Origin of Life - A New Concept

Why not!! You can access my website here - www.originoflife.in

 

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I wasn't thinking about extraterrestrial biology.

I doubt that humans are the most complex terrestrial organism.

I doubt that the human genome is the most complex, advanced, or elegant terrestrial genome.

I doubt that human biology is the the most complex terrestrial biology.

 

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Why not Pete, At least as of now? Certainly the human brain is the most complex and advanced product of biological evolution. Biologically all organisms appear more or less same - all organisms run somewhat similar metabolism to sustain themselves. All of them have the same 'will to survive'. But there appears a vast difference in the degree of 'encephalization' across phylogenetic tree of evolution - till it has reached the highest degree (so far) in the human being. His intelligence and creativity are the suffficient evidences.

 

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No. We do not exhibit the highest degree of evolution. You are what is known as egocentric. We are no more advanced than an armadillo.

Sorry...

 

perhaps

that origin , is an insult to the highest degree to Humanity

and I resent it

to think that this is what we think of ourselves by any body is a shame really

a damn shame

 

Surely I must be misssing your point of view entirely.

Can you explain scientifically how an armadillo is as much intellectually advanced as humans.

 

Not to put words in Origin's virtual mouth, but I interpret him to be referring to the relativity of each species in its phylogenetic position. The armadillo is at the top of its clade, and so are we. Each is highly adapted to the particular stressors that produced its traits. More precisely, each ancestor adapted - the cumulative adaptations were the best suited for selection. So here we are.

I also think Origin is responding to the anthropocentric view that prevails among folks who feel humans are inherently special.

 

Tough shit. If you are too infantile to accept the truth when it is offered then you can wallow in anthropocentric ignorance. As mammals there appears to be zero evidence that armadillos have undergone fewer (or more) mutations and hence evolutionary changes since their line and our line diverged. If you have such evidence please present it here.

krishnagopal, you are focusing on human intellect. What if we focus on flying ability, or eyesight, or speed, or strength, etc. Why have you singled out the one thing that makes us look 'more advanced' and ignored the many things that make us look 'weak'?

 

What he said.

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Why? It is true. Maybe this will help.
You are special because you have a big brain.
A cheetah is special because he can run so damn fast.
A honey bee is special because he can see in ultra-violet wave lengths.
A blue whale is special because they are so big.

If you want to believe that a big brain is the 'specialist', knock yourself out.

My young fellow we are just animals, get over yourself! An animal with absurdly large cabeza, but an animal none the less.

 

I should answer this categorically –

>>The armadillo is at the top of its clade, and so are we. Each is highly adapted to the particular stressors that produced its traits. More precisely, each ancestor adapted - the cumulative adaptations were the best suited for selection.>>

Not only armadillos but every organism on this earth is highly adapted to its surroundings. Those organisms which could not adapt have become extinct. We must realize that the so-called “disadvantageous” species are only disadvantageous in the “human eyes”. You may think the eyeless earthworms (because they have not ascended well in your cladograms) are disadvantaged but the very fact that they have survived and maintained their progeny across many millions of years show that they have adapted well.

The cladograms are again only one method in taxonomy – the divisions are only arbitrary for the human understanding. Really nature will not follow your rules and clades.

>>I also think Origin is responding to the anthropocentric view that prevails among folks who feel humans are inherently special.>>

I must make it perfectly clear to you that I am no anthropocentric. I can give you a list of the following disadvantages the humans themselves can posses

Humans cannot fly
Humans cannot turn their heads completely back as some birds do
Humans cannot even reach their backs to scratch
Human’s food passages and air passages are adjacent so that they may choke at any time
Human urogenital tracts are combined – why?
Human’s smelling and hearing capacity is not so perfect
Human’s so called “intellect” is shoddy at best –
….. The list is endless
Who ever had said that man is the center of the universe? He has a pretty long way to go, and there may be better species “out there”

>>Why have you singled out the one thing that makes us look 'more advanced' and ignored the many things that make us look 'weak'?>>

Now, I must answer this. You may agree that all organisms on the earth have three fundamental characteristics – awareness of its surroundings, ability to reproduce and metabolism for its survival (rest of the other features can be accommodated into one of these). I believe that the most primary of these three is the awareness – and it is the subtlest. All organisms posses it and at all times – as phylogeny progressed the awareness has transformed into consciousness and lead to human intellect. Thus, I would say that the human intellect has (to a limited extent) overcame the other physical disabilities. This is open for discussion

 

This sort of silence is not new. Whenever a new idea is presented there is this kind of silence. It is our refusal to accept something new. I was even accused of being ‘too speculative’ when I proposed my hypothesis that ‘life has originated in primordial membranes’. Can I say that such people are dogmatic? Science cannot be based on dogma (as religion is) – there can be debate. I have based my hypothesis by the following analogy.

The primordial molecules (eg nucleic acids) formed from the ‘primordial soup’ started replicating themselves “Replication First Theory” – my question is how did they ‘know’ to replicate? What was the urge. On the other hand it is proposed that these primordial molecules (eg, proteins) started to engineer cascades of chemical reactions to control their surrounding milieu (Metabolism First Theory) – my question is how did these molecules ‘know’ anything of their surroundings? The simple answer is that ‘somehow’ they started reproducing or metabolizing.

My answer is that the ‘know’ has come first. The molecules have first become ‘aware of their own presence’. What sort of molecules do we expect to have such awareness? Certainly those molecules that need no code for them to form. What sort of molecules we have in our present day cells that have no known code for them to operate? They are hydrocarbons. The hydrocarbons must have first formed primordial membranes which became aware of the surroundings – as discussed in some detail in my website. You may know that hydrocarbons can form without the intervention of life’s processes and are ubiquitous in the universe – found across interstellar spaces and nebulae.

 

The origin of life is in the Division of cells.

Every cell of every species of life was divided to create the female.

For that existed, cell division.

Therefore each animal has its female, thanks to cell division.

Kind regards,
Victor Elias Espinoza Guedez

 

Spinoza friend, How true it is! Everything is in halves - living or non-living. You only called them male-female.

I had to read between the lines to get your purport.

 

Not a flutter! Flat?

 

The metabolism first theory has an advantage in terms of potentials. Chemical reactions move spontaneously in the direction of lowering energy and increasing entropy. Combustion/metabolism goes with the flow. This creates an easy and reliable energy stream with a constant direction. The molecules can align along the shore of this repetitive energy stream.

Templates also make use of energy potential, but this is based on secondary bonding forces. The proper base pairing means minimal energy in terms of hydrogen bonding energy. But this is energy is weaker than the covalent bonding energy lowering within metabolism. Template binding has the disadvantage of lowering entropy, until it detaches. This stream is weaker, which makes it harder to align along the stream.

Metabolism has all the energy it needs (combustion analogy), plus enough energy to spare, to drive the formation of the cell's energy supply, ATP. This occurs along an energy stream to CO2 and H2O. Genetic templates need energy rich molecules to begin; tri-phosphates. These will need an energy stream to form, and are more likely to appear near a substantial energy stream.

 

Awareness-First Hypothesis

Dear Wellwisher, Your “energy stream analogy” is very interesting. But if we follow your analogy only, the life processes must come to a stand-still after sometime, because thermodynamics allows only one-way pass. This is because, you have showed only one direction in this stream in the case of metabolism; the reverse direction is that of an anabolic reaction (which decreases entropy) that always occurs in a living cell. This combination of anabolism and catabolism forms a “repetitive energy stream” as you put it. For the catabolism (cellular respiration) to run eternally there must be anabolism also. This means that, anabolism forms macromolecules to provide ‘fuel’ to run catabolism (to break sugars into CO2 and H2O). But, For the macromolecules to form is not in strict accordance with the principles of thermodynamics. Nature does not allow a decrease in entropy, at least without allowing a compensatory increase in the entropy somewhere else in the universe. Life processes trick the nature to do this job. The trick is simple – for decreasing the entropy of molecules and to build macromolecules, life takes-in the surrounding energy. In plants, for example, to produce energy-containing sugars (decrease in entropy) through photosynthesis, nature has to undergo some sort of change so that finally entropy in the surroundings has to increase, and this is done by breaking water (H2O is a source of electrons, as you know, in oxygenic phototrophs) and liberating oxygen (this increases entropy). This is the simple reason why plants need sun light and we need our daily ration to keep life going.

Now the question of templates. Sure, to join one unit with other to build macromolecules of nucleic acids or proteins using codes also needs thermodynamic principles. To run the above metabolic show, it needs a direction (in the form of codes) to direct the chain of reactions one succeeding the other. This is accomplished by proteins (enzymes) which, in turn, are coded by DNA.

The complex metabolic processes cannot run without a direction (codes) – but at the same time, a coding system cannot evolve without an existing metabolism – the dilemma is whether ‘replication-first’ or metabolism-first’?? The answer may be that both of them are complimentary – one cannot exist without the other. It follows that they developed together. But we must ask a question here – what is the whole purpose of this duel mechanism? The answer again is - To harness incoming energy and supply it to the living cell where it is needed. Energy is needed to do work – there are 4 kinds of work a cell has to perform to live – Synthetic, Mechanical, Electrical and Regulatory. Synthetic and regulatory are anabolic works; whereas mechanical and electrical are catabolic. If you think correctly, mechanical movements are also achieved by means of electrical work. Electrical work is done almost entirely at the level of membranes, by the way of ionic transfer. Thus, catabolic work is chiefly represented by electrical activity around the membranes. In other words all the metabolic cycles occurring in a cell assist in upholding the electrical acticity around the membranes. How is this electrical energy utilized at the membranes? This is converted to membrane potentials across the membrane – why – again, this is to ‘do work’.

The conclusion is simple: The purpose of all activity occurring in a cell is to sustain the membrane potentials across the membranes.

What is this electrical activity doing at the membranes – it is ‘creating awareness’ of its surroundings. Why is this awareness essential? Because it is only the way by which a cell can ‘know’ of its presence in its surrounding milieu. But then what is this ‘know’? That is life. The ‘know’ had orchestrated the development of all these sequences of metabolism and replication.

Why, lastly, is reproduction? Life, somehow, ‘knew’ that it cannot sustain for long, and death is inevitable. Reproduction is a life’s ploy to win over death.

Hence my “Awareness-First” hypothesis.

 

They don't need to know anything. It is simple chemistry and thermodynamics.

 

But how do microorganisms, for eg, 'go' insearch of food - they have to sense the external world. And why do the animals and plants urge to reproduce at the cost of so many risks and adventures - they know the inevitable. Simple chemistry is no life -like the one you run in labs - it dies sooner than later, as we see daily in our lab experiments. The urge is what makes life sustain against odds, as we see in daily life.

 

Third: What has driven the polymerized macromolecules to replicate and reproduce themselves?

IMPO (James R, ONLY MY SPECULATION here re: OP's query). "Speculation: Casimir or other quantum effects?"