More on the origin of life

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Folks, this is what I’m talking about. Simple, teachable, understandable. Potentially true.


If you won’t listen to the whole talk, start at 40:00
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Yep, excellent talk. Eric is also an engaging speaker.

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What does he say?

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Electricity is perpetually flowing throughout the body of the planet. Deep sea vents are a result of plate tektonics, and they are a continuous source of electron donors (raw metals dissolved in water), and thus act as the “battery” of the earth that keeps the electricity flowing. Because of this, deepsea vents are expected to be THE focal points of the planet where one would expect the emergence of chemically fed primordial life.

His insight into the origin of life in this talk is that

  1. Anaerobic matabolism must be older than aerobic.
  2. The core of the anaerobic metabolism is the citric acid cycle.
  3. In the presence of deep sea vents that supply metals profusely, this cycle can be run “downhill” perpetually sort of like a waterwheel.
  4. This kind of cyclic reaction is able to supply the basic building blocks needed to build a cell.
  5. Ergo this small piece of the LARGE puzzle of the origin of life seems to fall into place naturally, as if the possibility of life is “woven into the fabric of reality”.

My thoughts:
So this is an attempt at a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life, but with pleasing connotations of fine tuning (i.e. the rarity of plate tektonics as well as the “built-in” quality of life-enabling chemistry).

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Also from the talker dr. Eric Smith: "life should have originated at the place where the chemistry of the life we see today represents the “default mode”.

Like a crack that forms under stress has to have an associated tensor field that can help focus the stress energy which is spread out evenly throughout the material down to a single point of failure which enables the crack to spread linearly instead of random cracks popping up throughout the material,

so should life represent a favoured mode of failure in its original environment spreading linearly and then branching out along paths of least resistance to form an ecosystem around an energy source."