 degrees Celsius, peptides consisting of two and three units began to form. Postdoctoral fellow Jay Forsythe confirmed the chemical structures using NMR mass spectrometry.-"'We allowed the peptide bonds to form because the ester bonds lowered the energy barrier that needed to be crossed," Hud added.-"On the early Earth, those cycles could have taken 20 days and nights -- or perhaps much longer if the heating and drying cycles corresponded to seasons of the year.-"Beyond easily forming the polypeptides, the wet-dry process has an additional advantage. It allows compounds like peptides to be regularly broken apart and reformed, creating new structures with randomly-ordered amino acids. This ability to recycle the amino acids not only conserves organic material that may have been in short supply on the early Earth, but also provides the potential for creating more useful combinations."-My usual comment: Done by intelligent design in a lab.