ULTIMATE COMPUTING - Quantum Consciousness Studies

Origin and Evolution of Life 47
3 Origin and Evolution of Life
3.1 Soup vs Mud, Chicken vs Egg
What is life Living organisms have certain properties that are nearly
synonymous with the trait of being alive-organization, growth, reproduction,
dynamic purposeful activities and (at least in higher organisms) intelligence and
consciousness. Life forms that we have come to know are all based on the same
type of genetic blueprints (DNA, RNA) and building blocks (proteins), suggesting
a common ancestry. That ancestry, life’s emergence, is generally viewed as a
rearrangement of cosmic matter originally produced in the “Big Bang” which is
presumed to have given birth to the universe some 14 billion years ago. Life’s
molecular emergence can be viewed in the context of two basic questions
concerning place of origin (“soup vs mud”) and molecular cause and effect
(“chicken vs egg”).
In the 1920’s Russian biochemist A. I. Oparin (1938) and British biologist J.
B. S. Haldane (1947) described their concept of a “primordial soup” of organic
molecules existing in the earth’s oceans a mere 4 billion years ago. Their soup
was thought to be a product of geochemical processes and energy sources acting
in an atmosphere of unoxidized gases such as methane, ammonia and hydrogen,
similar to what exists currently on Jupiter. This primordial atmosphere was the
view of eminent chemist Harold Urey (1939), whose graduate student Stanley L.
Miller carried out a key experiment in the early 1950’s. Miller created a closed
environment containing such a primitive atmosphere and passed electric sparks
simulating lightning through it. He detected organic molecules relevant to living
processes. Fifteen percent of the original methane carbon was found in molecules
which included four amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Miller also
found precursors of DNA and ribose sugars from which RNA is formed. Because
the most central molecules of life are identical in all organisms on earth, Miller’s
primordial soup has been considered to represent the conditions from which life
emerged. Other research has questioned the hydrogen rich atmosphere upon
which Urey and Miller based their experiment and still other work has shown that
at least some organic precursors of life can be generated in many types of
atmospheres.
There are other candidates for the site of life’s origin. Conditions above the
thermal vents recently discovered on the ocean floor are believed conducive to the
formation of organic compounds, leading some to propose these spots, rather than
the traditionally imagined ponds or tidal pools, as the cradle of life (“deep soup”).
Thermal vents are home to strange and exotic life forms such as giant tube worms
which thrive in the great pressures of the deep ocean. Organic compounds have
also been found commonly in intrastellar dust, in comets, and in meteorites that
fall to earth. Many believe the supply of organic precursors to life was augmented
from space while few admit to believing that primitive cells were transplanted to
earth from space.
An alternative explanation has been advanced by A. Graham Cairns-Smith
(1982) of Glasgow University, who suggests that early organisms utilized preexisting
information templates in the form of wet clay crystals (“mud”).
Crystalline inorganic materials appear to have many “life-like” properties such as
the ability to store and replicate information in the form of crystal defects,
dislocations, twin boundaries, and substitutions. Clay minerals like kaolinite
crystallize at ordinary temperatures from aqueous solutions of common rock.
Their catalytic surfaces and complex morphology suggested to Cairns-Smith an