It is important to realize that Orgel is a leader of one faction (I will resist the temptation to write “sect”) and he is critiquing the ideas of a different faction. Since I happen to subscribe to the ideas of the second faction, I may not be perfectly fair to Orgel here.
Orgel does not calculate probabilities in part because the ideas he is critiquing are not specific enough to permit such a calculation. Furthermore, and this is something you would need some background to appreciate, the issue here isn’t a question of a fluke coming together somewhere here on earth of the right ingredients. It is more a matter of a fluke coming together of laws of chemistry. Orgel is saying that he doubts that the cycle idea would work anywhere in this universe—it would take a suspiciously fine-tuned universe to let all those reactions work together like that. It is a reasonable argument—particularly coming from someone whose chemical intuition is as good as Orgel’s.
I think Orgel is pretty much right. The reductive citric acid cycle is a cute idea as the core of a metabolism-first theory, but it is probably too big and complicated a cycle to be realistic as the first cycle. Personally, I think that something simpler, using CO or HCN as the carbon source has a better chance of success. But until we come up with something specific and testable, the “metabolism first” faction maybe deserves Orgel’s scorn. The annoying thing is that our best ideas are untestable because they require enormous pressures and unsafe ingredients to test them. Damned frustrating when you want to criticize the other side for producing untestable theories.
Orgel was fair to the extent that he also provided a pretty good critiqueto his own faction’s ideas at about the same time. But it is possible that Sutherland’s new ideas on RNA synthesis may revive the RNA-first viewpoint.
If you really dig watching abiogenesis research, as I do, it is an exciting time to be alive. Lots of ideas, something wrong with every one of them, but sooner or later we are bound to figure it all out.
It is important to realize that Orgel is a leader of one faction (I will resist the temptation to write “sect”) and he is critiquing the ideas of a different faction. Since I happen to subscribe to the ideas of the second faction, I may not be perfectly fair to Orgel here.
Orgel does not calculate probabilities in part because the ideas he is critiquing are not specific enough to permit such a calculation. Furthermore, and this is something you would need some background to appreciate, the issue here isn’t a question of a fluke coming together somewhere here on earth of the right ingredients. It is more a matter of a fluke coming together of laws of chemistry. Orgel is saying that he doubts that the cycle idea would work anywhere in this universe—it would take a suspiciously fine-tuned universe to let all those reactions work together like that. It is a reasonable argument—particularly coming from someone whose chemical intuition is as good as Orgel’s.
I think Orgel is pretty much right. The reductive citric acid cycle is a cute idea as the core of a metabolism-first theory, but it is probably too big and complicated a cycle to be realistic as the first cycle. Personally, I think that something simpler, using CO or HCN as the carbon source has a better chance of success. But until we come up with something specific and testable, the “metabolism first” faction maybe deserves Orgel’s scorn. The annoying thing is that our best ideas are untestable because they require enormous pressures and unsafe ingredients to test them. Damned frustrating when you want to criticize the other side for producing untestable theories.
Orgel was fair to the extent that he also provided a pretty good critiqueto his own faction’s ideas at about the same time. But it is possible that Sutherland’s new ideas on RNA synthesis may revive the RNA-first viewpoint.
If you really dig watching abiogenesis research, as I do, it is an exciting time to be alive. Lots of ideas, something wrong with every one of them, but sooner or later we are bound to figure it all out.