I had starred this when it first appeared, then forgot about it so
completely that I didn't recognize it first.
MarkE was badgered by Bill Rogers to read Deamer and Damer's take
on OOL (Origin of Life), and by doing so, he has called Bill's bluff...
Oh, wait, he calls it an "excellent presentation", heedless of my warning that it is to be found,
AT BEST, below the 20th floor of the 100 floor metaphoric "OOL skyscraper" at the roof
of which is the first free-living prokaryote. The lipid bag puts it possibly that high. The
contents are somewhere on the way to the second floor.
On Tuesday, September 26, 2023 at 10:10:49 AM UTC-4, MarkE wrote:
> The title is “A new model for the origin of life: A new model for the origin of life: Coupled phases and combinatorial selection in fluctuating hydrothermal pools.”
Heck, this was old hat when I was a teen-ager half a century ago. Or maybe I am
recalling a "well, du-uh" speculation of mine that the way to OOL was
repeated drying/concentration of probiotic "soup" followed by dilution.
Fox had already succeeded in producing "microspheres" in one such cycle,
and it seemed natural to move on.
Little did I suspect back then how incredibly intricate the simplest bacteria are.
>
https://youtu.be/nk_R55O24t4?feature=shared
>
> Summary: “Hydrothermal fields on the prebiotic Earth are candidate environments for biogenesis. We propose a model in which molecular systems driven by cycles of hydration and dehydration in such sites undergo chemical evolution and selection in a dehydrated surface phase followed by encapsulation and combinatorial selection in a hydrated phase. This model is partly supported by recent science, and lies partly in the realm of speculation including a hypothesized pathway for the parallel evolution of the functional machinery of life.
Huge understatement, that "speculation."
>Complex models like this present challenges for science in the 21st century and we will describe a new technology to enable the simulation of such models.”
Sounds like a sentence out of a grant proposal which could get anything between a "poor" and "very good" rating,
depending almost totally on how the rest of the proposal goes. Proposals rated "excellent," at least in my
area of pure mathematics, make more modest statements.
On that basis, I rate Deamer and Damer's "proposal" as "fair," IF the rest is much better than what
MarkE quotes below.
Even so, one such rating is usually enough to kill a proposal. Even one "good" needs to be balanced
by at least one "excellent" to have a snowball's chance in the hell of these days of "grade inflation."
>
> I say “excellent presentation” because it is a well-explained overview of a model these leading OoL researchers have collaborated extensively on. Commendably, their approach attempts to resolve the “water paradox” with cycles of hydration and dehydration, the salt problem using freshwater hydrothermal pools, it seeks a systems chemistry approach moving reactions away from equilibrium, and urges getting out of glasswear and into prebiotically plausible natural environments.
So one might think if one believed that such environments still exist. But any products would be gobbled up
by the living things in the environment. One simply does not have the wherewithal for spontaneous generation of life
in the modern day environment. The best you can hope for is to substitute enormous tanks for "glassware", maybe
on the scale of the vast cyclotrons [or whatever] that seem to have successfully produced a Higgs boson.
>
> THIS I BELIEVE IS ONE OF THE MOST RECENT AND BEST HOLISTIC OOL MODELS ON OFFER, FROM LEADERS IN THE FIELD.
If that's true, so much the worse for less fine models, and for the others in the field of OOL.
> Some observations and comments.
>
> * 3:51 Off the bat Damer asked the question, “Why does the community need a new model for the origin of life?”
>
> He then answers in a way remarkably similar to criticisms by James Tour and William Bains.
>
> * 6:51 “Freeman Dyson who I confer with what about once a year on this project, and he kind of gives us a thumbs up, in general had this idea that life began with little bags of garbage and these are lipid bags in solution the garbage is the dirty water that is the random chemical compound components, and that somehow this dirty water started to do metabolism and that it could replicate its contents and then the bags would grow and split in two, and if they split in two now quickly enough and reliably enough, you'd have life, but that's a you know it sounds a little kind of flippant, but in fact this is a very profound insight as to how life may have started…”
Dream on, Deamer and Damer.
> See:
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/Ki5fLxziHos/m/QeqGRxj2AQAJ
>
> * 11:54 “so here we have a sort of putative environment for what we're talking about. You'll notice that there's sort of this slurry here that sort of represents the fact that perhaps this pool dried down many times and it's rehydrated many times and it turns out when this happens that things are deposited on the edge of the pool think of them like think of this like a bathtub ring in your bathtub…”
>
> Displayed is a photo of pool with chemical deposits visible from changing water levels. Kudos for proposing a process and locating it in prebiotically plausible natural environment.
> How/where from the supply of free lipids and nucleotides and/or amino acids?
> Dilution of these monomers in the pool a problem, despite the drying-concentrating effect.
> No mention of a mechanism for chirality necessity.
>
> But an interesting and innovative scenario all the same. It does offer a stepwise pathway for pre-biotic evolution.
MarkE is infatuated with a bunch of gobbledygook, tending towards a "poor" rating.
>
> * 19:54 “I think there's two dozen volcanoes on Kamchatka; I think there's several hundred hydrothermal systems the size of Yellowstone on Kamchatka, it's just an enormous system so on the early Earth the hydrothermal field attached you know on a volcanic island would have been one of the most chemically rich and dynamic environments.”
>
> Arguing against myself for a moment: it would be easy to under-appreciate that you get to roll the dice an incomprehensibly large number of times.
MarkE should make that arguing permanent.
>
> * 23:48 “let's look at here's our a primitive protocell on the way to life in our system that has as we mentioned before pores it has a membrane of course it has something that's stabilizing the membrane something like a primitive cytoskeleton it has the beginnings of a metabolic system it has the beginnings of replicator
WHAT REPLICATOR? Fox's protocells "replicated" but they are universally conceded to be a dead end.
"and in all of this it has to have some kind of emergent feedback mechanism that controls the rates of everything because as soon as you get a chemical reaction that goes around and generates products it can get out of control you need to have a regulatory mechanism that controls those rates…”
>
> All that from recycled little bags of garbage. But I accept it’s a hypothesis ready for testing. Let the empirical verification begin.
MarkE isn't even waiting for a regulatory mechanism. He's head over heels in love
with the scenario.
>
> * 27:29 “…when the proto cell is able to do the trick of dividing its contents dividing itself and creating daughter cells”
>
> Usefully accurate and repeatable cell division that duplicates and separates the protocell’s polymers prior to pinching and splitting? Wow.
It occurs to me that MarkE may be sarcastic here, and perhaps that goes back
to ALL his laudatory comments.
>
> * 49:16 “with one of our instruments here's how we test the hypothesis. we're going to make an anaerobic condition we just chose carbon dioxide we could use others if we wished such as nitrogen for example but we cannot have oxygen there that these temperatures oxygen begins to attack the molecules we want to have an anaerobic environment…”
>
> Credit for the experimental commitment. Let’s see what emerges.
Prediction: nothing but glorified tar.
Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
https://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos