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Charles Darwin’s speculation about early life was probably right

#1
C C Offline
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201...ife-theory

EXCERPTS: . . . Darwin never wrote about how life began in his books, but he did speculate about it in private. The key document is a letter he wrote, dated 1 February 1871, to his close friend the naturalist Joseph Dalton Hooker. This letter is now almost 150 years old. It is short – just four paragraphs – and hard to read because of Darwin’s spidery handwriting. In it, after a brief discussion of some recent experiments on mould, Darwin outlined the beginnings of a hypothesis:

“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etc. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter [would] be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”

[,,,] In many ways Darwin’s idea is hopelessly incomplete, but he cannot be faulted for that. He was writing before the discovery of nucleic acids like DNA, before biologists understood anything about how genes work, and when the internal workings of living cells were largely a mystery. ... But the same basic outline is still being pursued today, and many researchers are convinced that it is the best explanation we have of life’s origin.

[...] What is clear, however, is that Darwin’s idea was far-sighted. He envisioned the need for a range of chemicals to become concentrated in a small space, and the need for an energy source that could drive chemical reactions. “Just like many of Darwin’s insights,” says Vincent, the warm little pond hypothesis was “very prescient”.

Darwin made one other point in his letter, which is “underappreciated”, says Vincent. “The processes that happen in that warm little pond might happen so easily that they happen all the time,” she says. We may not see it simply because, whenever a new protein or similar forms naturally, a hungry bacterium gobbles it up. “We talk about the origin of life like it’s something that happened in the deep past,” says Vincent. “But it’s something that could be trying to happen even now.” (MORE - details)
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#2
Zinjanthropos Offline
I’ve always maintained that when life first appeared on the Earth that many different forms appeared all around the same time. I mean conditions were right so why not more than one primitive organism? What followed was a truly epic battle for supremacy and survival.
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