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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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I think life probably originated from a relatively simple reaction that managed to continuously propagate. There was a primordial stew, and a bunch of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen and probably other elements started reacting in a way that they could pull in more fuel from the surroundings instead of the reaction just dying out. In its early stages it really wasn't anything you would call life. But the parts of the reaction that were best at getting more fuel spread the fastest, and the equilibrium kept shifting, and the chemical reaction kept semi-randomly stumbling onto more and more efficient ways to get more fuel. Eventually the chemical reaction develops a process something like mitosis, where it splits in two and each part goes off in different directions, and those parts keep splitting off themselves when they get sufficiently large, and the ones that are best at getting more fuel stay "alive" and spread the most. And that's the beginning of life.

I don't think that that's necessarily so incredibly unlikely in the right environment with the right chemicals. But it'd probably take a very long time and very precise conditions that don't allow for the initial reaction to just burn through all the fuel itself without splitting to happen.

From the Wikipedia article on abiogenesis:

“The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities on Earth was not a single event, but a process of increasing complexity involving the formation of a habitable planet, the prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Many proposals have been made for different stages of the process“

That sounds very complicated. Many different parts are involved with many different mechanisms, which had to be in place at the right time in many different stages. By “A relatively simple reaction that managed to propagate” are you imagining some kind of one-step jump to a self-replicating organism?

That sounds very complicated. Many different parts are involved with many different mechanisms, which had to be in place at the right time in many different stages.

The other way around, the fact that it involves many steps makes the whole a lot easier to accomplish. It's like saying jumping over a building is easier than climbing a staircase because the latter involves many steps that must occur in the right place at the right time.

A relatively simple reaction that managed to propagate” are you imagining some kind of one-step jump to a self-replicating organism?

A self-propagating reaction which manages to become more efficient, propagate, then split into multiple (identical) reactions in different locations, each of which propagates itself, is for all intents and purposes the metabolism of a self-replicating organism. The molecules and structures involved in that reaction are called an organism. As an example, the simplest organisms we know of (biological viruses) are nothing but molecules which propagate themselves by hijacking the machinery (reactions) of existing cells to do their replication.

There is a section in Dawkins' "The Ancestors Tale" which makes a 'flipped' version of this argument. Perhaps the process starts with a chemical that has this duplication-like property, and then it turns into competition for what spreads/duplicates best:

After that digression on catalysis and enzymes, we now turn from ordinary catalysis to the special case of autocatalysis, some version of which probably played a key role in the origin of life. Think back to our hypothetical example of molecules A and B combining to make Z under the influence of the enzyme abzase. What if Z itself is its own abzase? I mean, what if the Z molecule happens to have just the right shape and chemical properties to seize one A and one B, bring them together in the correct orientation, and combine them to make a new Z, just like itself? In our previous example we could say that the amount of abzase in the solution would influence the amount of Z produced. But now, if Z actually is one and the same molecule as abzase, we need only a single molecule of Z to seed a chain reaction. The first Z grabs As and Bs and combines them to make more Zs. Then these new Zs grab more As and Bs to make still more Zs and so on. This is autocatalysis. Under the right conditions the population of Z molecules will grow exponentially - explosively. This is the kind of thing that sounds promising as an ingredient for the origin of life.

pg 571 of the hardback edition

Dawkins' goes on to discuss a real example of a (relatively) simple 'abzase', an amino adenosine triacid ester (AATE), that has this property. In that case, 'A' is amino adenosine and 'B' is a pentafluorophenyl ester.

edit: this is the same as the middle bullet point from recovering_rationaleist's comment

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