Primordial soup

The previous discussion of Earth evolution has already demonstrated the feasibility of interactions between carbon, carbon dioxide, and clays. Some modern theories of life origin have been constructed in the suggestions of generations of physiologically active molecules in clay-organic interactions. 

However, to estimate the significance of these modern theories, we have to mention the previons theories of life origin, which dominated our way of thinking for a long time. 

According to A. Oparin, life eventually arose from that substrate. l.B.C. Haldane developed similar theory at nearly the same time. 

For several decades, Oparin s model remained uncontradicted, the more so because experiments simulating prebiotic atmospheric conditions and applying electric discharges, ionizing particles, or UV-radiation were able to synthesize amino acids, small peptides, sugars, heterocyclic compounds and other biochemical molecules. 

Nevertheless, neither the original Oparin theory nor its more recent variants are especially satisfying accounts of the origins of life. Major deficiencies at present include the inability of this theory to account for the currently accepted phylogenetic and biochemical differentiation of Archaea, Bacteria and Eucarya inability to account for the presumed thermophilic characteristics of the earliest common ancestor of these groups and inability to account for the origin of chirality. See also Box 5 for phylogenetic relationships. 

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A remarkable, but (at first sight, at least) naively unimpressive, feature of this rule is its class c4-like ability to give rise to complex ordered patterns out of an initially disordered state, or primordial soup. In figure 3.65, for example, which provides a few snapshot views of the evolution of four different random initial states taken during the first 50 iterations, we see evidence of the same typically class c4-like behavior that we have already seen so much of in one-dimensional systems. What distinguishes this system from all of the previous ones that we have studied, however, and makes this rule truly remarkable, is that Life has been proven to be capable of universal computation. 

Extraterrestrial origins of life Terrestrial origins of life Life was delivered to the Earth (or any planet) by meteorites of cometary material, leading to the idea of panspermia The molecules of life were built on Earth, perhaps in the primordial soup or little warm pool... 

The pH of the oceans forming the primordial soup is important in controlling the charged nature, or otherwise, of the amino and carboxylic acid species and hence their chemistry. Generating reaction schemes for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules requiring basic conditions will not be relevant if the oceans are acidic. Consider dissolving CO2 into water, simply written as ... 

While it is relatively rare in the earth s crust, Mo is the most abundant transition metal in seawater. When we consider that the oceans are the closest we get today to the primordial soup in which life first arose, it is not surprising that Mo has been widely incorporated into biological systems. Indeed, the only organisms that do not require Mo, use W, which lies immediately below Mo in the Periodic Table, instead. The biological versatility of Mo and... 

If life follows from (primordial) soup with causal dependability, the laws of nature encode a hidden subtext, a cosmic imperative, which tell them Make life And, through life, its by-products, mind, knowing, understanding. .. ... 

Some time after the evolution of this primitive protein-synthesizing system, there was a further development DNA molecules with sequences complementary to the self-replicating RNA molecules took over the function of conserving the genetic information, and RNA molecules evolved to play roles in protein synthesis. (We explain in Chapter 8 why DNA is a more stable molecule than RNA and thus a better repository of inheritable information.) Proteins proved to be versatile catalysts and, over time, took over that function. Lipidlike compounds in the primordial soup formed relatively impermeable layers around self-replicating collections of molecules. The concentration of proteins and nucleic acids within these lipid enclosures favored the molecular interactions required in self-replication. 

Chemical entities might be viewed as a primordial soup of nonselective agents from which selective agents can evolve. The primordial pool might... 

Simply put, Creighton says that if we find a reaction pathway in a modern organism that goes A-KB- C- D, then D was available in the primordial soup—synthesized by simple chemical precursors without... 

In the field of artificial life we are today at a level that organic life reached about 4 billion years ago, at the time of the so-called primordial soup, but the interesting thing is that we could actually witness the origin of this new form of life with our own eyes. This is the last frontier of mechanism, the borderline beyond which the dream could become true. 

Even so, as has been pointed out, silicon may have had a part to play in the origin of life on Earth. A curious fact is that terrestrial life forms utilize exclusively right-handed carbohydrates and left-handed amino acids. One theory to account for this is that the first prebiotic carbon compounds formed in a pool of "primordial soup" on a silica surface having a certain handedness. This handedness of the silicon compound determined the preferred handedness of the carbon compounds now found in terrestrial life. An entirely different possibility is that of artificial life or intelligence with significant silicon content. 

The basic aim of this theory is an attempt to avoid the uncertainties of explaining prebiotic mechanism to account for the production of RNA from primordial soup. This is connected with a suggestion that catalytic polypeptides (short sequences of... 

Describe the main preconditions of life origin in the Earth. What notions are included in the term primordial soup ... 

And so Hoyle decided to make heavy elements in stars, and to spread them around by means of supernova explosions. But in doing so, Hoyle had to follow the blueprint of abundances which God prepared earlier when He had planned to make the elements from Ylem [the primordial soup of high-energy photons]. 

In virtually all experiments that simulate the synthesis of a primordial soup, enantiomers of amino acids and sugars do not occur instead only racemates have been produced (Miller 1953). It is difficult to imagine how only one of the enantiomers formed under the conditions of a primordial broth. Instead, import and identification of biologically relevant molecules in meteorites and comets appears as a more straightforward path. The compounds found in a meteorite provide a natural record of prebiotic chemistry in the early solar system and is closest to the onset of life. 

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