I've just spent the last 2 days reading about it, which i why im posting about it now to hear peoples thoughts. The general conclusions are that self replicating molecules as we know them are too complicated to have arisen from the chemical soup of the primordial earth. so im hoping that IQfy will have ideas for a more simple self replicating system, or will propose multiverse explanations of how something extremely unlikely was actually 100% guaranteed. Surely a scientific discussion board will have something more interesting to say on the origins of life other than 'go read about it'.
>The general conclusions are that self replicating molecules as we know them are too complicated to have arisen from the chemical soup of the primordial earth.
I think this theory is small. They just can't envision a scenario where it can happen. I've seen some interesting theories like certain rock formations served as a "template" for protocells to form. Its all conjecture though. Very hard to prove what early protobiochem was like on earth.
I think in the modern day most people shouldn't be interested in proving what early biochem on earth was like, instead we should be interested in coming up with a way of creating a self-replicating system in a lab, and ideally this system should be more simplistic than RNA/DNA replicating systems so as to be more plausible to spontaneously derive from a chemical soup. Whether or not what we come up with is the same as how life on earth originally developed is not so interesting to me - but being able to create modern day abiogenesis would be incredible, and it seems relatively realistic to achieve considering it must be simple enough to have at one point just happened by chance within the universe.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>I think in the modern day most people shouldn't be interested in proving what early biochem on earth was like
you can do both
doing it in a lab seems like it would be way easier than trying to find evidence for early biochem tbh
2 years ago
Anonymous
yeah that's my point. if we achieve it in a lab it may or may not be the same as how it happened on earth however many billions of years ago, but i feel like it would satisfy my curiosity either way.
2 years ago
Anonymous
RNA/DNA alone can self replicate?
Like chicken or the egg, did RNA DNA come first or the what.
An in tandem process of the DNA molecules needing materials besides itself, to when those materials interact with it, the different order of DNA strands equal a particular function?
How many genes was the first RNA spiral? Nessecerily 1?
The genes themselves are complex particular constructions of molecules?
The key is understanding, the smallest possible biological molecule, though could it be the early ones clicked together and was somewhat larger than smallest possible.
Layers of earth, the surface, altitude variables, climate variables, wind variables, water temperature variable,
And this is before plant life; what came first biological cells and entity like biology, or plan biology?
Plant biologies decaying into cells beggining to form?
If strands of RNA spontaneously formed;
If gene, or 4 genes together spontaneously formed, (what is the spiral strands that hold the genes made of? That had to form right aside the genes, and have the needed capabilities to let the genes seperate)
What could they alone do? RNA/DNA needs other things for anything to be done?
DNA (strand (1)) is made by not DNA strand (1).
DNA requires other things to formulate it?
And the other things require DNA to formulate it? Chicken and the egg symbiosis?
The 4 type of genes (actg is it?)
First there was 1 type?
Or 2?
It could have been many of these various parts and mechanisms developed seperately, and then we're pushed and grouped together;
A bunch of real simple things (like cellular automata) then brought together, will have novel reactions, and evolutions and adaptations;
2 years ago
Anonymous
Humans being a macro version of this; a human can maybe do XYZ alone and may be a certain way, but bring 30 of them in an environment for 12 years, and they change and grow and learn and develop in tandem and do greater than sum of parts stuff
your thinking is too highminded. Borrowing from Dawkins in The Selfish Gene and from my personal impressions over the years (I am a biologist, but my specialization is evo anthropology), I think that RNA/DNA came around as storage media. Life spent a good deal of time without actively using RNA, it was a big soup that kept becoming more, but contained no discrete units (e.g. cells); then, for whatever reason, the stochastic self-reproduction (autopoeisis) of the soup rearranged itself into discrete units, and these discrete units required formal information storage (inactivated genomes, cf. miRNAs that are certainly genetically and chemically active).
Or perhaps the discrete unit was what was necessary to exit the very steep temperature, pH, nitrogen, salinity, and pressure gradients of hydrothermal vents and colonize new habitats, where the cell then formally evolved, only to recolonize hydrothermal vents (in the form of modern extremophiles, which should be considered very ancestral iirc) and displace the amorphous soup present there, thus wiping out the last trace of the "primordial soup".
Or so I imagine it, and the idea reverberates with colleagues, though I haven't had the privilege of someone who specializes in abiogenesis (as the institute that trained me is specialized in anthropology, not molecular chemistry).
2 years ago
Anonymous
You said life could have existed before RNA DNA, in what way, forms, could life have existed?
RNA DNA doesn't act and perform functions on its own, right? It requires things to unzip and 'read' the order the genes are in, and then perform tasks in that order, or, what?
2 years ago
Anonymous
https://www.nature.com/subjects/catalytic-rna
you should familiarize yourself with how active RNA actually can be.
You're thinking of RNA as a cold storage medium, which it isn't.
>in what way, forms, could life have existed?
You run into the problem of agreeing whether it is life or not, hence my use of the term "autopoiesis", as that one is generalized enough to permit observation of a "self-replicating system".
>The general conclusions are that self replicating molecules as we know them are too complicated to have arisen from the chemical soup of the primordial earth.
Totally wrong. We know of many self-polymerizing molecules, phosphoramidate DNA.
We can't calculate the likelihood of the entire process because we don't have enough information, but the probability that there such nucleotides on the primordial earth is 1.
>self replicating molecules as we know them are too complicated to have arisen from the chemical soup of the primordial eart
Black person we've found amino acids on fricking comets wtf are you talking about?
im studying a chem eng degree, for some reason we have to do some biology shite, and "abogenesis" is just taught as absolute fricking gospel lmao. i dont even believe it yet on my exams i have to write about it as if it is an undeniable fact and not just some crazy sci fi dream some hippie once had
thinking about it, it is probably because my biochem professor does a lot of research in that field... i hate academia, i just wanna make oil refineries for gods sake
my university (central europe) embraced that some things are in dispute and not fully explained. They asked you to describe the "currently accepted hypothesis" or similar wording, there was no reddit-tier athiest tilt.
>Read a book about a thing that is literally impossible to have observed >That's it. That's exactly how it happened. Because science. >Wear 2 masks to protect from the 'rona virus. >Take thalidomide. It's safe even if you are pregnant. >Fill your airships full of hydrogen and cover them with thermite.
I'm so glad science is never wrong and knows everything.
Hydrogen was safe, the collision was what killed them. No one in the Hindenburg died from the explosion; the fall killed them. Helium would have the same casualties.
There a neat paper published this year about thermodynamics and evolution. It connects the parameters for machine learning, evolution, and statistical thermodynamics. Pretty cool reading and it gives motivation to abiogenesis.
It is interesting and crazy to think about if RNA DNA cells started in one tiny location of earth, and spread from that point, the size of DNA and cells, to pretty much cover the globe, with the variety of DNA life, pretty crazy
I believe that "inventing" RNA and compartmentalization gives you such a major advantage over the rest of the soup that the soup itself just becomes food instead of a competing organism. The first compartmentalized cell would've had broken efficiency gains over its surroundings, such that we can effectively speak of its surroundings as an agar dish instead of a living, self-reproducing system.
[...]
this is either very smart or hopelessly moronic.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Yea and if its surrounding soup had any mechanical processes; maybe some of the cells consuming the soup consumed parts of this mechanical life processes, and was benefited; similar to how we eat, we break down plants and meat and distribute the parts to cells?
When did plant life start in all this
2 years ago
Anonymous
I would be careful comparing our digestion (which is highly specialized by comparison, and as we are mammals, we only transmute, but cannot "create", organic material, i.e. a plant or a cow has to do most of the work building amino acids and proteins which we then essentially restructure into ourselves, humans have a very reduced digestive enzymatic pallet compared to plants and bacteria) with cellular digestion, particularly when we are talking about proto-cells and their surrounding soup.
It would be safer to suggest that the proto-cell is like an ISRU and the primordial soup the environment it is drilling into. Compartmentalization gives many benefits, but transformation of organic material (e.g. a hawk eating a rabbit) and generation of organic material (autotrophic metabolism) are two different things.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I was merely wondering, the early stages as you suggest may have been a single cell slurping some protolife soup, and that organisms benefit by taking within them the parts and mechsnicsms of other organisms;
Wondering that we are composed of billions of cells,.and our slurping of soup feeds them.
So like cells formed networks of cells, and combined their abilities, to find beneficial soup to slurp, to take on more to do more, and that is pretty much the foundation of life.
When did plant life come about in the abiogenesis picture, and what roles did it possibly play?
2 years ago
Anonymous
Plants came way after single celled organisms. iirc the higher plants should be derivatives of cyanobacteria (or performed endosymbiosis with them), so life was well under way by the time plants showed up.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Even single celled organisms seem more alive and creature like than plants, and yet plants came after them, and happened to tremendously benefit life in a variety of ways?
How did this happen?
Is it possible multi cell organisms edited genes to produce plants,.and then naturally selected plants that; with rain, sun, gass intake and emission, molecular production, decay intake (soil sucking), benefited their cellular abilities?
2 years ago
Anonymous
Plants are successful independent of the other kingdoms.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>Plants are successful independent of the other kingdoms.
But plants don't possess conciousness, it seems like the only point of their existence is benefiting concious life (considering animals and maybe even some small multi cellular life is concious).
The only thing plants can be said to be successful, is providing humankind with various fruits, vegetables, medicines, materials; I bet they did the same for the mini simple cellulars;
It is tempting to wonder if humans and macro plants are not macro versions of microbes and mini plants, and if plants are not some purposeful construction of early mini celled organisms.
Their own versions of micro farming
2 years ago
Anonymous
>It is tempting to wonder if humans and macro plants are not macro versions of microbes and mini plants, and if plants are not some purposeful construction of early mini celled organisms. >Their own versions of micro farming
Is this possible? Self moving cellular life is different then non, brains have minds. Plants are composed of DNA but they are hardly alive, as a dragonfly, scorpion, horseshoe crab, snake, tardigrade is alive and brainful, quickly interactive with the variables of environment. Processing informations of the environment and self moving in relation to intepretations of that information.
So if plants came much later than this other kind of life; how did they come about? A bunch and a bunch and a bunch of the other life died and decayed, and all that dieing decaying materials and DNA souped together and out of that mixture grew the precursor ancestors of all plant life?
Living moving cellular life had random genetic mutations that resulted in ones child being a blade of grass?
Genetic mutations especially in that early stage, I mean infinite genetic mutations can happen, but what is required for them to be in any way meaningful is infrastructure of the body that can read and react to that genetic information.
Then proper perfect faultless genetic code readers and actioners had to be developed, so yeah infinite dna of infinte types can be made and made and made, but with no consistent reader and actor and body stable of it, it's useless, so how the knowing perfect reader was developed, and then so when it died there was another able perfect reader and actor; have to develop in tandem
>extremely unlikely thing happens and creates life >the life eventually ends up fussing about how unlikely that was >meanwhile on ten trillion planets devoid of life, there's no life to think about how unlikely life is
Literal kindergarten thoughts. You would never be able to put this drivel in the form of a syllogism because it has zero content. It's not an argument.
>You would never be able to put this drivel in the form of a syllogism because it has zero content
Please make a syllogism showing that anything which is not able to be put in the form of a syllogism has zero content.
There are many possible liquids and mixtures of liquids and oils and lipids and goos and slimes and pond scums in puddles and lakes and ponds and muds, and consider who easily and often bubbles and domes are made in liquids, boiling water, or just disturbed waters bubble up
>habitable world
Not a biologist, but isn't it shortsighted to believe that the conditions where life emerged here on Earth must be met for life to emerge somewhere else? Even on this planet there are environments where life would seem unthinkable for a human and yet plenty of organisms thrive.
>LUCA
is their any proof all life shares same common LUCA? what if archea and bacteria or different bacteria phyla had had different last ancestors but ended up being similar because of horizontal genetic transfer?
For it to be otherwise (consider how large the surface area of the earth is) the precursors to life would have started multiple locations on earth and either been different or the same.
It is interesting and crazy to think about if RNA DNA cells started in one tiny location of earth, and spread from that point, the size of DNA and cells, to pretty much cover the globe, with the variety of DNA life, pretty crazy
Abiogenesis
RNA world
It's actually a really complex and interesting field of study, one of my friends did their thesis on it, and will start research next semester. I don't know all that much, but i can answer basics. But your best bet to understand is to read the literature. I'll upload a paper that is a good starting point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle >The anthropic principle, also known as the "observation selection effect", is the hypothesis that there is a restrictive lower bound on how statistically probable our observations of the universe are, because observations could only happen in a universe capable of developing intelligent life. Proponents of the anthropic principle argue that it explains why this universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate conscious life, since if either had been different, we would not have been around to make observations.
/thread
>it is this way because if it were another way, we wouldn't be here to ask why is it this way
No shit, that's the point. It is this way so we can ask questions, that doesn't answer the question as to why it is this way.
This is genuinely unintelligent and I have no idea how people can take this seriously. Are you unintelligent, anon? I don't think you are, so why are you accepting such a shitty argument?
>you are guilty of teleological reasoning and/or attempting to forcefully categorize life according to some cosmological principle you haven't admitted to us yet. >Plants live for their own sake. Some species make use of them.
It's 50 50 wheather a teleology exists or not here or there for this or that, you do not know for certain it does or does not exist so let's consider both cases.
Plants do not live for their own sake because there is no sake of them, only brains/minds have sakes.
Plants are in some way related to all animals, all DNA possessors are related. Related as; the group of objects that possess DNA.
Creatures that can self move with many degrees of freedom, multi cellular organisms, though there are these which are rather solitary.... A lot of this has to do with conciousness/brain/mindness...
Without any brain mindness, all sorts of complicated stuff on earth and plants can be happening but none of it experienced.
Non self and world-experiencing biological matter, developed into self and world-experiencing biological matter;
From the smallest simplest weakest abilities, developed very far from those states and characteristics;
The motivation was increased self and world experience.
The difference between the first cells environment detecting and sensifying apparatuses compared to our bodies complex network of senses.
Not every part of a cell or our body is concious material; bones or veins material is not independantly mindful and concious, but a certain amount of it in a certain order is required for our mindfulness;
Early simple celled organisms required materials from the environment (materials unlike them) they could use to build and replicate themselves and fashion their parts out of.
Plants capture and create useable bioligical material, for non plants to build, maintain, and replicate their bodies.
So if we consider earth to be 1 large cell, plants would be akin to bones and veins, non plant life brain/mind
>Plants go to war with eachother over the course of decades or centuries. You should read about trees releasing signalling chemicals. It is also theorized that bamboo evolved to its current reproductive cycle (one massive synchronized letting loose of pollen once every 40 years) to combat predation by herbivores, i.e. the plants are fighting back.
But they are not concious, they are programmed by DNA to act. Concious beings are largely programmed by DNA but the brain mind system allows incredibly fluid quick paced self and environment interaction.
Herbivores likely don't know what's best for them, so the bamboo is like if you eat us all there will be no more bamboo for you, so we develop this tactic to better ensure us sticking around.
The whole thing is there is no self directed purpose, no thought process, it's all automatic DNA programming. We can say butterflies and squirrels and beavers is all automatic DNA programming, squirrels can't help but want to run across trees, and eat nuts, it's automatic, butterflies can't help but love flowers, but they do possess degrees of freedom steming from mind, they are in control of limbs and their body, there are personality differences between them
>the plants are fighting back
You can't personify it like this. There is no conscious effort. There is just selection. The flora more fit for survival are what we see today
anthropomorphizing is all we've got to describe these processes with. Nobody's bothered to develop unteleological diction for use by biologists when describing what the gene machines do.
Herbivores likely don't know what's best for them, so the bamboo is like if you eat us all there will be no more bamboo for you, so we develop this tactic to better ensure us sticking around.
The whole thing is there is no self directed purpose, no thought process, it's all automatic DNA programming. We can say butterflies and squirrels and beavers is all automatic DNA programming, squirrels can't help but want to run across trees, and eat nuts, it's automatic, butterflies can't help but love flowers, but they do possess degrees of freedom steming from mind, they are in control of limbs and their body, there are personality differences between them
Plants do not live for their own sake because there is no sake of them, only brains/minds have sakes.
Plants are in some way related to all animals, all DNA possessors are related. Related as; the group of objects that possess DNA.
Creatures that can self move with many degrees of freedom, multi cellular organisms, though there are these which are rather solitary.... A lot of this has to do with conciousness/brain/mindness...
Without any brain mindness, all sorts of complicated stuff on earth and plants can be happening but none of it experienced.
Non self and world-experiencing biological matter, developed into self and world-experiencing biological matter;
From the smallest simplest weakest abilities, developed very far from those states and characteristics;
The motivation was increased self and world experience.
The difference between the first cells environment detecting and sensifying apparatuses compared to our bodies complex network of senses.
Not every part of a cell or our body is concious material; bones or veins material is not independantly mindful and concious, but a certain amount of it in a certain order is required for our mindfulness;
Early simple celled organisms required materials from the environment (materials unlike them) they could use to build and replicate themselves and fashion their parts out of.
Plants capture and create useable bioligical material, for non plants to build, maintain, and replicate their bodies.
So if we consider earth to be 1 large cell, plants would be akin to bones and veins, non plant life brain/mind
>let's consider both cases
Occam's razor makes it safe to throw out.
>only brains/minds have sakes.
Only according to your pseudo-spiritual principle that I am under no obligation to honor or expect to help us understand abiogenesis better.
Invalid use of Occam's razor. You have to delineate the premises of both sides to determine if that is actually so. Spectacular failure when discussing unwitnessed events of the smallest order perhaps billions of years ago. Your b***h ass can't even prove that you aren't a bot, or that yesterday even happened. If you don't want to talk with the dude, then just don't respond. Fricking plebbitors.
>Occam's razor makes it safe to throw out.
Occam's razor makes Occam's razor safe to throw out, making Occam's razor a circular myopic paradoxical worthless imperfect untrustworthy quick and convienient easy simple rubeish rubbish way to deflect and deny and dismiss a thought due to ones own predilection for possessing their ignorance.
Just kidding, but Occam's razor is an overly simple, groundless goof. A discussion of possible meaning of purpose and teleology and the possibilities of biological intention and goal orientation is a long ardous topic for a seperate discussion perhaps, if one is not interested or knowledgeable in that topic it makes perfect sense, using occams razor that the reaon they would want to dismiss and nullify the totality of that topics potential is because of their short comings in relation to it.
>>only brains/minds have sakes. >Only according to your pseudo-spiritual principle that I am under no obligation to honor or expect to help us understand abiogenesis better.
If plants have sakes, rocks have sakes?
Or DNA has a sake, alone, or only when I specific cells?
Gardners believe flowers have a more worthy sake than weeds
What can something unable to experience anything, benefit in anyway from this or that or the other? Where does benefit, for sake, come into play, get rewarded pay?
"for their own sake" or "for X sake" is an American idiom describing that something does something for its own reasons. Rocks do not do anything. Plants, at their most base level (just like any single cell organism, any animal, and humans), live to reproduce themselves.
Just kidding, but Occam's razor is an overly simple, groundless goof. A discussion of possible meaning of purpose and teleology and the possibilities of biological intention and goal orientation is a long ardous topic for a seperate discussion perhaps, if one is not interested or knowledgeable in that topic it makes perfect sense, using occams razor that the reaon they would want to dismiss and nullify the totality of that topics potential is because of their short comings in relation to it.
I will respond to the rest in a bit
convince me why I should humor teleological or cosmological explanations/principles if they do not promise a superior understanding of biology, when the field of thermodynamics with negentropy specifically does a good job at it already without introducing an extra set of axioms.
>throwing out a more complex set of axioms in favor of a simpler set is abuse of parsimony
ok guy
2 years ago
Anonymous
>a more complex set of axioms in favor of a simpler set
What methods did you use to reach that gureenteed flawless conclusion?
2 years ago
Anonymous
>Plants, at their most base level (just like any single cell organism, any animal, and humans), live to reproduce themselves.
But other organisms experience their life and living, they feel rewards for actions. Does a plant feel?? Does a plant experience?
If not, a rock made to roll down the hill by wind is just like a plant made to grow up by water and the sun, pure non experienced determinism
[...]
convince me why I should humor teleological or cosmological explanations/principles if they do not promise a superior understanding of biology, when the field of thermodynamics with negentropy specifically does a good job at it already without introducing an extra set of axioms.
[...] >throwing out a more complex set of axioms in favor of a simpler set is abuse of parsimony
ok guy
You didn't catch that bit^^^ of implied natural selection.
How much does animal cellular biology naturally select plants over the last 100,000 years? I will agree big trees got carried away and now can hardly be controlled, but we hardly want to because we like them, our strange cousins.
Ok so dna life was first self moving cellular (not rooted plant like), and then plants somehow started, and somehow became infinitely beneficial and integral to the growth and progression of bio cell non rooted dna life
>earth, 4.3 billion BC or whatever >Atmosphere all CO2, N2 and H2O with traces of other shit farting around >Lightningstorm.physics >ionized and radicalized gas molecules react with eachother to deionise/deradicalize, creating more complex molecules like carbonates, formic acids, methanols, cyanides, cyanates, nitrates, amines etc. etc. etc. >These continue fricking around in the air until they decide the ocean would be more comfy >In the ocean these molecules sink, and sink, and sink all the way down until eventually there's at least a small concentration at the bottom of the ocean. >there's more shit at the bottom of the ocean though: >Ocean_Floor_vent.thermodynamucs >The chemicals happen to meet the high temperature water, and find themselves in gaseous pockets of water vapour and CO2 and whatever else is in there, which gives them the conditions to react, rearrange etc. >After reacting the water cools because it's still at the bottom of the ocean, leaving the reacted chemicals in the water again, able to be pulled back into the thermal vent >reflux aparratus.chemistry
(1/?)
>So we have atmospheric ionization performing gaseous electrochemistry, and thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean refluxing the primordial soup >In this process, all the amino acids, sugars and whatever else can possibly be formed in these conditions is formed in these conditions. >As these chemicals build up, they start to react with eachother in the thermal streams >Over time, this would create flimsy randomized DNA-like molecules from the nucleobases we're familiar with and more rarely others we're not familiar with. It could be that ATCG was a coincidence, or it could be that those are the most easily formed options >These random DNA-like molecules would be shit, frankly. sugars sticking out all over the place, amino acids mixed in, maybe some sulfates, chlorides, all sorts of shitty garbage >BUT >hydrogen_bonding.quantummechanics >Regardless of what the soup polymer looks like, it will have some nucleobases in it somewhere because those bastards are in meteorites so they're probably in the primordial soup >In the rest of the ocean nearby, there will be other nucleobases floating around. >If, perchance, these come closer and are compatible, they will hydrogen bond with our proto-DNA-polymer >If these nucleobases are attached to sugars and amino acids, when they next get blasted by the thermal vent, the existing proto-DNA-polymer will act as a catalyst, having held the nucleobase building blocks in enough proximity to eachother that they'll be more likely than otherwise to react with each-other. >first-self-replication.biologyquestionmark
(2/?)
(I hate this 2000 character limit lmao)
>The first proto-DNA molecule thing will have, purely by chance, catalysed the creation of a second one >This "second" proto-DNA-polymer will, again, be a warped and twisted monstrocity compared to what we have now. However, if we simplify it a section of the original in this scenario would be as follows: >-A-(8 sugars or amino acids)-T-(19 sugars or amino acids)-T-(5 sugars or amino acids)-C- >This original was a mess, created completely at random from whatever floated nearby over the course of 10,000 trips through thermal vents. >the nucleobases for the second molecule catalysed by the first, though, only hydrogen bonded with the sparsely distributed nucleobases in this catalysis scenario, so it's much less likely that there would be extra sugars and amino acids between them in the second molecule and it might look more like this: >T-(1 sugar)-A-(2 amino acids)-A-C >With the nucleobases flipped by their pairing, of course. >this refined proto-DNA molecule would then go and frick around in the ocean again, picking up more nucleobases before being heated in the thermal vents to create more proto-DNA molecules
(3/3, i think)
I propose that not only is abiogenesis possible, i think it's unreasonably simple. So simple in fact, that i have high hopes for the ease with which life will have formed on other planets. If we can reason our way to these DNA-like molecules self-replicating purely by being heated and cooled repeatedly, it's not too far to get to protocells and random proteins.
That's a classic view for sure. RNA-world theory has gained a lot of attention in the past decade (essentially everything you said but RNA instead of DNA). The second interesting theory that's popped up is the idea the lipid wold theory, that lipid spheres/membranes predated the self-replicating RNA/DNA and are where all of the critical chemical reactions took place that led to self-replicating molecules. It addresses one of the questions of abiogenesis, which is how you get a high enough concentration of the pre-bio molecules together to react and mutate properly/how they found themselves surrounded in a lipid membrane. Pre-life conditions had lipid-like micells, and the original thought is by randomly dividing/coming together, they could have trapped molecules inside. While possible, it was always a bit "meh" for me, but recent work suggests that pre-RNA structures could have actually been embedded/attached to the lipid-like membrane and reactions took place on a much smaller 2D plane, which would concentrate the molecules without requiring random-encapsulation from lipids
I propose that not only is abiogenesis possible, i think it's unreasonably simple. So simple in fact, that i have high hopes for the ease with which life will have formed on other planets. If we can reason our way to these DNA-like molecules self-replicating purely by being heated and cooled repeatedly, it's not too far to get to protocells and random proteins.
Very cool, fun journey.
Having to navigate the ocean seems a bit tough, weren't there a lot of shallow pools and puddles around too, and would sun light heating them up do anything, or are the thermal vents needed? .there are shallow hot springs and geysers and volcanic areas.and things too right
there's an entire field of study about this called "abiogenesis"
read a book or two
I've just spent the last 2 days reading about it, which i why im posting about it now to hear peoples thoughts. The general conclusions are that self replicating molecules as we know them are too complicated to have arisen from the chemical soup of the primordial earth. so im hoping that IQfy will have ideas for a more simple self replicating system, or will propose multiverse explanations of how something extremely unlikely was actually 100% guaranteed. Surely a scientific discussion board will have something more interesting to say on the origins of life other than 'go read about it'.
>The general conclusions are that self replicating molecules as we know them are too complicated to have arisen from the chemical soup of the primordial earth.
I think this theory is small. They just can't envision a scenario where it can happen. I've seen some interesting theories like certain rock formations served as a "template" for protocells to form. Its all conjecture though. Very hard to prove what early protobiochem was like on earth.
I think in the modern day most people shouldn't be interested in proving what early biochem on earth was like, instead we should be interested in coming up with a way of creating a self-replicating system in a lab, and ideally this system should be more simplistic than RNA/DNA replicating systems so as to be more plausible to spontaneously derive from a chemical soup. Whether or not what we come up with is the same as how life on earth originally developed is not so interesting to me - but being able to create modern day abiogenesis would be incredible, and it seems relatively realistic to achieve considering it must be simple enough to have at one point just happened by chance within the universe.
>I think in the modern day most people shouldn't be interested in proving what early biochem on earth was like
you can do both
doing it in a lab seems like it would be way easier than trying to find evidence for early biochem tbh
yeah that's my point. if we achieve it in a lab it may or may not be the same as how it happened on earth however many billions of years ago, but i feel like it would satisfy my curiosity either way.
RNA/DNA alone can self replicate?
Like chicken or the egg, did RNA DNA come first or the what.
An in tandem process of the DNA molecules needing materials besides itself, to when those materials interact with it, the different order of DNA strands equal a particular function?
How many genes was the first RNA spiral? Nessecerily 1?
The genes themselves are complex particular constructions of molecules?
The key is understanding, the smallest possible biological molecule, though could it be the early ones clicked together and was somewhat larger than smallest possible.
Solid, liquid, gas, electricity, magnetism, gravity, protons, neutron, electrons
Layers of earth, the surface, altitude variables, climate variables, wind variables, water temperature variable,
And this is before plant life; what came first biological cells and entity like biology, or plan biology?
Plant biologies decaying into cells beggining to form?
If strands of RNA spontaneously formed;
If gene, or 4 genes together spontaneously formed, (what is the spiral strands that hold the genes made of? That had to form right aside the genes, and have the needed capabilities to let the genes seperate)
What could they alone do? RNA/DNA needs other things for anything to be done?
DNA (strand (1)) is made by not DNA strand (1).
DNA requires other things to formulate it?
And the other things require DNA to formulate it? Chicken and the egg symbiosis?
The 4 type of genes (actg is it?)
First there was 1 type?
Or 2?
It could have been many of these various parts and mechanisms developed seperately, and then we're pushed and grouped together;
A bunch of real simple things (like cellular automata) then brought together, will have novel reactions, and evolutions and adaptations;
Humans being a macro version of this; a human can maybe do XYZ alone and may be a certain way, but bring 30 of them in an environment for 12 years, and they change and grow and learn and develop in tandem and do greater than sum of parts stuff
Someone who knows about RNA DNA please respond
Someone answer this please
your thinking is too highminded. Borrowing from Dawkins in The Selfish Gene and from my personal impressions over the years (I am a biologist, but my specialization is evo anthropology), I think that RNA/DNA came around as storage media. Life spent a good deal of time without actively using RNA, it was a big soup that kept becoming more, but contained no discrete units (e.g. cells); then, for whatever reason, the stochastic self-reproduction (autopoeisis) of the soup rearranged itself into discrete units, and these discrete units required formal information storage (inactivated genomes, cf. miRNAs that are certainly genetically and chemically active).
Or perhaps the discrete unit was what was necessary to exit the very steep temperature, pH, nitrogen, salinity, and pressure gradients of hydrothermal vents and colonize new habitats, where the cell then formally evolved, only to recolonize hydrothermal vents (in the form of modern extremophiles, which should be considered very ancestral iirc) and displace the amorphous soup present there, thus wiping out the last trace of the "primordial soup".
Or so I imagine it, and the idea reverberates with colleagues, though I haven't had the privilege of someone who specializes in abiogenesis (as the institute that trained me is specialized in anthropology, not molecular chemistry).
You said life could have existed before RNA DNA, in what way, forms, could life have existed?
RNA DNA doesn't act and perform functions on its own, right? It requires things to unzip and 'read' the order the genes are in, and then perform tasks in that order, or, what?
https://www.nature.com/subjects/catalytic-rna
you should familiarize yourself with how active RNA actually can be.
You're thinking of RNA as a cold storage medium, which it isn't.
>in what way, forms, could life have existed?
You run into the problem of agreeing whether it is life or not, hence my use of the term "autopoiesis", as that one is generalized enough to permit observation of a "self-replicating system".
>The general conclusions are that self replicating molecules as we know them are too complicated to have arisen from the chemical soup of the primordial earth.
Totally wrong. We know of many self-polymerizing molecules, phosphoramidate DNA.
We can't calculate the likelihood of the entire process because we don't have enough information, but the probability that there such nucleotides on the primordial earth is 1.
>self replicating molecules as we know them are too complicated to have arisen from the chemical soup of the primordial eart
Black person we've found amino acids on fricking comets wtf are you talking about?
>proof that aliens exist.
im studying a chem eng degree, for some reason we have to do some biology shite, and "abogenesis" is just taught as absolute fricking gospel lmao. i dont even believe it yet on my exams i have to write about it as if it is an undeniable fact and not just some crazy sci fi dream some hippie once had
thinking about it, it is probably because my biochem professor does a lot of research in that field... i hate academia, i just wanna make oil refineries for gods sake
my university (central europe) embraced that some things are in dispute and not fully explained. They asked you to describe the "currently accepted hypothesis" or similar wording, there was no reddit-tier athiest tilt.
>i dont even believe
*i don't even understand
ftfy
>Read a book about a thing that is literally impossible to have observed
>That's it. That's exactly how it happened. Because science.
>Wear 2 masks to protect from the 'rona virus.
>Take thalidomide. It's safe even if you are pregnant.
>Fill your airships full of hydrogen and cover them with thermite.
I'm so glad science is never wrong and knows everything.
Hydrogen was safe, the collision was what killed them. No one in the Hindenburg died from the explosion; the fall killed them. Helium would have the same casualties.
There a neat paper published this year about thermodynamics and evolution. It connects the parameters for machine learning, evolution, and statistical thermodynamics. Pretty cool reading and it gives motivation to abiogenesis.
..you wouldn't mind posting a DOI, would you?
life should be a necessary consequence of the right conditions. Read about negentropy.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2120042119
Thermodynamics of evolution and the origin of life.
The first table is sex.
yoo, pulling through!
Thanks fambly.
I believe that "inventing" RNA and compartmentalization gives you such a major advantage over the rest of the soup that the soup itself just becomes food instead of a competing organism. The first compartmentalized cell would've had broken efficiency gains over its surroundings, such that we can effectively speak of its surroundings as an agar dish instead of a living, self-reproducing system.
this is either very smart or hopelessly moronic.
Yea and if its surrounding soup had any mechanical processes; maybe some of the cells consuming the soup consumed parts of this mechanical life processes, and was benefited; similar to how we eat, we break down plants and meat and distribute the parts to cells?
When did plant life start in all this
I would be careful comparing our digestion (which is highly specialized by comparison, and as we are mammals, we only transmute, but cannot "create", organic material, i.e. a plant or a cow has to do most of the work building amino acids and proteins which we then essentially restructure into ourselves, humans have a very reduced digestive enzymatic pallet compared to plants and bacteria) with cellular digestion, particularly when we are talking about proto-cells and their surrounding soup.
It would be safer to suggest that the proto-cell is like an ISRU and the primordial soup the environment it is drilling into. Compartmentalization gives many benefits, but transformation of organic material (e.g. a hawk eating a rabbit) and generation of organic material (autotrophic metabolism) are two different things.
I was merely wondering, the early stages as you suggest may have been a single cell slurping some protolife soup, and that organisms benefit by taking within them the parts and mechsnicsms of other organisms;
Wondering that we are composed of billions of cells,.and our slurping of soup feeds them.
So like cells formed networks of cells, and combined their abilities, to find beneficial soup to slurp, to take on more to do more, and that is pretty much the foundation of life.
When did plant life come about in the abiogenesis picture, and what roles did it possibly play?
Plants came way after single celled organisms. iirc the higher plants should be derivatives of cyanobacteria (or performed endosymbiosis with them), so life was well under way by the time plants showed up.
Even single celled organisms seem more alive and creature like than plants, and yet plants came after them, and happened to tremendously benefit life in a variety of ways?
How did this happen?
Is it possible multi cell organisms edited genes to produce plants,.and then naturally selected plants that; with rain, sun, gass intake and emission, molecular production, decay intake (soil sucking), benefited their cellular abilities?
Plants are successful independent of the other kingdoms.
>Plants are successful independent of the other kingdoms.
But plants don't possess conciousness, it seems like the only point of their existence is benefiting concious life (considering animals and maybe even some small multi cellular life is concious).
The only thing plants can be said to be successful, is providing humankind with various fruits, vegetables, medicines, materials; I bet they did the same for the mini simple cellulars;
It is tempting to wonder if humans and macro plants are not macro versions of microbes and mini plants, and if plants are not some purposeful construction of early mini celled organisms.
Their own versions of micro farming
>It is tempting to wonder if humans and macro plants are not macro versions of microbes and mini plants, and if plants are not some purposeful construction of early mini celled organisms.
>Their own versions of micro farming
Is this possible? Self moving cellular life is different then non, brains have minds. Plants are composed of DNA but they are hardly alive, as a dragonfly, scorpion, horseshoe crab, snake, tardigrade is alive and brainful, quickly interactive with the variables of environment. Processing informations of the environment and self moving in relation to intepretations of that information.
So if plants came much later than this other kind of life; how did they come about? A bunch and a bunch and a bunch of the other life died and decayed, and all that dieing decaying materials and DNA souped together and out of that mixture grew the precursor ancestors of all plant life?
Living moving cellular life had random genetic mutations that resulted in ones child being a blade of grass?
Genetic mutations especially in that early stage, I mean infinite genetic mutations can happen, but what is required for them to be in any way meaningful is infrastructure of the body that can read and react to that genetic information.
Then proper perfect faultless genetic code readers and actioners had to be developed, so yeah infinite dna of infinte types can be made and made and made, but with no consistent reader and actor and body stable of it, it's useless, so how the knowing perfect reader was developed, and then so when it died there was another able perfect reader and actor; have to develop in tandem
>published this year about
So two more weeks until proof and experimental proof in a lab (which will be intelligent design) by definition.
So far it seems 100% of the planets we have looked at have life starting on them. Doesn't seem too rare to me
>extremely unlikely thing happens and creates life
>the life eventually ends up fussing about how unlikely that was
>meanwhile on ten trillion planets devoid of life, there's no life to think about how unlikely life is
this, huge survivorship bias
Literal kindergarten thoughts. You would never be able to put this drivel in the form of a syllogism because it has zero content. It's not an argument.
>You would never be able to put this drivel in the form of a syllogism because it has zero content
Please make a syllogism showing that anything which is not able to be put in the form of a syllogism has zero content.
god obviously lol
There are many possible liquids and mixtures of liquids and oils and lipids and goos and slimes and pond scums in puddles and lakes and ponds and muds, and consider who easily and often bubbles and domes are made in liquids, boiling water, or just disturbed waters bubble up
Bro I'm getting mad cut the bullshit how did life start
It's not unlikely, just requires a real big tube. To ensure that every possible component is present when the creation of the first cells begin.
God said to be so
We can do the stats.
# of Earths for which data exists: 1
# of Earths which contain life: 1
Estimated probability: 1/1 = 100%
>habitable world
Not a biologist, but isn't it shortsighted to believe that the conditions where life emerged here on Earth must be met for life to emerge somewhere else? Even on this planet there are environments where life would seem unthinkable for a human and yet plenty of organisms thrive.
>LUCA
is their any proof all life shares same common LUCA? what if archea and bacteria or different bacteria phyla had had different last ancestors but ended up being similar because of horizontal genetic transfer?
For it to be otherwise (consider how large the surface area of the earth is) the precursors to life would have started multiple locations on earth and either been different or the same.
It is interesting and crazy to think about if RNA DNA cells started in one tiny location of earth, and spread from that point, the size of DNA and cells, to pretty much cover the globe, with the variety of DNA life, pretty crazy
Abiogenesis
RNA world
It's actually a really complex and interesting field of study, one of my friends did their thesis on it, and will start research next semester. I don't know all that much, but i can answer basics. But your best bet to understand is to read the literature. I'll upload a paper that is a good starting point.
Big fricking mystery. Legos had to place themselves in right spots and there was shitton of time for it to happen.
Meteor probably didn't originate here even if it's possible for life to create on its own.
I farted. oops
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
>The anthropic principle, also known as the "observation selection effect", is the hypothesis that there is a restrictive lower bound on how statistically probable our observations of the universe are, because observations could only happen in a universe capable of developing intelligent life. Proponents of the anthropic principle argue that it explains why this universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate conscious life, since if either had been different, we would not have been around to make observations.
/thread
>it happened because it did chuds lool get a clue!
Thanks for outing yourself as a moron
Read more on selection bias.
>it is this way because if it were another way, we wouldn't be here to ask why is it this way
No shit, that's the point. It is this way so we can ask questions, that doesn't answer the question as to why it is this way.
This is genuinely unintelligent and I have no idea how people can take this seriously. Are you unintelligent, anon? I don't think you are, so why are you accepting such a shitty argument?
No. It was actually very likely, given the conditions. Actually 100% likely
Sara walker has some very interesting insights.. Kind of unrelated, but the story of the emergence of cyanobacteria alone will blow your fricking mind
>a woman
>interesting insights
No thanks.
Life appeared not too long after Earth's formation, does that seem unlikely?
>you are guilty of teleological reasoning and/or attempting to forcefully categorize life according to some cosmological principle you haven't admitted to us yet.
>Plants live for their own sake. Some species make use of them.
It's 50 50 wheather a teleology exists or not here or there for this or that, you do not know for certain it does or does not exist so let's consider both cases.
Plants do not live for their own sake because there is no sake of them, only brains/minds have sakes.
Plants are in some way related to all animals, all DNA possessors are related. Related as; the group of objects that possess DNA.
Creatures that can self move with many degrees of freedom, multi cellular organisms, though there are these which are rather solitary.... A lot of this has to do with conciousness/brain/mindness...
Without any brain mindness, all sorts of complicated stuff on earth and plants can be happening but none of it experienced.
Non self and world-experiencing biological matter, developed into self and world-experiencing biological matter;
From the smallest simplest weakest abilities, developed very far from those states and characteristics;
The motivation was increased self and world experience.
The difference between the first cells environment detecting and sensifying apparatuses compared to our bodies complex network of senses.
Not every part of a cell or our body is concious material; bones or veins material is not independantly mindful and concious, but a certain amount of it in a certain order is required for our mindfulness;
Early simple celled organisms required materials from the environment (materials unlike them) they could use to build and replicate themselves and fashion their parts out of.
Plants capture and create useable bioligical material, for non plants to build, maintain, and replicate their bodies.
So if we consider earth to be 1 large cell, plants would be akin to bones and veins, non plant life brain/mind
>Plants go to war with eachother over the course of decades or centuries. You should read about trees releasing signalling chemicals. It is also theorized that bamboo evolved to its current reproductive cycle (one massive synchronized letting loose of pollen once every 40 years) to combat predation by herbivores, i.e. the plants are fighting back.
But they are not concious, they are programmed by DNA to act. Concious beings are largely programmed by DNA but the brain mind system allows incredibly fluid quick paced self and environment interaction.
Herbivores likely don't know what's best for them, so the bamboo is like if you eat us all there will be no more bamboo for you, so we develop this tactic to better ensure us sticking around.
The whole thing is there is no self directed purpose, no thought process, it's all automatic DNA programming. We can say butterflies and squirrels and beavers is all automatic DNA programming, squirrels can't help but want to run across trees, and eat nuts, it's automatic, butterflies can't help but love flowers, but they do possess degrees of freedom steming from mind, they are in control of limbs and their body, there are personality differences between them
>the plants are fighting back
You can't personify it like this. There is no conscious effort. There is just selection. The flora more fit for survival are what we see today
anthropomorphizing is all we've got to describe these processes with. Nobody's bothered to develop unteleological diction for use by biologists when describing what the gene machines do.
>let's consider both cases
Occam's razor makes it safe to throw out.
>only brains/minds have sakes.
Only according to your pseudo-spiritual principle that I am under no obligation to honor or expect to help us understand abiogenesis better.
Invalid use of Occam's razor. You have to delineate the premises of both sides to determine if that is actually so. Spectacular failure when discussing unwitnessed events of the smallest order perhaps billions of years ago. Your b***h ass can't even prove that you aren't a bot, or that yesterday even happened. If you don't want to talk with the dude, then just don't respond. Fricking plebbitors.
>Occam's razor makes it safe to throw out.
Occam's razor makes Occam's razor safe to throw out, making Occam's razor a circular myopic paradoxical worthless imperfect untrustworthy quick and convienient easy simple rubeish rubbish way to deflect and deny and dismiss a thought due to ones own predilection for possessing their ignorance.
Just kidding, but Occam's razor is an overly simple, groundless goof. A discussion of possible meaning of purpose and teleology and the possibilities of biological intention and goal orientation is a long ardous topic for a seperate discussion perhaps, if one is not interested or knowledgeable in that topic it makes perfect sense, using occams razor that the reaon they would want to dismiss and nullify the totality of that topics potential is because of their short comings in relation to it.
I will respond to the rest in a bit
>>only brains/minds have sakes.
>Only according to your pseudo-spiritual principle that I am under no obligation to honor or expect to help us understand abiogenesis better.
If plants have sakes, rocks have sakes?
Or DNA has a sake, alone, or only when I specific cells?
Gardners believe flowers have a more worthy sake than weeds
What can something unable to experience anything, benefit in anyway from this or that or the other? Where does benefit, for sake, come into play, get rewarded pay?
"for their own sake" or "for X sake" is an American idiom describing that something does something for its own reasons. Rocks do not do anything. Plants, at their most base level (just like any single cell organism, any animal, and humans), live to reproduce themselves.
convince me why I should humor teleological or cosmological explanations/principles if they do not promise a superior understanding of biology, when the field of thermodynamics with negentropy specifically does a good job at it already without introducing an extra set of axioms.
>throwing out a more complex set of axioms in favor of a simpler set is abuse of parsimony
ok guy
>a more complex set of axioms in favor of a simpler set
What methods did you use to reach that gureenteed flawless conclusion?
>Plants, at their most base level (just like any single cell organism, any animal, and humans), live to reproduce themselves.
But other organisms experience their life and living, they feel rewards for actions. Does a plant feel?? Does a plant experience?
If not, a rock made to roll down the hill by wind is just like a plant made to grow up by water and the sun, pure non experienced determinism
>Gardners believe flowers have a more worthy sake than weeds
You didn't catch that bit^^^ of implied natural selection.
How much does animal cellular biology naturally select plants over the last 100,000 years? I will agree big trees got carried away and now can hardly be controlled, but we hardly want to because we like them, our strange cousins.
Ok so dna life was first self moving cellular (not rooted plant like), and then plants somehow started, and somehow became infinitely beneficial and integral to the growth and progression of bio cell non rooted dna life
>earth, 4.3 billion BC or whatever
>Atmosphere all CO2, N2 and H2O with traces of other shit farting around
>Lightningstorm.physics
>ionized and radicalized gas molecules react with eachother to deionise/deradicalize, creating more complex molecules like carbonates, formic acids, methanols, cyanides, cyanates, nitrates, amines etc. etc. etc.
>These continue fricking around in the air until they decide the ocean would be more comfy
>In the ocean these molecules sink, and sink, and sink all the way down until eventually there's at least a small concentration at the bottom of the ocean.
>there's more shit at the bottom of the ocean though:
>Ocean_Floor_vent.thermodynamucs
>The chemicals happen to meet the high temperature water, and find themselves in gaseous pockets of water vapour and CO2 and whatever else is in there, which gives them the conditions to react, rearrange etc.
>After reacting the water cools because it's still at the bottom of the ocean, leaving the reacted chemicals in the water again, able to be pulled back into the thermal vent
>reflux aparratus.chemistry
(1/?)
>So we have atmospheric ionization performing gaseous electrochemistry, and thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean refluxing the primordial soup
>In this process, all the amino acids, sugars and whatever else can possibly be formed in these conditions is formed in these conditions.
>As these chemicals build up, they start to react with eachother in the thermal streams
>Over time, this would create flimsy randomized DNA-like molecules from the nucleobases we're familiar with and more rarely others we're not familiar with. It could be that ATCG was a coincidence, or it could be that those are the most easily formed options
>These random DNA-like molecules would be shit, frankly. sugars sticking out all over the place, amino acids mixed in, maybe some sulfates, chlorides, all sorts of shitty garbage
>BUT
>hydrogen_bonding.quantummechanics
>Regardless of what the soup polymer looks like, it will have some nucleobases in it somewhere because those bastards are in meteorites so they're probably in the primordial soup
>In the rest of the ocean nearby, there will be other nucleobases floating around.
>If, perchance, these come closer and are compatible, they will hydrogen bond with our proto-DNA-polymer
>If these nucleobases are attached to sugars and amino acids, when they next get blasted by the thermal vent, the existing proto-DNA-polymer will act as a catalyst, having held the nucleobase building blocks in enough proximity to eachother that they'll be more likely than otherwise to react with each-other.
>first-self-replication.biologyquestionmark
(2/?)
(I hate this 2000 character limit lmao)
>The first proto-DNA molecule thing will have, purely by chance, catalysed the creation of a second one
>This "second" proto-DNA-polymer will, again, be a warped and twisted monstrocity compared to what we have now. However, if we simplify it a section of the original in this scenario would be as follows:
>-A-(8 sugars or amino acids)-T-(19 sugars or amino acids)-T-(5 sugars or amino acids)-C-
>This original was a mess, created completely at random from whatever floated nearby over the course of 10,000 trips through thermal vents.
>the nucleobases for the second molecule catalysed by the first, though, only hydrogen bonded with the sparsely distributed nucleobases in this catalysis scenario, so it's much less likely that there would be extra sugars and amino acids between them in the second molecule and it might look more like this:
>T-(1 sugar)-A-(2 amino acids)-A-C
>With the nucleobases flipped by their pairing, of course.
>this refined proto-DNA molecule would then go and frick around in the ocean again, picking up more nucleobases before being heated in the thermal vents to create more proto-DNA molecules
(3/3, i think)
I propose that not only is abiogenesis possible, i think it's unreasonably simple. So simple in fact, that i have high hopes for the ease with which life will have formed on other planets. If we can reason our way to these DNA-like molecules self-replicating purely by being heated and cooled repeatedly, it's not too far to get to protocells and random proteins.
That's a classic view for sure. RNA-world theory has gained a lot of attention in the past decade (essentially everything you said but RNA instead of DNA). The second interesting theory that's popped up is the idea the lipid wold theory, that lipid spheres/membranes predated the self-replicating RNA/DNA and are where all of the critical chemical reactions took place that led to self-replicating molecules. It addresses one of the questions of abiogenesis, which is how you get a high enough concentration of the pre-bio molecules together to react and mutate properly/how they found themselves surrounded in a lipid membrane. Pre-life conditions had lipid-like micells, and the original thought is by randomly dividing/coming together, they could have trapped molecules inside. While possible, it was always a bit "meh" for me, but recent work suggests that pre-RNA structures could have actually been embedded/attached to the lipid-like membrane and reactions took place on a much smaller 2D plane, which would concentrate the molecules without requiring random-encapsulation from lipids
Very cool, fun journey.
Having to navigate the ocean seems a bit tough, weren't there a lot of shallow pools and puddles around too, and would sun light heating them up do anything, or are the thermal vents needed? .there are shallow hot springs and geysers and volcanic areas.and things too right