Abstract
David Deamer has written another book, Assembling Life, on the origin of life. It is unapologetically polemic, presenting Deamer’s view that life originated in fresh water hydrothermal fields on volcanic islands on early Earth, arguing that this provided a unique environment not just for organic chemistry but for the self-assembling structure that drive that chemistry and form the basis of structure in life. It is worth reading, it is an advance in the field, but is it convincing? I argue that the Origin of Life field as a whole is unconvincing, generating results in Toy Domains that cannot be scaled to any real world scenario. I suggest that, by analogy with the history of artificial intelligence and solar astronomy, we need much more scale, and fundamentally new ideas, to take the field forward.
Highlights
Five Alarm Bio Ltd., O2h Scitech Park, Mill Lane, Hauxton, Cambridge CB22 5HX, UK; Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
FL was more of an overview, albeit coloured by Deamer’s own ideas
Because Deamer has done a good job of laying out all the more mainstream options, and developing his thesis that life probably originated in fresh water hydrothermal systems from self-organizing fatty acid lamellae
Summary
AL is unapologetically polemic, presenting Deamer’s view that life originated in fresh water hydrothermal fields on volcanic islands on early Earth. Because Deamer has done a good job of laying out all the more mainstream options, and developing his thesis that life probably originated in fresh water hydrothermal systems from self-organizing fatty acid lamellae. Other features Deamer cites as important to subaerial hydrothermal fields are frequent wet/dry cycles, both to form multilamellar structures and drive dehydration reactions, a variety of gradients of pH and temperature, ready recycling of input chemicals, chemistry that mobilizes all the major elements of biochemistry, air–water
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