There would be quite a long period of time between the initial formation of these micro-pore membranes and the point in time where they could form free floating cells. In that time, they would need to evolve all the machinery to exist unsupported: better membranes, RNA, maybe even DNA, and some method of generating their own proton gradient. And to evolve at all, they would need to reproduce.
The problem is that these creatures are stuck in their respective pores. In order to evolve beyond a stage where they could barely even be considered alive at all, these things would need a way of colonizing other pores. I’m not sure if Lane discusses the question at all, but it seems like a difficult problem. The process would initially have to be so simple it could happen naturally without any molecular machinery.
EDIT: I’ve now actually read this book, and looked at a figure depicting the situation, and found out that rather than the membranes being stretched across the pore like the skin of a drum, they would form a bubble the sits in the pore. I can easily imagine a bubble growing over time and then dividing when it gets too large, with one of the bubbles wandering off until it gets stuck in another pore. This resolves my confusion.
I think that might have been the deeper reason to talk about this mechanism:
Thermal currents through microporous labrynths have a remarkable capacity to concentrate organic molecules (including amino acids, fatty acids and nucleotides) to extreme levels, thousands or even millions of times the starting concentration, by way of a process known as thermophoresis. This is a little like the tendency of small items of laundry to accumulate inside a duvet cover in the washing machine.
Under this model, maybe during an exogenous(?) cooling cycle each pore gets ffillyed with “whatever it gets filled with” and then chemistry happens, and the reaction somehow becomes exothermic and so the fastest chemistry sprays back out into the medium, and so there is more of the faster/hotter chemistry for the next time “chemicals are being caught in pores like socks in a duvet cover”?
I am not any sort of chemist, let alone a biochemist, so this is all fanciful speculation.
I also haven’t read the book, but I don’t read the review as suggesting “creatures” at all. Just collections of compounds near membranes, in a positive feedback loop where the presence of those compounds makes it more likely that those compounds are produced from the other stuff in the environment.
In that sort of picture, it seems somewhat plausible that initially such feedback loops and diffusion could stand in for reproduction within the environment of a single smoker. Greater or lesser variations in the environment might provide selection effects toward robustness of feedback loops.
I can imagine some intermediate stage between free-floating chemicals near membranes and a fully formed cell: forming an extra membrane when conditions change in some direction, such as increased temperature. This could prevent diffusion and mixing of any more harmful environment with the mixture. When the conditions return to normal, the extra membrane dissolves and the chemicals start diffusing and catalysing their own production again.
There would be quite a long period of time between the initial formation of these micro-pore membranes and the point in time where they could form free floating cells. In that time, they would need to evolve all the machinery to exist unsupported: better membranes, RNA, maybe even DNA, and some method of generating their own proton gradient. And to evolve at all, they would need to reproduce.
The problem is that these creatures are stuck in their respective pores. In order to evolve beyond a stage where they could barely even be considered alive at all, these things would need a way of colonizing other pores. I’m not sure if Lane discusses the question at all, but it seems like a difficult problem. The process would initially have to be so simple it could happen naturally without any molecular machinery.
EDIT: I’ve now actually read this book, and looked at a figure depicting the situation, and found out that rather than the membranes being stretched across the pore like the skin of a drum, they would form a bubble the sits in the pore. I can easily imagine a bubble growing over time and then dividing when it gets too large, with one of the bubbles wandering off until it gets stuck in another pore. This resolves my confusion.
I think that might have been the deeper reason to talk about this mechanism:
Under this model, maybe during an exogenous(?) cooling cycle each pore gets ffillyed with “whatever it gets filled with” and then chemistry happens, and the reaction somehow becomes exothermic and so the fastest chemistry sprays back out into the medium, and so there is more of the faster/hotter chemistry for the next time “chemicals are being caught in pores like socks in a duvet cover”?
I am not any sort of chemist, let alone a biochemist, so this is all fanciful speculation.
I also haven’t read the book, but I don’t read the review as suggesting “creatures” at all. Just collections of compounds near membranes, in a positive feedback loop where the presence of those compounds makes it more likely that those compounds are produced from the other stuff in the environment.
In that sort of picture, it seems somewhat plausible that initially such feedback loops and diffusion could stand in for reproduction within the environment of a single smoker. Greater or lesser variations in the environment might provide selection effects toward robustness of feedback loops.
I can imagine some intermediate stage between free-floating chemicals near membranes and a fully formed cell: forming an extra membrane when conditions change in some direction, such as increased temperature. This could prevent diffusion and mixing of any more harmful environment with the mixture. When the conditions return to normal, the extra membrane dissolves and the chemicals start diffusing and catalysing their own production again.