A New Finding Raises an Old Question: Where and When Did Life Begin?

A New Finding Raises an Old Question: Where and When Did Life Begin?

Kat McGowan

Even without consensus on how and where life got going, everyone pretty much now agrees on a basic when: early. And quickly.

In fact, it could have happened more than once around the same time, in many places. “It’s entirely plausible,” says MIT geobiologist Tanja Bosak. That also means that it could have happened on another planet. In the case of Mars, our closest candidate, it could have come and gone.

NASA’s Mars 2020 mission will try to find that out. Engineers will outfit its rover with a micro-Raman spectrometer that can do a bit of what Papineau and Dodd did in the lab—analyze rocks for former biological content. Williford, who is the deputy project scientist for the mission, will use some of the Nuvvuagittuq samples to test the rover’s spectrometer during its development.

If a mission one day sniffs out former life in rocks on Mars or elsewhere, Papineau thinks it will shift our perception of our uniqueness in the cosmos. It might even “unify people,” he says. Van Kranendonk says it’d be like the Apollo astronauts looking back at our planet from space: “It could have a profound impact on our place in the cosmos.”

In the meantime, scientists will continue looking where they always have—in remote ancient rock, in biochem labs, in clean rooms under microscopes, and in bubbling vats like the one in Lane’s lab at University College London. It’s just a block away from Papineau’s office, but it’s a completely different world. Lane builds origins-of-life reactors to try to replicate the chemical reactions that lead to creation.

On one of the latest OOL "advances", from https://www.quantamagazine.org/origin-of...-20190916/:

"But research is beginning to show that starting with the right kind of mess is not only more realistic, but more effective at generating the materials vital to life, while also doing away with problems that have plagued purer systems. “There are times when we have mixtures, rather than just the isolated reactants that people typically use, and we get better results,” said Nicholas Hud, a chemist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. When mixtures are taken into consideration, the emergence of life on Earth in some ways “is not as hard as we might think it is.”

In the most compelling evidence to date, Krishnamurthy and a postdoctoral researcher in his lab, Subhendu Bhowmik, looked at how a system of chimeric RNA-DNA molecules — molecules built from the chemical units of both RNA and DNA — produced pure RNA and pure DNA more easily than systems that started out pure."

How about all the extremely complex functional molecular structures needed for the first organism? It’s not so clear that simple Shannon information complexity can produce anything. What is the organizing principle? If there is a goal, how does it come to exist? After 150 years of origin of life research, as usual nothing but just-so-stories.

From here:

"This is reminiscent of the Steve Martin routine, “You can be millionaire and never pay taxes!”  The routine starts with this:

You can be a millionaire and never pay taxes!  You can have one million dollars and never pay taxes! You say  “Steve how can I be a millionaire and never pay taxes?”  First, get a million dollars.  Now you say, “Steve what do I say to the tax man when he comes to my door and says, ‘You have never paid taxes’?”  Two simple words.  Two simple words in the English language: “I forgot!”

The routine is a classic setup and takedown.  Martin sets the scenario up by promising the audience he will show them two things, first how to make a million dollars and second how to avoid paying taxes on the income.  Hilarity ensues when he takes down the first expectation with a simple “First, get a million dollars,” and then takes down the second with the lamest tax-avoidance scheme in the history of the world, “I forgot.”

The similarity between the reported “research” and the Martin routine is obvious.  It is as if the researchers said:

You can account for the staggering complexity of life with one simple explanation!  You say, “Mr. Researcher, how can I account for the staggering complexity of life with one simple explanation?” First, start with the complexity.  Now you say, “Mr. Researcher, what do I say to the academic community when they come to my door and say ‘You never actually accounted for the origin of the staggering complexity of life.’?”  Three simple words.  Three simple words in the English language: “I assumed it!”"