How did life get started on Earth? Some of the answer to this age-old question have come to light in research recently performed at Georgia Institute of Technology.
The crucibles that bore out early building blocks of life may have been, in many cases, modest puddles.
Now, researchers working with that hypothesis have achieved a significant advancement toward understanding an evolutionary mystery -- how components of RNA and DNA formed from chemicals present on early Earth before life existed.
In surprisingly simple laboratory reactions in water, under everyday conditions, they have produced what could be good candidates for missing links on the pathway to the code of life.
And when those components joined up, the result even looked like RNA.
As the researchers' work progresses, it could reveal that much of the original chemistry that led to life arose not in fiery cataclysms and in scarce quantities, but abundantly and gradually on quiet, rain-swept dirt flats or lakeshore rocks lapped by waves.
In turn, their work could increase our understanding of the probability of life's existence elsewhere in the universe.
The research from the NSF/NASA Center for Chemical Evolution (CCE), headquartered at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is generously funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation and NASA. The recent results were published on April 25, 2016 in Nature Communications.
The researchers go on to list several nucleotides and similarly-structured molecules that could have readily formed in puddles on a prebiotic Earth.
The full Nature Communications journal article is available at: Spontaneous formation and base pairing of plausible prebiotic nucleotides in water.
My chemistry studies were limited and are long-since behind me. How close ARE we to figuring out how life got started? Thinking ahead, if we could recreate these primordial circumstances and create life from inanimate molecules, what consequences do you foresee on science, society, and politics?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @07:28PM
Because all three are based on subjective matter from an unenlightened species that is scared of finding out they aren't superior, unique, or have a metaphysical creator.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday April 26 2016, @07:53PM
Even if we do manage it, you know the first Star Trek fan in the bunch is going to have to a "Q" imitation and ruin the whole thing.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday April 26 2016, @09:25PM
[humans are] scared of finding out they aren't superior, unique, or have a metaphysical creator.
We are pretty safe from finding out any such thing. If anyone is dreaming that a new race of supermen are going to burst out of some Mars jars in a lab, they must have missed their last meds.
(Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Tuesday April 26 2016, @08:17PM
All will be well; there will just be some "new" thing science can't explain yet; that is where the religious will bury their heads until that can be explained....and so on.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 3, Informative) by opinionated_science on Tuesday April 26 2016, @08:24PM
Sorry, a nice article etc.... but this principle was put forward decades ago.
Put simply , we know that spontaneous micelles can form in many conditions. So a few amino acid precursors , a couple of billion litres of reactant, add energy and many spontaneous combinations of chemicals.
By definition, the reaction/molecule combination that is able to reproduce (even by stoichiometric probabilities) will prevail.
If we ever find life elsewhere in the Universe, it might well be easy to spot. The chemistry of life is abundant although ad hoc. Rolling the dice again, might well yield a different world...
(Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday April 26 2016, @08:37PM
Then I wonder why we have only one life... why not two or even ten different lives.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday April 26 2016, @09:04PM
Probably a simple case of dominant reaction rates. I've had this discussion (over beer) with colleagues. Imagine a replication event chain of A->B->C , where the rates are A=3.0, B=0.0003, C=10.
So we have a rate limiting step of B. It is not hard to imagine another event chain X->Y->Z, where X=3.0,Y=0.0004,Z=10
Given enough time (we have 4 billion years to fill!!!) XYZ will out produce ABC. Now this is artificially simple, since there are stochastic terms (dumb luck).
But as though experiments go, it is clear very small differences can really add up, especially if alternate solutions are difficult to spontaneous arise.
This is probably the most fundamental reason that all of nature looks the same. at the molecular level. Good ideas can be rare, so much less likely (though possible) to occur often.
The quirk of biology is how the *same* components have different uses! A bit more deep thinking, you can see it really cannot be any other way.
A billion years of refinement is an enormous amount of entropic encoding...
(Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday April 26 2016, @11:47PM
Yeah, I buy that, but... there were a single event at some point when a dumb matter became something that could reproduce and so became life. This, supposedly, happened by luck. So, why did not it happen more than once?
Is it because there is only one possible "design"? I don't buy one ate another... they may were competing for the same resources but again it implies very similar design.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 27 2016, @02:26AM
That's a fair question and the answer is that it may well have happened multiple times, we just don't have much evidence because of the time scales involved.
There is a school of thought that the Ediacaran biota [wikipedia.org] is whole separate tree of life, unrelated to any living species, but as it happened something like 635–542 Million years ago the evidence is just fragments.
The other thing that may have changed everything for life on Earth was the Great Oxygenation Event [wikipedia.org] which may have wiped out most of the life then existing.
The point is that there have been several extinctions that we know of, there may have been a whole lot more that we have no evidence for.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 26 2016, @08:38PM
Thinking ahead, if we could recreate these primordial circumstances and create life from inanimate molecules, what consequences do you foresee on science, society, and politics?
Vitalism died in organic chemistry many decades ago when it was found there's no god given life force required to make biochemical moledules... a urea molecule is urea no matter if a kidney made it or a chemical plant. Ditto the vitamins and everything else. So what you're talking about is just extremely very high molecular weight vitalism.
When it was discredited for small to medium biology related chemicals, nobody cared. Likely ditto "life". Then the debate will be what happens when an AI is created, again, by the time it happens its a big who cares.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday April 26 2016, @10:01PM
God runs a Chinese restaurant, and I read it in a fortune cookie.
"I pee'd in the cookie batter." Lucky Number: Rule 34
And at the cash register, my wallet was enlightened.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 27 2016, @02:41AM
It's far easier for me to believe that life was "brewed" in space. There are exactly two things that make earth more likely than space, those being our magnetic field, and atmospheric electricity. Hard to believe that there are no other magnetic and electrical fields in the universe.
Wherever and however life originated, I think life fell to earth, then ran rampant once it got here.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @10:17AM
Life couldn't evolve from nucleotide acids alone. Biochemistry is quite complicated and all its parts had to co-evolve simultaneously. Spontaneous generation of its most basic parts is encouraging, but we still have a whole missing chain of links between that and even the most simplistic of life forms. Without fossil records, it will be very hard to reconstruct how it had happened.
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Wednesday April 27 2016, @10:33AM
>create life from inanimate molecules
as I said for years in the other site, artificial life is not recreating life in a universe that already supports the concept, which is like teaching a monkey to fire up a car. Artificial life is building up a simulation and discern what properties let it develop life.
It will sure make some atheists happy, though. Until somebody reminds them that "a god outside of time creating life" and "a god outside of time letting a system evolve until life springs out" are equivalent from the POV of the god.