Jagged Environment
A role for science?
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Jagged EnvironmentA role for science? |
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Mass extinctions |
If one’s understandings are wrong, of course one’s questions are nonsense. It is then impossible to comprehend, or to even recognise, information as answers. Where does Science fit? What part does it have in all of this? It seems to be part of human nature to seek significance - Human Significance; to imagine the Universe exists entirely in the purpose of generating life - Human Life. Many scientists have struggled to understand the events which might have acted to create life, in minutiae, on a molecular basis. However, there is no convincing such explanation; and all such theories of Chemical Evolution are flawed by requiring the generation of order of unimaginable exactitude, from complete chaos - the primordial soup. More desperately, scientists now look to comets, and claim that basic molecular building blocks, such as amino-acids, were deposited from the tails of comets (large comets are even suggested to have deposited the vast oceans onto a barren, rocky Earth, in past millennia); of course, this is so improbable, as to be utter nonsense. Although we can never be certain of all the details of all the processes which conspired to create life, since we can only guess at the nature of the conditions which may have pertained on the primitive Earth, in this essay I have presented an overall model which explains the generation of simple Life. This rests upon the generation, simultaneously, of all the materials necessary for compartmentalisation and structure, which is implicit for the formation of living cells, by a single event: the hydrolysis of silicon-aluminium-carbides by geochemically formed water, yielding hydrocarbons (oil), which then coat clay particles formed in the same process, so providing semipermeable membranes, separating aqueous regions, built upon ordered 3-D clay-structures. In contact with the percolating water phase, carrying organic nutrients, and building-blocks, such as amino-acids, bases, and porphyrins, and able to remove waste, so functioning as a primitive blood, collections of such primitive clay-cells then began to act co-operatively; in communication with a neighbouring mass of slightly different cells (the clay being inhomogeneous), these collectives could co-operate to their mutual advantage, heralding the incipiency of later animal life. The initial Evolution of these simple clay-cells was caused by oxidation of their simple hydrocarbon membranes, leading to antioxidant formation, which protected them from further damage by oxygen. Further oxidation provided lipids, from which an entirely organic kind of life budded - severing the apron-string of the clay support. Copyright © 2001 Chris James Last updated 12 March, 2005 |
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