minaras

 

 

You do understand that these chemical reactions are not random at all... right?

Nothing is unquestionable.

 

The point about the deap-sea vent hypothesis is that it proposes specific chemical pathways and finds supporting evidence in biochemistry and genetics.

 

The same is true for other hypotheses for abiogenesis. Do you have any specific suggestions for the mechanisms involved?

My suggestions are that actually organic compounds were formed later in the course of life. It was a result of life, or else a consequence of a system of reactions that was becoming more and more complex.

[How is survival capacity not true order? Your beginning observation is good, but the facts are a bit skewed.

This is a difficult question. For some reason, order in living systems or reactions appear to pose survival capacities. This means that they can continue in the long term more effectively than others with a less ordered state. However, a) this is not always the case and b) natural laws do not promote the creation of order directly. For instance, if you pour oil in a glass of water, the entropy of the system will increase, but at the end, oil and water will be perfectly separated in a condition which, in a way, is a state of perfect order (all oil concentrated at the top of the solution). So it seems that in the long term, despite initial fluctuations, order will triumph in some cases. This is not because there is a natural law that constantly creates order (with the expense of increasing disorder of the environment), but because of the capacity of order to sustain itself in the very long term over other possible conditions.

I'm not really sure what you are trying to say. You seem to be describing (in a slightly confusing way) one way abiogenesis may have occurred (some sort of "chemical evolution").

Yes you probably misunderstood. I am not saying that chemicals are are conscious or driving evolution towards a particular direction. Chemicals are inevitable and happening spontaneously. We are just a part of the system. In a repeating alphabet, if we were X and Y, we would think that the system is sophisticated, and the purpose of A and B is to lead to C and D and eventually to us. Through the evolution of chemical reactions, the end reactions will be the ones with survival capacity. But what is special about us? We can survive. Its not true order, its only survival capacity.

2. Adding more energy will not necessarily cause more reactions to take place. In general it might shift the equilibrium. If there is enough energy to break certain bonds then a new equilibrium may be created.

Adding more energy will not lead to more complex reactions, but they will not stop happening. And once the ones with repeatability or adhesive capacities come along, then the system will begin to thrive very fast.

However, it seems very unlikely that life was created by "random" chemical reactions. It seems more likely that a particular chemical environment (e.g. proton gradients at deep sea vents) provided a starting point.

Is it more likely that life emerged of some soup of gradients, rather than emerged naturally as a sum of random chemical reactions?

I've been thinking of starting a thread along similar lines, but have held back because I thought it was potentially a bit depressing!

My thinking was that life started by certain inevitable chemical reactions. Once natural selection took over these reactions gradually became more and more complex. But have they remained as inevitable chemical reactions ever since, just very complex ones.

This seemingly naïve thought you had becomes very reasonable if you consider who is the reference frame. We .A sum of continuously happening reactions inside the whole system of reactions.

Suppose we have a flask with simple chemical compounds and we constantly provide external energy so that random chemical reactions occur. If we continue to provide external energy then not only chemical equilibrium will not occur, but instead more and more reactions will occur and the system will thrive and become more and more complex. Lets say that our system is not a flask, but primordial earth and the external source of energy is solar energy coming from the sun. In this case, equilibrium would be avoided, and the system would continue to thrive. Through the eons, in a chaos of chemical reactions, only those with some kind of repeatability and periodicity will not lead to a dead end and will be able to continue happening in the long term. Additionally, many random chemical reactions will eventually lead to some molecules with the ability to adhere with other molecules and also with surfaces. These reactions will eventually prevail and become the basis for further complexity, because the chemical compounds will not diffuse around and lead to dead ends. This will make the process multifocal rather than diffuse, enhancing its ability to thrive. Thereafter, these focal sites of increasing complexity will interact with one another and the systems with the greatest capacity to survive will continue happening in the long term and will become more complicated. Additionally, more stable compounds will be formed and so gradually what we know as organic compounds with be formed. Also, the reactions with the ability to promote their own existence would prevail and continue to exist, in a process which is a kind of natural selection and survival of the fittest reactions.
Random chemical reactions does not promote a certain plan or any kind of order, but what we see, is the result of the sum of the reactions that happened through history. However, their end results are reactions that are characterized by survival capacities over others. And suppose that these end results are the observers of the whole system. Virtually they are composed from some chemical compounds, which are constantly changing However, everything that happens leads to them. Everything is a matter of perspective. If they analyze their own reactions they will have a very good view to their homeostasis. As we said they are seeing the system from inside, or else in a mirror like direction, because they themselves are part of things, so they appreciate things from its results. They think that homeostasis is a very perfectly sophisticated and stochastic mechanism, because they are the result of homeostasis, but the theory that we analyzed says that homeostasis simply is the catalogue of the chemical reactions that are still happening, and just because they keep happening, the organism is alive. It is like they are in a moving ship, and so they realize things differently from someone who is standing in the port. Most of all, they don’t have a good sense of our own movement. Additionally, if they were not a part of the chemical system, they would not find any reasoning or purpose of existence for all the other reactions on earth. Even if they were tables for example, they would think that the most perfect creatures are the tables.
In other words these systems would have exactly the same perspective as we ourselves have while thinking about what is life, evolution, reproduction (repeatability of reactions).
Thus, random reactions and life can be the opposite sides of the same coin.
Important tip:
How can random reactions, no matter how good they were selected through the centuries, can lead from a tiny spore to the creation of extremely complex organisms (plants, animals, human) in relatively predictive ways?
Answer: Don’t get confused by the complexity of the grown up organisms. Don’t forget what happens with fractals. Seemingly complex structures emerge as the result of very simple initial conditions (equations). Similarly, complex animals can arise predictively from the flourishing of much simpler entities over time, such as zygotes, spores etc. This is simply perceived by us as embryology.