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The following are previously unclassified quotes about the Origin of Life, now classified under that heading, and under subheadings alphabetically by author and date, as a temporary intermediate step towards integrating them into my quotes pages proper.
"It's a mistake to suppose that there is a sort of road, with life as its destination, along which a chemical mixture is inexorably conveyed by the passage of time. It isn't just a matter of carrying on doing more of the same, with the amino acids obligingly assembling themselves into proteins and the proteins joining up with nucleic acids, and so on, to eventually make a living thing. It isn't a one-way street like that, and the reason is very basic. Making amino acids is what a physicist would call 'thermodynamically downhill', which means it is a natural process that occurs automatically, like crystallisation. But hooking the amino acids together into long chains to make proteins goes the other way. That is an 'uphill'-a statistically more difficult or unlikely-process. Let me give you an analogy. It's a little bit like going for a walk in the countryside, coming across a pile of bricks and assuming that there will be a house around the corner. There is a big difference between a pile of bricks and a house. Now part of the problem here is that attaching the amino acids together to make proteins costs energy. True, there was no lack of energy on the young Earth, but the problem is not energy per se. Rather, it is how this energy organised itself in such a way as to produce this extremely elaborate thing called a protein." (Davies P.C.W. & Adams P., "More Big Questions," ABC Books: Sydney, Australia, 1998, pp.47-48)
"When I give public lectures and talk about the universe and all the stars and planets and so on, someone from the audience will often comment at the end: 'The universe is so vast, there are so many stars out there, so many planets, it would be absurd to suppose that we are alone. There must be life on one of those planets somewhere.' But that is simply not true! The reasoning is wrong. When you look at the numbers we have just been talking about it is clearly a logical fallacy to suppose that just because you have a huge number of planets you are necessarily going to produce life somewhere else. The total number of planets that are likely to exist within our observable universe has been estimated at about 1020, that is a one followed by twenty zeros. And we were just talking about 1 followed by 130 zeros, and that is for a single protein! Seventy powers of ten doesn't make much of a dent in 130. It clearly is not going to help very much just extending the space to the observable universe. The mathematics is clear: the odds against making life by some sort of random molecular shuffling anywhere in the observable universe are infinitesimal. So I don't think that random shuffling explains how it happened." (Davies P.C.W. & Adams P., "More Big Questions," ABC Books: Sydney, Australia, 1998, pp.49-50)
"There is one that I like quite a lot, which is a comparison between flying a kite and flying a radio-controlled plane. A kite is literally hardwired to the controller on the ground. By contrast, a radio-controlled plane has an informational channel. How does the plane perform its aerobatics? You push and pull some levers, and these signals are encoded into electromagnetic pulses. That information is then sent up to the plane and decoded. Note that the radio waves themselves don't push and pull the plane around. The signals encoded in the radio waves merely harness other forces and liberate them to do the job. So the radio channel plays the role of an informational channel rather than a physical push-pull link. What has all this to do with life? As we know it, life is based on a kind of deal struck between two very different classes of molecules. One of these are the nucleic acids, which contain the genetic information encoded in the sequence of their atoms. These molecules can't do very much. It is the proteins, the other class of molecules, that are the real workers in biology. But both types of molecules need the other: the nucleic acids on their own are helpless; the proteins on their own are also helpless. ... This is the ultimate chicken-and-egg problem. The great mystery about the origin of life is, which came first: chicken or egg? Was it the nucleic acids or the proteins? That is the traditional biochemical mystery." (Davies P.C.W. & Adams P., "More Big Questions," ABC Books: Sydney, Australia, 1998, pp.55-56)
"One characteristic feature of the above critique needs to be emphasized. We have not simply picked out a number of details within chemical evolution theory that are weak, or without adequate explanation *for the moment*. For the most part this critique is based on crucial weaknesses intrinsic to the theory itself. Often it is contended that criticism focuses on present ignorance `Give us more time to solve the problems,' is the plea. After all, the pursuit of abiogenesis is young as a scientific enterprise. It will be claimed that many of these problems are mere state-of-the-art gaps. And, surely some of them are. Notice, however, that the sharp edge of this critique is not what we *do not* know, but what we *do* know. Many facts have come to light in the past three decades of experimental inquiry into life's beginning. With each passing year the criticism has gotten stronger. The advance of science itself is what is challenging the nation that life arose on earth by spontaneous (in a thermodynamic sense) chemical reactions." (Thaxton C.B., Bradley W.L. & Olsen R.L., "The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories," [1984], Lewis & Stanley: Dallas TX, 1992, Second Printing, p.185. Emphasis in original.)
"In a somewhat different approach, J.D. Bernal proposed that the key to formation of polymers from small organic molecules is their adsorption, activation, and polymerization upon clays. Many different kinds of clay do indeed adsorb amino acids, nucleic acid bases, and sugars quite efficiently and selectively. In this model, clays circumvent the concentration gap somewhat, leading to high local concentrations of random biological-like polymers. At a later stage these polymers are assumed to self-assemble into protocells; and again, a primitive protocell population serves as a base from which those with synthetic and metabolic activity can be selected. One problem with clays is that materials upon them tend to be subject to ultraviolet radiation degradation. In addition, many polymeric materials are adsorbed more strongly than are small molecules and would not be available for further reactions." (Folsome C.E., "The Origin of Life: A Warm Little Pond," W.H. Freeman & Co: San Francisco CA, 1979, p.87)
"Some scientists say, just throw energy at it and it will happen spontaneously. That is a little bit like saying: put a stick of dynamite under the pile of bricks, and bang, you've got a house! Of course you won't have a house, you'll just have a mess. The difficulty in trying to explain the origin of life is in accounting for how the elaborate organisational structure of these complex molecules came into existence spontaneously from a random input of energy. How did these very specific complex molecules assemble themselves?" (Davies P.C.W. & Adams P., "More Big Questions," ABC Books: Sydney, Australia, 1998, p.48)
"Speculations on the origin of life have, until recently, been purely theoretical. The latest experimental findings, however, are raising more questions than they're answering." (Evans J., "It's alive - isn't it?" Chemistry in Britain, Vol. 36, No. 5, May 2000, pp.44-47. http://www.chemsoc.org/chembytes/ezine/2000/evans_may00.htm)
"In my opinion, the great mystery about the origin of life is where the biological information came from in the first place. That is the crux of the matter, not the complicated chemistry and how it came into being. We won't find the secret of life in the laws of chemistry. The biological information must have come from our environment, of course, but how did it concentrate, how did it go on accumulating, in molecules, to the extent that we would call them living?" (Davies P.C.W. & Adams P., "More Big Questions," ABC Books: Sydney, Australia, 1998, p.54)
"Research sponsored by NASA, to enable astronauts to recognize the most rudimentary forms of life, suggested that the simplest kind of living thing would contain at least 124 proteins of 400 amino acids each. A genetic code would be functioning, making sure the organism reproduced true to type. Now that we have learned to build self-replicating robots, we can make some calculations of the magnitude of difficulty in creating a life form even as 'simple' as that. Marcel J. E Golay, from the viewpoint of an engineer, wrote in Analytical Chemistry: `Suppose we wanted to build a machine capable of reaching into bins for all its parts, and capable of assembling from these parts a second machine just like itself. What is the minimum amount of structure or information that should be built into the first machine? The answer comes out to be of the order of 1,500 bits - 1,500 choices between alternatives which the machine should be able to decide. This answer is very suggestive, because 1,500 bits happens to be also of the order of magnitude of the amount of structure contained in the simplest large protein molecule which, immersed in a bath of nutrients, can induce the assembly of those nutrients into another large protein molecule like itself, and then separate itself from it.' The problem is that a self-replicating robot has been designed to build copies of itself, whereas the chemical reactions that led to the first living organism must have happened entirely by chance. Yet the odds against such a chance occurrence seem insuperable - by any statistical standards, plain impossible. Golay calculated the odds of his robot reaching into the bin at random and sticking all its component bits and pieces together haphazardly, and then finishing with a perfect copy of itself: there was only one chance in 10450, he said. ... Frank B. Salisbury in American Biology Teacher, using different calculations, concluded that the odds of the chance evolution of a medium-sized protein of 300 amino acids was about one in 10600 - a number 'completely beyond our comprehension.'" (Hitching, Francis, [British writer, member Royal Archaeological Institute & Prehistoric Sociery], "The Neck of the Giraffe: Or Where Darwin Went Wrong," Pan: London, 1982, pp.66-67)
"Men talk much of matter and energy, of the struggle for existence that molds the shape of life. These things exist, it is true; but more delicate, elusive, quicker than the fins in water, is that mysterious principle known as "organization," which leaves all other mysteries concerned with life stale and insignificant by comparison. For that without organization life does not persist is obvious. Yet this organization itself is not strictly the product of life, nor of selection. Like some dark and passing shadow within matter, it cups out the eyes' small windows or spaces the notes of a meadow lark's song in the interior of a mottled egg. That principle - I am beginning to suspect- was there before the living in the deeps of water." (Eiseley, Loren C., [late Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania], "The Flow of the River," in "The Immense Journey," [1946], Vintage: New York NY, 1957, reprint, p.26)
"In fact, Arrhenius suggested, that was how life on Earth got its start. It was vitalized by spores from space; spores that had originated on some other world that might remain forever unidentified planet. In fact, Arrhenius suggested, that was how life on Earth got its start. It was vitalized by spores from space; spores that had originated on some other world that might remain forever unidentified. Several points can be used to argue against this notion. One can calculate how many spores must leave a world in order that even one might have a reasonable chance to meet another world in the course of the lifetime of the Universe, and the amount is preposterously high. Then, too, it is unlikely that spores can survive the trip through space. Bacterial spores are highly resistant to cold, even extreme cold; they might also be expected to survive vacuum. It is doubtful that even the hardiest spores could exist for the length of time it would take to drift from planetary system to planetary system ... spores are very sensitive to ultraviolet light and other hard radiation. .... The radiation from any star anywhere in its ecosphere would be enough to kill wandering spores.... Cosmic-ray particles would kill them even in the depths of space. Arrhenius thought that radiation pressure would propel spores away from a star and through space. ... whatever propels the spore away from a star and toward others in the first place would repel the spore as it approached another star and prevent it from landing on a planet within the ecosphere. All in all, the notion of Earth's having been seeded by spores from other worlds is exceedingly dubious. Besides, of what use is it to explain the origin of life on Earth by calling upon life on other planets for help? One would have then to explain the origin of life on the other planet. And if it could form on any planet by some natural and nonmiraculous means, then it could form on Earth in the same fashion." (Asimov, Isaac [biochemist and science writer], "Extraterrestrial Civilizations," Crown: New York NY, 1979, pp.156-157).
"Between 1977 and 1981, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe came out with a series of strange articles on the composition of interstellar dust clouds. These papers could not be ignored because of Hoyle's prestige (as an astrophysicist, not a biologist), but they have tarnished his image forever. First, the authors kept changing their minds about the chemicals that they claim to have identified in interstellar dust clouds; second, their science is unacceptable. .... I won't go into too much detail, but their comparison of the dust spectrum and that of cellulose was, how shall I put it-imaginative. Incredibly, this was still not the end of the shameless pseudoscience. One bright morning the authors woke up to the realization that the dust spectrum was really (wait for it, folks) that of a mixture of bacteria and algae that had gone through a process of freeze-drying in space! One almost regrets that the series of papers did not continue, finally identifying the spectrum as belonging to a mixture of Maxwell House and freeze-dried ET. In any case, the theory suffers from all `they-came-from-outer-space' theories: even if true, it doesn't explain how organic material (carbon-containing molecules) or life originated `out there.' Let's get back to this planet." (Silver B.L., "The Ascent of Science," Oxford University Press: New York NY, 1998, pp.341-342).
"It is possible, of course, that life did not arise on the earth at all. According to the theory of panspermia, which was popular in the 19th century, life could have been propagated from one solar system to another by the spores of microorganisms. Francis H.C. Crick and Leslie E. Orgel recently made the more venturesome suggestion that the earth, and presumably other sterile planets, might have been deliberately seeded by intelligent beings living in solar systems whose stage of evolution was some billions of years ahead of our own. The process, which Crick and Orgel call directed panspermia, might explain, for example, why molybdenum, which is quite scarce on the earth, is essential for the functioning of many key enzymes. One can neither prove nor disprove theories of panspermia, but they are not really relevant to the inquiry of interest here. The earth is hospitable to the kind of life found on it. If that kind of life did not evolve on the earth. it must surely have evolved on a planet not drastically different from the earth in its temperature and composition. The question really is: How might life have evolved on an earthlike planet?" (Dickerson, Richard E. [Professor of Molecular Biology, University of California, Los Angeles]., "Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life," Scientific American, Vol. 239, No. 3, September 1978, p.62)
"A point too often passed over in making hypotheses about the origin of life is that the problem of reproducing the parts of a living organism, once the machinery exists, is quite different from the problem of building the first machine." (Blum, Harold F., [physicist, Princeton University, USA], "Time's Arrow and Evolution," [1951], Harper Torchbooks: New York NY, 1962, p.178E)
"To make coacervates in the laboratory requires quite high concentrations of polymers. But primeval ponds contained a decidedly dilute soup of small organic compounds. Hence the dilute small precursors must cross the first concentration gap to react and form polymers. The resultant dilute polymers must cross a second concentration gap to form coacervates. Finally, the coacervates themselves must cope with a most dilute solution of organic compounds to effect further coacervate synthesis. We will face this problem of the concentration gap again and again. Hypothetically, there are ways to circumvent the concentration gap, but they all appear to be more wishful thinking than plausible facets of reality." (Folsome C.E., "The Origin of Life: A Warm Little Pond," W.H. Freeman & Co: San Francisco CA, 1979, pp.83- 84))
"Salts such as sodium chloride are also present in ponds. Although primeval ponds contained far fewer salts than our present ocean, salt molecules still far outnumbered organic molecules. As evaporation proceeded, both would be concentrated. Consider some rough calculations. The salt concentration of a pond might be some 1.5 grams per liter (10% of the concentration of today's oceans), and amino acid concentration of all some 20-odd, might be about 200 millionths of a gram per liter. The ratio of salt molecules to amino acid molecules is thus some 10,000 to 1. To focus on the synthesis of a random protein we imagine a chance collision of one amino acid with another. The problem is that 10,000 times more frequently, the amino acid collides with a salt molecules. The above example also ignores the fact that amino acids are but one subset of an entire nonvolatile suite of organic compounds present in the evaporating pool. Thus, our amino acid would be colliding with and reacting with other dissimilar organic compounds as well as with salt molecules far more frequently than with other amino acids. Even worse, as the pool evaporated, solar ultraviolet radiation would become a factor, degrading quite rapidly whatever was concentrated. Under special circumstances concentration does work in the laboratory, but creating coacervates in the real world is quite another matter." (Folsome C.E., "The Origin of Life: A Warm Little Pond," W.H. Freeman & Co: San Francisco CA, 1979, pp.84-85)
"Proteinoid microspheres are easy to prepare - it's done in many high school laboratories. All that is necessary is to heat a chunk of lava with a gas burner, throw a spoonful of dry L or D amino acids on the hot lava, and wash resultant proteinoids off the lava with a cup of water. The central question is where did all those pure, dry, concentrated and optically active amino acids come from in the real, abiological world? A further problem arises when we consider the nature of proteinoid microsphere boundaries. Cells possess a lipoprotein membrane, which is gossamer-thin and slowly Permeable to many small molecules by diffusion. Proteinoid microspores have a boundary made of grossly thick layers upon layers of partly hydrophobic proteins. This later is so thick that it resembles a near-impermeable cell wall or spore coat more closely than a cell membrane." (Folsome C.E., "The Origin of Life: A Warm Little Pond," W.H. Freeman & Co: San Francisco CA, 1979, pp.85,87)
"But as researchers continue to examine the RNA-world concept closely, more problems emerge. How did RNA arise initially? RNA and its components are difficult to synthesize in a laboratory under the best of conditions, much less under plausible prebiotic ones. For example, the process by which one creates the sugar ribose, a key ingredient of RNA, also yields a host of other sugars that would inhibit RNA synthesis. Moreover, no one has yet come up with a satisfactory explanation of how phosphorus, which is a relatively rare substance in nature, became such a crucial ingredient in RNA (and DNA)." (Horgan, John [Senior Writer, Scientific American], "In The Beginning...," Scientific American, February 1991, p.103. Ellipses in original)
"Another more fundamental and intractable problem that strikes at the very heart of the RNA world hypothesis is, as Ferris himself admits, the prebiotic formation of the nucleotide units. At first glance, this doesn't really seem to be too much of a problem. An RNA nucleotide is made up of a phosphorylated ribose sugar linked to one of the four RNA bases, and a variety of plausible prebiotic synthetic routes for creating all of these have been suggested. For instance, one of the simplest prebiotic methods for creating ribose is the polymerisation of formaldehyde. Adenine can be formed from ammonia and hydrogen cyanide, as can guanine. Cytosine can be formed by reacting cyanoacetylene with cyanate, cyanogen or urea, and uracil can be produced by the hydrolysis of cytosine. ... But would these kinds of reactions have been plausible on the early Earth? One scientist who thinks not is Robert Shapiro at New York University, US. He argues that many of the prebiotic routes suggested for the synthesis of nucleotide bases are so artificial that it is unlikely that they ever took place on the early Earth, and that, even if they did, any yields from the reactions would have been so small and the products would have decayed so rapidly that there would have been little chance of them getting together to form nucleotides." (Evans, Jon [Deputy news editor], "It's alive isn't it?," Chemistry in Britain, Vol. 36, No. 5, May 2000, pp.44-47. http://www.chemsoc.org/chembytes/ezine/2000/evans_may00.htm)
"If early life was based on RNA, then the first ribozymes must initially have formed abiotically on the early Earth before going on to help form the first lifeforms. Researchers propose that these first RNA sequences must have been produced by the gradual stringing together of individual nucleotide building blocks of RNA that arose naturally in the environment. When this has been attempted in the laboratory, only a few nucleotides have joined together before the RNA chain snaps - far short of the 50 nucleotides that would be needed before a sequence could show any kind of catalytic activity." (Evans, Jon [Deputy news editor], "It's alive - isn't it?" Chemistry in Britain, Vol. 36, No. 5, May 2000, pp.44-47. http://www.chemsoc.org/chembytes/ezine/2000/evans_may00.htm)
"Even as Pasteur was knocking the pins out from under spontaneous generation, however, the situation was being eased a little bit. In 1859, the English biologist Charles Robert Darwin ... presented exhaustive evidence in favor of an evolutionary theory in which the various species of living things were not separate and distinct from the beginning. Instead, under the pressure of increasing populations and of natural selection, all living things gradually changed; new, and presumably more suitable, species developed from old. In this way, several different species might have a common ancestor and, if one went back far enough, all life on Earth may have developed from a single very primitive ancestral form of life. .... What it meant was that one no longer had to account for the separate creation of each of the millions of species of living things known. Instead, it would be sufficient to account for the creation of any form of life, however simple. This original simple form, produced by spontaneous generation, could then by evolutionary processes give rise to all other forms of life, however complex-even human beings. Of course, if spontaneous generation were really impossible, the production of one form of life was as much a miracle as the production of a million forms." (Asimov, Isaac [biochemist and science writer], "Extraterrestrial Civilizations," Crown: New York NY, 1979, p.154)
"Hints of this vast age were already available in the early decades of the twentieth century, and it began to appear that there was enough time for evolution to do its work, if life could somehow start spontaneously. But could that spontaneous start take place? Unfortunately, by the time the extreme age of the Earth came to be understood, the extreme complexity of life also came to be understood, and the chance of spontaneous generation seemed to shrink further. Twentieth century chemists ... found that every protein had to have every one of thousands of different atoms (even millions in some cases) placed just so if it was to do its work properly. .... What's more, different nucleic acids and different proteins, along with smaller molecules of an kinds, intermeshed in complicated chains of reactions. Life, even the apparently simple life of bacteria, was enormously more complicated than had been imagined in the days when the matter of spontaneous generation was being squabbled over. Even the simplest form of life imaginable would have to be built up out of proteins and nucleic acids, and how did those come to be formed out of dead matter? The origin of life on Earth, despite evolution, seemed more than ever a near-miraculous event." (Asimov, Isaac [biochemist and science writer], "Extraterrestrial Civilizations," Crown: New York NY, 1979, pp.155-156. Emphasis in original)
"Now that the reader has been warned against certain errors, which have their source in the human brain, we can examine the methods used by the mind to describe the universe and to foresee future events. This study is indispensable, as we expect to base our arguments on scientific methods and on mathematical reasoning to demonstrate that they both lead to the necessity of admitting the intervention of a transcendent, extra-earthly force in order to explain Life." (du Nouy L., "Human Destiny," Longmans, Green & Co: New York NY, 1947, Seventeenth Printing, p.12)
"Perhaps the most fundamental and at the same time the least understood biological problem is the origin of life. It is central to many scientific and philosophical problems and to any consideration of extraterrestrial life. Most of the hypotheses of the origin of life will fall into one of four categories: 1. The origin of life is a result of a supernatural event; that is, one permanently beyond the descriptive powers of physics and chemistry. 2. Life-particularly simple forms- spontaneously and readily arises from nonliving matter in short periods of time, today as in the past. 3. Life is coeternal with matter and has no beginning; life arrived on the Earth at the time of the origin of the earth or shortly thereafter. 4. Life arose on the early Earth by a series of progressive chemical reactions. Such reactions may have been likely or may have required one or more highly improbable chemical events. Hypothesis 1, the traditional contention of theology and some philosophy, is in its most general form not inconsistent with contemporary scientific knowledge, although this knowledge is inconsistent with a literal interpretation of the biblical accounts given in chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis and in other religious writings. Hypothesis 2 (not of course inconsistent with 1) was the prevailing opinion for centuries." (Sagan, Carl [late Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University], "Life: The origin of life," Encyclopaedia Britannica, Benton: Chicago IL, 15th edition, 1984, Vol. 10, p.900)
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Created: 27 November, 2002. Updated: 25 March, 2007.