The Big Bang of Life - the bold theory of life on Earth?

Like explaining the origin of the Universe's existence through the Big Bang theory, some discoveries by scientists around the world about the possibility of life forming abiotically led a journalist to introduce Life's Big Bang theory. However, there are still many holes in this theory…

In August 2020, in NewScientist magazine, journalist Michael Marshall, former head of BBC Earth column (BBC Earth) published an article titled 'The Big Bang of Life, a bold new theory of evolution. live on Earth'.

In his article, as a supporter of the theory of evolution, Michael Marshall proposed a new theory about the formation of life on earth. According to this theory, all the bases for cellular life on Earth would emerge as soon as life was initiated. He calls it the 'everything-first hypothesis'.

The first part of Michael Marshall's article acknowledged the failures of naturalists in explaining the origin of life, most of which were based on the assumption that life began with a simple living component and by somehow create other components around it. This is also known as abiotic angiogenesis ( abiogenesis ).

The failure of naturalists 

As Darwin assumed of a pond some kind of warm pond, with enough ammonia and sulfur salts, light, heat, electricity, etc. making it possible for protein mixtures to be formed, ready to be transformed into more complex forms…, many ideas have been proposed to explain how life began. Most are based on the assumption that cells are too complex to be formed all at once, so life must begin with only one living component and somehow create others around it. around it. However, when put into practice in the lab, these ideas don't produce anything particularly lifelike. So some researchers are starting to realize, for example, trying to build a car by building a chassis and hoping the wheels and engine will come out naturally.

One idea was that proteins came first. In the 1950s, biochemist Sidney Fox discovered that heating amino acids caused them to link together into chains…. However, the proteinoids never got any further. Some researchers still hunt for lifelike behavior in simple proteins, but the idea that the protein itself initiates life has now been largely disproved.

Illustration of abiotic phylogenetics

Recently, much research has focused on an idea known as the RNA world… However, biochemists have spent decades struggling to get RNA to assemble or copy itself in the lab. , and now they admit that it takes a lot of help to do this.

Perhaps, then, one would turn to think that the cell membrane appeared first. David Deamer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has spearheaded this direction. In the 1970s, his group discovered that fats found in cell membranes could be made when two simple chemicals, cyanamide and glycerol, were mixed with water and heated to 65°C. …. However, he now accepts that this is not enough, because lipids cannot carry genes or form enzymes.

A handful of scientists argue that life did not begin on Earth, but elsewhere in the universe, and that it was brought here on meteorites and other celestial bodies…. This idea is known as 'alternative theory' or 'panspermia'.

Aside from the fact that altruism simply deals with the problem of howAs life takes place, we also find no evidence of life elsewhere. If panspermia were true, bacteria would spill down to Earth from space, and nearby planets like the moon would spawn many of their corpses. But there is no evidence of invading bacteria and moonstone is sterile. Moreover, space is the enemy of life. In experiments when the bacteria were placed outside the International Space Station, even a year's exposure caused severe damage to life. This leaves a door for life to move through the solar system, but it's a narrow one: the trip from Mars to Earth will take at least many months. Travel from other stars would take millennia, so it seems impossible.

Arguments that have long been used in favor of abiogenesis , and continue to be featured in textbooks, are now all admittedly false based on physical evidence. .

Naturalists: 'The origin of life is clearly more complex than we thought.'

The difficulty in understanding the origin of life is that we don't know how life first came about. The oldest accepted fossils are 3.5 billion years old, but they don't help much. They are found in ancient rock formations in Western Australia known as stromatolites and are single-celled microorganisms resembling modern bacteria. They are relatively complex: even the simplest modern bacteria have more than 100 genes. The first creatures must be simpler . Viruses have fewer genes, but can only reproduce by infecting the cell and taking over the cell, so they don't appear before the cell.

3 core processes of life

In the absence of physical evidence for abiotic origin, researchers on the origins of life begin anew by asking two questions. What are the basic processes that underlie life? And what chemicals do these processes use?

The answer, they argue, is: Life can be reduced to three core systems:

First, it has structural integrity: that is, each cell has an outer membrane that holds them together.

Second, life has metabolism, a set of chemical reactions that capture energy from its surroundings.

Finally, life can reproduce using genes, which contain instructions for building cells, and be passed on to progeny….

The three core processes of life are intertwined . Genes carry the instructions to make proteins, which means that proteins exist only because of genes. But proteins are also essential for maintaining and replicating genes, so genes exist only on proteins. And proteins – made by genes – are important for building lipids for cell membranes. Any theory explaining the origin of life must take this into account. However, if we assume that genes, metabolism and cell membranes are unlikely to arise simultaneously, it means that one of them must come first and 'create' the factors. remaining.'

'Life's Big Bang' – could key molecules of life form together?

The shortcomings of these simple models of the origin of life led Deamer and others to discover a seemingly less plausible alternative of all three core systems of life co-occurring in form. highly simplified. This theory is also known as the 'everything-first hypothesis' theory.

According to this theory, genes, metabolism, and cell membranes would for some reason appear simultaneously from the very beginning of life on earth. Michael Marshall calls this the Life's Big Bang.

Illustration of the Big Bang

Since 1971, over the past 50 years, many scientists in different parts of the world have conducted countless studies and experiments on this issue.

The most successful is that Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School has made significant strides in revealing how this can happen. Starting in 2003, his team built model cells with outer layers of fatty acids surrounding an inner space that could contain RNA.

These artificial cells form particularly quickly in the presence of montmorium llonite clay minerals, which are normally trapped within them, carrying RNA inside. The more RNA the artificial cell acquires, the more it grows: they compete with each other. Furthermore, they could divide to form daughter cells, just like modern cells. 'Growth and division could be the result of simple physico-chemical forces without the need for any complex biochemical machinery,' the team writes . Szostak's team has even seen RNA self-replicating inside artificial cells.

But, one core system that is still missing in these artificial cells is metabolism. This is especially difficult because it means creating an entire chain of chemical reactions. In modern organisms, they are controlled by a series of protein enzymes, which could not have existed when life began. However, other researchers have begun to find ways for metabolic chemical reactions to take place without protein.

Instead of ending

According to Michael Marshall, life is 'incredibly complex'. All the ingredients necessary for life must appear in the right place in the first place, otherwise life cannot exist, rendering natural theories about the origin of life unconvincing, absurd and unconvincing. illusory.

The so-called 'Big Bang of life' may give naturalists hope that 'everything [for life] appeared in the first place' at the cellular level. However, it only solves two-thirds of the core processes of life at the cellular level and must be influenced by deliberate experiments of human intelligence, not at all. Moreover, the distance from life at the cellular level to the formation of animals/plants with enormous diversity and extremely complex biological characteristics coincidentally is far, if not more. is not feasible. That is not to mention, how from life at the level of inanimate cells, can form people with thoughts, spirits, personalities, and emotions?

It is similar to the fact that, for some reason, randomly appears a car with a full frame, wheels, and engine, then randomly the car can run and drive itself on the road. city ​​and transforms into a being that thinks, thinks, and can give birth to other creatures.