On Sat, Jul 6, 2019 at 4:18 PM Lawrence Crowell < goldenfieldquaterni...@gmail.com> wrote
> > We have lots of hypotheses on this, but it is a point where biological > evolution loses explanatory power, just as general relativity fails at the > center of black hole collapse. I think that's the key point, Darwinian Evolution can't take over until you have a replicator of some sort, in fact I would say the origin of heredity is the same thing as the origin of life. That first replicator was certainly far simpler than anything alive today and it almost certainly didn't have any DNA in it. RNA is only single stranded not double as DNA is and it is usually much shorter too, and RNA would help in getting over the chicken or the egg problem. RNA can carry information, not as well as DNA can but it can do it. And RNA can act like an enzyme and catalyze chemical reactions, not as well as proteins can but it can do it. So the first RNA life would be very incompetent by modern standards but with Darwin you don't have to be perfect you just have to be better than the competition. In 1986 Nobel Laureate Walter Gilbert said in the journal Nature: "*One can contemplate an RNA world, containing only RNA molecules that serve to catalyze the synthesis of themselves. The first step of evolution proceeds then by RNA molecules performing the catalytic activities necessary to assemble themselves from a nucleotide soup*." However some people, like Chemist Graham Cairns-Smith think that even the RNA world, although far simpler than modern life, was still too complicated to be the first replicator aka the first life. Cairns-Smith proposed that the very first replicators were not organic at all but were clays were information was encoded in a pattern of defects in silicate crystals. In 1985 he wrote a book about it that is now online: Seven clues to the origin of life <https://www.krusch.com/books/evolution/Seven_Clues_Origin_Life.pdf> The problem with figuring out how life started is that chemicals usually don't have fossils, so even evolutionary biologist and militant atheist Richard Dawkins admits that although he likes the Cairns-Smith theory we may never be able to say this is definitely how life started and it couldn't have started any other way, the best we can do is find a plausible way that life *could* have started. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv3h7T4nzBVPcsMcnm2WBVPnZ%2BYzSf%2BKmFeHEbA5zubMsQ%40mail.gmail.com.
