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The Mystery of Life's Origin THE MYSTERY OF LIFE'S ORIGIN Reassessing Current Theories Charles B. Thaxton Walter L. Bradley Roger L. Olsen With a Foreword by Dean H. Kenyon The Mystery of Life's Origin The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories Charles B. Thaxton Walter L. Bradley Roger L. Olsen � � LEWISAND STANLEY The authors have prepared this book in conjunction with the publishing program of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Thaxton, Charles B. The mystery of life's origin. Bibliography: p. 220 Includes index. 1. Life-Origin. 2. Chemical evolution. 3. Life­ Origin-Research. 4. Chemical evolution-Research. I. Bradley, Walter L. II. Olsen, Roger L. III. Title. QH325.B68 1984 577 83-17463 ISBN 0-929510-02-8 Copyright 1984 by Foundation for Thought and Ethics. All rights reserved. Second printing, September, 1992. Published by: Lewis and Stanley,� 13612 Midway Rd., Suite 500, Dallas, Texas 752 LEWIS AND STANLEY Manufactured in the United States of America. Foreword The Mystery of Life's Origin presents an extraordinary new analy­ sis of an age-old question: How did life start on earth? The authors deal forthrightly and brilliantly with the major problems confront­ ing scientists today in their search for life's origins. They under­ stand the impasse in current laboratory and theoretical research and suggest a way around it. Their arguments are cogent, original, and compelling. This book is sure to stimulate much animated dis­ cussion among scientists and laymen. It is very likely that research on life's origins will move in somewhat different directionsonce the professionals have read this important work. The modern experimental study of the origin of the first life on earth is now entering its fourth decade, if we date the inception of this fieldof research to Stanley Miller's pioneering work in the early 1950s. Since Miller's identification of several (racemic) protein­ forming amino acids in his electric discharge apparatus, numerous follow-up studies have been conducted. Conforming in varying degrees to the requirements of the so-called "simulation paradigm," these experiments have yielded detectable amounts of most of the major kinds of biochemical substance as well as a variety of organic microscopic structures suggested to be similar to the historical pre­ cursors of the first living cells. This program of research can be regarded as a natural extension of Darwin's evolutionary views of the last century. The goal of the work is to findplausible uniformitarian mechanisms for the gradual spontaneous generation of living matter from relatively simple molecules thought to have been abundant on the surface of the primitive earth. v vi THE MYSTERY OF LIFE'S ORIGIN The experimental results to date have apparently convinced many scientists that a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life will be found, but there are significant reasonsfor doubt. In the years since the publication of Biochemical Predestination I have been increas­ ingly struck by a peculiar feature of many of the published experi­ ments in the field. I am not referring to those studies conducted more or less along the lines of Miller's original work, although there are firm grounds for criticizing those studies as well. I am referring to those experiments designed to elucidate possible pathways of pre­ biotic synthesis of certain organic substances of biologic interest, such as purines and pyrimidines, or polypeptides. In most cases the experimental conditions in such studies have been so artificially simplified as to have virtually no bearing on any actual processes that might have taken place on the primitive earth. For example, if one wishes to finda possible pre biotic mechanism of condensation of free amino acids to polypeptides, it is not likely that sugars or aldehydes would be added to the reaction mixture. And yet, how likely is it that amino acids (or any other presumed precursor substance) occurred anywhere on the primitive earth freefrom con­ tamination substances, either in solution or the solid state? The difficulty is that if sugars or aldehydes were also present polypep­ tides would not form. Instead an interfering cross-reaction would occur between amino acids and sugars to give complex, insoluble polymeric material of very dubious relevance to chemical evolution. This problem of potentially interfering cross-reactions has been largely neglected in much of the published work on the chemical origins of life. The possible implications of such an omission merit careful study. Other aspects of origin-of-life research have contributed to my growing uneasiness about the theory of chemical evolution. One of these is the enormous gap between the most complex "protocell" model systems produced in the laboratory and the simplest living cells. Anyone familiar with the ultrastructural and biochemical complexity of the genus Mycoplasma, for example, should have serious doubts about the relevance of any of the various laboratory "protocells" to the actual historical origin of cells. In my view, the possibility of closing this gap by laboratory simulation of chemical events likely to have occurred on the primitive earth is extremely remote. Another intractable problem concerns the spontaneous origin of the optical isomer preferences found universally in living matter (e.g., L- rather than o-amino acidsin proteins, o- rather than L- sugars Foreword vii in nucleic acids). Mter all the prodigious effort that has gone into attempts to solve this great question over the years, we are really no nearer to a solution today than we were thirty years ago. Finally, in this brief summary of the reasons for my growing doubts that life on earth could have begun spontaneously by purely chemical and physical means, there is the problem of the origin of genetic, i.e., biologically relevant, information in biopolymers. No experimental system yet devised has provided the slightest clue as to how biologically meaningful sequences of subunits might have ori­ ginated in prebiotic polynucleotides or polypeptides. Evidence for some degree of spontaneous sequence ordering has been published, but there is no indication whatsoever that the non-randomness is biologically significant. Until such evidence is forthcoming one cer­ tainly cannot claim that the possibility of a naturalistic origin of life has been demonstrated. In view of these and other vexing problems in origin-of-life research, there has been a need for some years now for a detailed, systematic analysis of all major aspects of the field. It is time to re-examine the foundations of this research in such a way that all the salient lines of criticism are simultaneously kept in view. The Mystery of Life's Origin admirably fillsthis need. The authors have addressed nearly all the problems enumerated above and several other important ones as well. They believe, and I now concur, that there is a fundamental flaw in all current theories of the chemical or;i.gins of life. Although the tone of the book is critical, the authors have written it in the positive hope that their analysis will help us find a better theory of origins. Such an approach is, of course, entirely consistent with the manner in which scientific advances have occurred in the past. One of the uniquely valuable features of the book is its discussion (Chap. 6) of the relative geochemical plausibilities of the various types of simulation experiments reported in the literature. To my knowledge this is the firstsystematic attempt to devise formal crite­ ria for acceptable degrees of interference by the investigator in such experiments. Another especially helpful feature is the detailed dis­ cussion of the implications of thermodynamics (Chaps. 7, 8, and 9) for the origin-of-life problem. This important topic is either omitted entirely or is treated superficially in most other books on the chemi­ cal origins of life. The authors might have included a more detailed discussion of the problem of optical isomer preferences, but this deficiency detracts in only a minor way from the overall strength of their argument. viii THE MYSTERY OF LIFE'S ORIGIN If the author's criticisms are valid, one might ask, why have they not been recognized or stressed by workers in the field?I suspect that part of the answer is that many scientists would hesitate to accept the authors' conclusion that it is fundamentally implausible that unassisted matter and energy organized themselves into living sys­ tems. Perhaps these scientists fear that acceptance of this conclu­ sion would open the door to the possibility (or the necessity) of a supernatural origin of life. Faced with this prospect many investiga­ tors would prefer to continue in their search for a naturalistic expla­ nation of the origin of life along the lines marked out over the last few decades, in spite of the many serious difficulties of which we are now aware. Perhaps the fallacy of scientism is more widespread than we like to think. One's presuppositions about the origin of life, and especially the assumption that this problem will ultimately yield to a persistent application of current methodology, can certainly influence which lines of evidence and argument one chooses to stress, and which are played down or avoided altogether. Whatthe authors have done is to place before us essentially all the pertinent lines of criticism in one continuous statement and to invite us to face them squarely. All scientists interested in the origin-of-life problem would do well to study this book carefully and to evaluate their own work in the light of its arguments. Dean H. Kenyon Professor of Biology San Francisco State University Preface The Mystery of Life's Origin is a book that had to be written. There is a critical necessity in any developing scientific discipline to subject its ideas to test and to rigorously analyze its experimental proce­ dures.
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