B
Black_Rose
Guest
The origin of life personally interests me and I am pursuing it as an intellectual leisure interest. This attempts to understand a fundamental existential question: the chemical origin of the existence of all life.
My interest is independent of any theological/religious attachment and is entirely secular since I do not affirmatively believe in divine intervention in life’s origins although I am receptive to the possibility. Furthermore, even if God did create life, promulgating a supernatural origin of life would not be an effective argument supporting the existence of a benevolent personal god for the reasons I argued here.
I highly recommend individuals who have the combination of the requisite general intelligence, knowledge of chemistry and biology, and free time required to understand the literature on this topic to pursue it. Of course, one should not expect to find concrete, confident answers to this intriguing question as origin of life has been plagued, in general, with uncertainty, ambiguity, and speculation. Inquiry into the origin of life is scientific since the topic can be explored empirically by analyzing and interpreting data from experiments that attempt to recapitulate the environment and chemistry of the early Earth.
One hypothesis, the RNA world generally acceptable but still controversial, postulates early biochemistry being dominated by ribonucleic acid where it assumes the roles of catalyst (before the advent of translation) and genetic polymer. Synthesizing the RNA monomers, nucleotides with the ribose and sugar backbone with a purine and pyrimidine nucleobase, has been a notoriously difficult endeavor for prebiotic chemists. The recent work of chemist John Sutherland, however, has provided some optimism that the pathways for producing nucleotides would be discovered. Recently, Sutherland and his colleagues published a purported prebiotic synthesis of pyrimidine ribonucleotides in Nature, which was considered extraordinarily difficult due to the challenge of linking pyrimidine bases to ribose. No plausible route to the purine nucleotides has been discovered yet. Robert Shapiro, a well-known critic of the RNA world hypothesis, doubts the relevance of Sutherland’s work on the origin of life, citing how one of the reagents, cyanoacetylene, would not be abundant on the early Earth.
What are your perspectives and views on the origin of life?
Some reading:
Fairly Light:
Robert Shapiro: A Simpler Origin of Life
Nicolas Wade: Chemists Show How RNA Can Be the Starting Point for Life
NYU chemist Robert Shapiro decries RNA-first possibility
Jack Szostak: Systems chemistry on early Earth
Journal Articles (technical and accessible through the links):
Leslie Orgel (2004): Prebiotic Chemistry and the Origin of the RNA World
Leslie Orgel (2008): The Implausibility of Metabolic Cycles on the Prebiotic Earth
Gerald Joyce (2002): Antiquity of RNA-based Evolution
Robert Shapiro (2006): Small Molecule Interactions were Central to the Origin of Life
Robert Shapiro (1999): Prebiotic cytosine synthesis: A critical analysis and implications for the origin of life
John Sutherland (2010): Ribonucleotides
Matthew Powner, J. Sutherland et al.(2009): Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in
prebiotically plausible conditions
My interest is independent of any theological/religious attachment and is entirely secular since I do not affirmatively believe in divine intervention in life’s origins although I am receptive to the possibility. Furthermore, even if God did create life, promulgating a supernatural origin of life would not be an effective argument supporting the existence of a benevolent personal god for the reasons I argued here.
I highly recommend individuals who have the combination of the requisite general intelligence, knowledge of chemistry and biology, and free time required to understand the literature on this topic to pursue it. Of course, one should not expect to find concrete, confident answers to this intriguing question as origin of life has been plagued, in general, with uncertainty, ambiguity, and speculation. Inquiry into the origin of life is scientific since the topic can be explored empirically by analyzing and interpreting data from experiments that attempt to recapitulate the environment and chemistry of the early Earth.
One hypothesis, the RNA world generally acceptable but still controversial, postulates early biochemistry being dominated by ribonucleic acid where it assumes the roles of catalyst (before the advent of translation) and genetic polymer. Synthesizing the RNA monomers, nucleotides with the ribose and sugar backbone with a purine and pyrimidine nucleobase, has been a notoriously difficult endeavor for prebiotic chemists. The recent work of chemist John Sutherland, however, has provided some optimism that the pathways for producing nucleotides would be discovered. Recently, Sutherland and his colleagues published a purported prebiotic synthesis of pyrimidine ribonucleotides in Nature, which was considered extraordinarily difficult due to the challenge of linking pyrimidine bases to ribose. No plausible route to the purine nucleotides has been discovered yet. Robert Shapiro, a well-known critic of the RNA world hypothesis, doubts the relevance of Sutherland’s work on the origin of life, citing how one of the reagents, cyanoacetylene, would not be abundant on the early Earth.
What are your perspectives and views on the origin of life?
Some reading:
Fairly Light:
Robert Shapiro: A Simpler Origin of Life
Nicolas Wade: Chemists Show How RNA Can Be the Starting Point for Life
NYU chemist Robert Shapiro decries RNA-first possibility
Jack Szostak: Systems chemistry on early Earth
Journal Articles (technical and accessible through the links):
Leslie Orgel (2004): Prebiotic Chemistry and the Origin of the RNA World
Leslie Orgel (2008): The Implausibility of Metabolic Cycles on the Prebiotic Earth
Gerald Joyce (2002): Antiquity of RNA-based Evolution
Robert Shapiro (2006): Small Molecule Interactions were Central to the Origin of Life
Robert Shapiro (1999): Prebiotic cytosine synthesis: A critical analysis and implications for the origin of life
John Sutherland (2010): Ribonucleotides
Matthew Powner, J. Sutherland et al.(2009): Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in
prebiotically plausible conditions
