Page 29 - The Origin of Life and the Universe - International Conference 2016

The Origin of Life and the Universe

important to realize that each approach proposed by the origin of life re-
searchers suffer from intractable problems. And I’m not going to discuss
these problems this morning because of time constraints. My colleague
Dr. Anjeanette Roberts will talk a little bit about some of these problems
in replicator-first scenarios. But I want to tell you a story that illustrates
how significant the problem is.
A number of years ago I attended an origin-of-life conference in
Oaxaca Mexico. This conference was called ISSOL 2002. This meeting at-
tracted some of the best origin-of-life researchers around the world. The
opening lecture of that conference was delivered by a scientist by the
name of Leslie Orgel. When he was alive, Orgel was considered the
preeminent origin of life researcher in the world. And he was given the
honor at this conference of presenting the opening lecture to the conference.
And he was asked to summarize the status of the RNA World Hypothesis,
an idea that he was one of the originators of. Throughout his lecture,
Orgel detailed problem after problem with the RNA World scenario.
Towards the end of his talk, he paused, and he said, “I hope that there are
no creationists in the audience, but it would be a miracle if a strand of
RNA ever appeared on the primitive Earth.” It is remarkable. Orgel was
known as an outspoken atheist. Yet, in an honest moment, he had to ac-
knowledge that the origin of life at least from a replicator first stand point
appeared to be basically a miracle.
Metabolism-first scenarios fare no better. Again there are problem
after problem after problem we can identify with these scenarios because
of time I’m not going into them, but I’m just going to simply say this that
when Orgel was alive one of the last scientific journal articles he wrote
was a critical review a metabolism-first scenario where he said that these
scenarios require: “an appeal to magic”, “a series of remarkable coincidences”,
“a near miracle”.
And finally, when it comes to membrane-first scenarios they too are
riddled with problems. Some of these problems are listed on the slide:
– Environmental conditions
– Amphiphile composition
– Amphiphile concentration
– Phase behavior
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