Abstract
Some fundamental molecules of life are suggested to have been formed, proliferated, and evolved through photochemical microscopic dissipative structuring and autocatalytic proliferation under the UV-C/UV-B solar environment prevalent at Earth’s surface throughout the Archean. Evidence is given in the numerous salient characteristics of these, including their strong absorption in this spectral region and their rapid non-radiative excited state decay through inherent conical intersections. The examples of the dissipative structuring and dissipative proliferation of the purines and of single strand DNA are given. UV-C and UV-B-induced stationary state isomerizations and tautomerizations are shown to be crucial to the formation of the purines from hydrogen cyanide in an aqueous environment under UV-C light, while UV-C induced phosphorylation of nucleosides and denaturing of double helix RNA and DNA are similarly important to the production and proliferation of single strand DNA. This thermodynamic dissipation perspective provides a physical-chemical foundation for understanding the origin and evolution of life.
Highlights
It is well known empirically, and described theoretically from within the framework of Non-linear Classical Irreversible Thermodynamics (Prigogine, 1967), that “spontaneous” macroscopic organization of material in space and time can occur within a system subjected to an externally imposed generalized chemical potential
The non-equilibrium thermodynamic principles outlined in Section 2, and the need for photon energies [21_TD$IF]≳ 3.0 eV to break and reform carbon covalent bonds, would further suggest that some fundamental molecules of life, and their associations in polymers or other complexes, are examples of microscopic dissipative structuring which occurred under the Archean UV-B and UV-C photon potential (Michaelian, 2009; Michaelian, 2011; Michaelian, 2013; Michaelian and Simeonov, 2015; Michaelian and Simeonov, 2017)
Following Prigogine’s non-equilibrium thermodynamic analysis of autocatalytic chemical reactions (Prigogine, 1967), and assuming the Glansdorff-Prigogine evolutionary criterion, Equation (8), I have shown (Michaelian, 2013) that, if under the imposition of the solar photon potential, and given a constant supply of reactants and a constant sink of the products, a photochemical route can be found to the production of a pigment molecule, and if that pigment molecule is efficient at dissipating the same photon potential that was required to produce it, a process similar to that of the autocatalytic chemical reaction would occur, only that besides a chemical potential, a photochemical potential would be dissipated
Summary
It is well known empirically, and described theoretically from within the framework of Non-linear Classical Irreversible Thermodynamics (Prigogine, 1967), that “spontaneous” macroscopic organization of material in space and time can occur within a system subjected to an externally imposed generalized chemical potential This arises from a non-equilibrium thermodynamic imperative to increase entropy production, i.e. to increases in the spread of the conserved quantities of Nature (energy, momentum, angular momentum, charge, etc.) over ever more microscopic degrees of freedom. Common examples of dissipative structuring occurring in systems held out of equilibrium by an external generalized chemical potential are space-symmetry breaking convection cells and time- and space-symmetry breaking patterns of a Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical oscillator The former arise in conductionconvection systems held under gravity at an imposed temperature gradient, while the latter arise in diffusion-reaction systems under imposed chemical affinities. Many examples of biology utilizing photon-induced molecular dissipative transformations at the quantum level (e.g. Schulten and Hayashi, 2014) and in Section 4 I present examples which may have led to the origin of life
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