Origin of Life: new commentaries (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, March 01, 2011, 14:52 (5016 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: After 60 years of research we are no further along than knowing what does not work. How to go from inorganic chemistry to organic (living) chemistry is as big a puzzle as ever.-Dennis Overbye, the veteran science writer for the NY Times describes a recent confab on o-o-l, which rehashed all the old stuff, presented nothing new, and apparently ignored the inorganic energy cycle theories. What most impressed him was the RNA-world theories, which of itself sounds very reasonable, until you study it a bit and discover just how miraculously complicated would be the origin. Did the parts just fall together, or did the enzymes, the atoms, the heat, etc. just join up?-http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/science/22origins.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1-I noted down some revealing quotes as I read this "romp" into the various theories, but couldn't read the last third or so, as I kept getting messages about the dangers of installing new software. I wonder if your UI got such warnings when he started work.-[...] "life is a very simple process," said Sidney Altman [...] "It uses energy, it sustains itself and it replicates."-One has to admire these scientists. If you can't solve a mystery, then just pretend there isn't one. Similarly, Dr John Sutherland has cracked all the codes:-With the right mixture and conditions, complicated-looking molecules can assemble themselves without help. When everything is in the pot [...] the chemistry to make RNA is easier.-But I was greatly taken with Steve Benner's reaction: nobody knows whether Dr Sutherland's recipe would work on the early Earth. Moreover, even if RNA did appear naturally, the odds that it would happen in the right sequence to drive Darwinian evolution seem small.-At last someone who acknowledges that life on Earth is NOT simply a matter of energy, sustenance and replication, but that Darwinian evolution demands a great deal more: the ability to innovate, adapt, develop. The great quest for life elsewhere in the universe is for ANY type of life. (Apparently it's now a pet theory that life did start elsewhere ... maybe on Mars, though see David's latest post about meteorites.) But if it couldn't/didn't evolve, it wouldn't be OUR type of life. In any case, if our type of life started somewhere else, we are still faced with the same mysteries. How did the mechanisms put themselves together in the first place?