HOW DID LIFE BEGIN?

Day 186 of the Lower Puna Eruption.

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Yesterday I focused on the religious point of view of how life began and I left you with some graphics from Scientific American on How Did Life Begin?  To summarize the current state of abiogenesis:

• Earth formed 4.54 billion years ago, and fossil evidence indicates it probably took a billion years for "life" to "happen," but that it is possible that this occurred as early as 4.3 billion years ago.

• The Miller-Urey experiment was conducted at the University of Chicago in 1952, sparking water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen in a reactor to produce 20 different amino acids.
• If this happened in a laboratory, surely somewhere on Planet Earth there were similar conditions involving these gases, electricity and so on to form organic compounds.

• Also too, organic molecules arrived from interstellar space to augment natural conditions.
• While panspermia remains a possibility, it is more likely that the transition from chemistry to biology was a gradual process of increasing molecular complexity.
• Investigators seem to be homing in on ribonucleic acid (RNA), a very long molecule that plays an essential role in all existing life.

• RNA has a long history beginning in 1868 with Friedrich Miescher of Switzerland and Americans Severo Ochoa/Arthur Kornberg, who won the 1959 Nobel Prize in Medicine.  I enter the picture here, for not long thereafter, I attended a lecture by Kornberg on the Stanford campus.  He was Head of the Biochemistry Department, and his talk led to my PhD dissertation a dozen years later related to the DNA/RNA of E. coli.
• RNA acts like an enzyme and stores/transmits information.
• Then came the double helix deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA--above to the right), first identified by James Watson and Francis Crick at the University of Cambridge in 1953.

• Scientists have found fossilized microorganisms as old as 4.28 billion years from geothermal areas in Quebec, Canada, and 3.48 billions years in Pilbara Craton, Australia.  To the right is a photo of those microbes in hematite tubes.
• If these finds are proof of early life so soon after the formation of Planet Earth, as there are similar conditions throughout the Universe, life should almost surely be widespread.

However, the fact of the matter is that science is no more certain than the six days of The Bible.  Was life a lucky accident through spontaneous generation, or a certainty?  Theories abound, but here is a quick summary that attempts to convince that life from our primordial soup was simple physics, when you crank in the second law of thermodynamics, law of entropy and all the known data.

Will we ever provide compelling proof of how life began?  Sure, all someone has to do is succeed in all the steps required to produce life.  Normal humans would probably select one of those four forms of possible first life.  If you are religious, you know that plants came before  humans.  However, the correct scientific answer is not in that list to the right.

As you might know, there are three domains:

We are among the Eucarya, the other two are microscopic.  It was only 1977 when archaea were determined to belong to their own domain, and there is reason to believe that they came before bacteria.  If you're wondering about the tree of life and our origins, it is more probable that we derived from archaea.  To the right is a transmission electron micrograph of Archaebacterium Methanococcoides burtonii.

Let's see now, I will not have much to do next year.  I'll get an Erlenmeyer flask, pump in some methane, ammonia and hydrogen with some water, spark the mixture with electricity, toss in some geothermal fluid, then place the products unto an optimal eco-environment and measure the archaea.  

The color from this geyser field comes from archaea.  So if I end up with some orange-colored liquid, that should prove I created life from scratch.  I wonder if 15 Craigside will allow me to do this on my lanai?

On the other hand, maybe I'll better enjoy continuing to be my current self:

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