Researchers Rethink the Ancestry of Complex Cells

quantamagazine.org

43 points·pseudolus··5 comments

Good post. I had an organic chemistry prof back in the late eighties that remarked something like, "if you think the origin of life was some sort of random event, think again". This was a really bright guy no one would take for a religious sort.

The alternative is that it was inevitable, given the conditions in which it occurred, dictated by laws of physics, chemistry, and thermodynamics, and was just a matter of time, like rust or diamonds.

I approve of this interpretation.

I certainly respect all reasonable opinions on the matter, but I'm personally convinced that there was some sort of, ahem, intervention involved. It seems that the mechanics of life involve many complexities that seem far from inevitable. Who knows, you may be right.

But then again, the anthropic principle - you are only here to observe them since they did happen, so the ludicrously small probability of something like this happening can not be held as evidence against it being random.

Then you are saddled with the overwhelmingly bigger problem of where the interventionist came from.

You don't converge when each next term is astronomically bigger than the previous one.

It appears, already, that amino acids and RNA were inevitable, and RNA turns out to suffice for the needed enzyme operations. RNA that replicates other RNA arises spontaneously. Once you get two of them, the seas fill with variations of everything they encounter.

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