Theoretical origin of life; from clays, an old idea (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, September 06, 2016, 00:29 (3000 days ago) @ David Turell

This thought is 50 years old and never found traction in the science world, the use of clay crystals to help bring DNA together. As the attempts at any glimpse of usefulness found nothing the idea went nowhere:-http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160823-the-idea-that-life-began-as-clay-crystals-is-50-years-old-"At a later stage, Cairns-Smith reasoned, biological molecules like DNA began to associate with the crystals. This helped the replication process. Eventually, a "genetic takeover" happened: the biological molecules developed the ability to replicate by themselves, and left the crystals behind.-"Cairns-Smith set all this out in a paper published in 1966, half a century ago.-"His ideas are elegant, but there is a big problem: they have proved almost impossible to test. In 50 years there have only been a handful of experiments exploring Cairns-Smith's ideas.-***-"There may never be hard evidence for Cairns-Smith's ideas. "If this were to be a huge scientific enterprise, if there were huge technology behind it, there would be enough resources to really push the experiments," says Braun. "But it's really just a very small community, and this is a little bit too far out."-"However, the lack of evidence will not be Cairns-Smith's real legacy. The specific scenario he envisaged may well be completely wrong. But in terms of inspiring people to look at the question of life's origin in new ways, his work has punched well above its weight."-Comment: This article discusses the failures of tis approach:-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Clay_hypothesis-Robert Shapiro in his book, Origins, 1986, discusses clays as a substrate on which simple organic molecules could form.-Origin of life is still a total mystery, and looks miraculous