Miller and Urey produced simple amino acids but then nothing happened. Apparently, the containers you use to try to make life in a test tube matter. When life got started, they always used Teflon.
Origin Of Life
Rob Sheldon on life from the lab: “Information first” is essential
Information first means it can never be random, just as OOL in the lab is not random. But that doesn’t mean that info-first cannot produce OOL. I’ve written a paper on the info-first OOL problem.
Why isn’t life being synthesized in a laboratory?
Synthesis of life in a laboratory is intelligent design. But using intelligent design only means we’ve left the world of fantasy (“it all just sort of happened a long time ago… ”). Here’s an example of a typical real problem: Living cells cannot reach equilibrium because their metabolisms would stop. They must dance till the music stops.
Jim Tour’s Wild West challenge: Go ahead. Make a cell
Make a cell, win the Nobel…
At Mind Matters News: How information becomes everything, including life
Without the information that holds us together, we would just be dust floating around the room.
Researcher: Biology transcends the limits of computation
Marshall: The present paper uses information theory (the mathematical foundation of our digital age) and Turing machines (computers) to highlight inaccuracies in prevailing reductionist models of biology, and proposes that the correct causation sequence is cognition > code > chemicals.
New animated short on the origin of life is a lot of fun
At ENST: Stadler and Anderson explore how origin-of-life papers and popular media reports have misled the public, evidenced by a survey underscored by Rice University synthetic organic chemist James Tour.
Design theorist Eric Anderson on claims for a self-replicating machine
Anderson: “The Cornell molecubes didn’t build themselves. Instead, they were built by intelligent researchers using other tools and systems — by a separate “factory” so to speak — that was, in turn, built by other tools and systems, and so on. Yet beyond the observation of this uncomfortable regress, there are several additional instructive issues we need to examine if we are to really appreciate what self-replication entails.”
Tan and Stadler’s recent book tackles claims of life from the lab
Royal Truman: “The hype which accompanied the publication in 2010 of what they dubbed Synthia overlooked how nothing of relevance to support evolution was accomplished. In a nutshell, the DNA sequence of a living bacterium was duplicated synthetically, and then transferred into a living cell. This would be comparable to copying a program from one computer to a different one, and then giving the impression the entire system, including hardware and operating system, could have originated on its own.”
Origin of life theories discount the problem of degradation
Stadler and Tan: Hundreds of millions of years of “deep time” is frequently cited as the saving feature for the profound improbability of each step of the Stairway [to Life]. Yet time is only an ally of a slow constructive process if degradation is ignored.
At BiorXiv: LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) more complex than supposed
Note that last sentence: “Our results depict LUCA as likely to be a far more complex cell than has previously been proposed, challenging the evolutionary model of increased complexity through time in prokaryotes. Given current estimates for the emergence of LUCA we suggest that early life very rapidly evolved considerable cellular complexity.” Just an accident. Nothing to see here.
Another issue re the origin of plants between 3.4 and 2.9 billion years ago…
Timothy Standish: I couldn’t help but notice that the time photosynthesis is supposed to have evolved doesn’t line up with either the time when oxygen is supposed to have become an important element in the atmosphere, half a billion years later, or the time that fixed carbon begins showing up in the fossil record, which is much earlier, possibly over half a billion years.
At Mind Matters News: Could advanced aliens have fine-tuned Earth for life?
As Robert Marks, Ola Hössjer, and Daniel Díaz discuss, some prominent atheists/agnostics have chosen to substitute advanced extraterrestrials for God.
At Mind Matters News: Is life from outer space a viable science hypothesis?
Currently, panspermia has been rated as “plausible but not convincing.” Marks, Hössjer, and Diaz discuss the issues.
Top world chemist, James Tour, to speak at COSM 2021
A common misconception is that researchers need only discover the “secret ingredient” or “key process” and we will know how life originated. But life is very much more complicated, even in its simplest forms, than we often realize.