Unless you are familiar with the work of a German patent attorney named Gunter Wachtershauser, just about everything you have read about the origin of life on earth is wrong. More specifically, there was no “prebiotic soup” providing organic nutrient molecules to the first cells or proto-cells, there was no RNA world in which self-replicating molecules evolved into cells, the Miller experiment is a red herring and the chemical processes it deals with never happened on earth until Miller came along. Life didn’t invent proteins for a long time after life first originated. 500 million years or so. About as long as the time from the “Cambrian explosion” to us.
I’m not saying Wachtershauser got it all right. But I am saying that everyone else except people inspired by Wachtershauser definitely got it all wrong. (70%)
Meh. What’s the chances of some germanic guy sitting around looking at patents all day coming up with a theory that revolutionizes some field of science?
You make the “metabolism first” school of thought sound like a minority contrarian position to the mainstream “genes first” hypothesis. I was under the impression that they were simply competing hypotheses with the jury being still out on the big question. That’s how they presented the issue in my astrobiology class, anyway.
It was a minority, contrarian position just a decade ago. But Wachtershauser’s position is not just “metabolism first”. It is also “strictly autotrophic” and “lipid first”. So I think it is still fair to call it a minority opinion.
Downvoted because it approximately matches what I (literally) covered in Biology 101 a month ago. (70% seems right because to be perfectly honest I didn’t pay that much attention and the Gunter guy may or may not have been relevant.)
Interesting. They are actually teaching this stuff now! Was the Origins material from the textbook, or from lectures? If textbook, could you name the book?
To clarify, you do think there was an “RNA world”—but it just post-dated cell walls.
An RNA world before cell walls is really a completely ridiculous idea.
...and of course, I am obviously not going to agree with the last line. IMO, Wachtershauser came along rather late, long after the guts of the problem were sorted out.
To clarify, you do think there was an “RNA world”—but it just post-dated cell walls.
Yes, except that what it post-dated was cell membranes, not cell walls. The distinction is important. I do think that there was an “RNA world” stage in life’s evolution when living cells could be modeled as “bags full of RNA”. But I believe that there was an earlier stage when they could be modeled as simply “bags full of water and minerals” and an even earlier stage when life consisted of “patches of living bag material adhering to the surface of minerals”.
there was no “prebiotic soup”
...sounds questionable, or at least very speculative: the first cells probably derived some nutrient value from at least one organic compound—not least because their cell [membranes] were probably composed of organic compounds.
Nope. No organic nutrients whatsoever. Autotrophic. This is the key idea that distinguishes Wachtershauser from almost everyone else. Yes, membrane materials are organic, but they were made (on site and just-in-time) by the first living membranes (on mineral surfaces).
...and of course, I am obviously not going to agree with the last line. IMO, Wachtershauser came along rather late, long after the guts of the problem were sorted out.
Of course. It amused me as I wrote my piece that you could write a strictly parallel contrarian position on the origin-of-life question. “Unless you are familiar with the work of Glascow chemist Graham Cairns-Smith, everything you have read about the origin of life on earth is wrong”.
I shouldn’t argue the “No organic nutrients whatsoever.” point too much—and indeed, I thought I deleted it from my comment pretty quickly. Yes, maybe everything organic was made from inorganic CO2 at the time of the first cells—but do we really know that with 70% confidence? No organic nutrients seems like quite a strong claim.
… maybe everything organic was made from inorganic CO2 at the time of the first cells—but do we really know that with 70% confidence?
Well, actually I think the carbon sources were more likely inorganic CO and inorganic HCN, with H2CO (formaldehyde) a possibility. “Organic”, in this claim, means having a C-C bond. And yes, I believe it with 70% confidence. Autotrophy came first. Heterotrophy came later.
No organic nutrients seems like quite a strong claim.
It is. It is the claim which forces a kind of intellectual honesty on the rest of your origin theory. You can’t just postulate that some needed chemical arrived on a handy comet or something. If you need a molecule, you must figure out the chemistry of how to make it from the materials already at hand. Wachtershauser didn’t suggests vents as the site of the origin simply because vents were new and “hot” at the time of his proposal. He did so because his chemical training told him that forming carbon-carbon bonds in high yields without enzymes requires a high-pressure high-temperature metal-catalyzed process like Fischer-Tropsch. And then he realized that vents provided an environment where this kind of chemistry could take place naturally.
I won’t argue with the “Autotrophy came first. Heterotrophy came later.” However, you were talking about the origin of cells here—and they “came later” too. Before there were cells there were very likely simpler “naked” replicators—including ones on mineral surfaces.
Surely though, this radically transforms your original claim:
“Organic”, in this claim, means having a C-C bond.
Surely that is not what “organic” normally means in this context! E.g. see:
If you say “organic nutrient molecules” and it actually turns out you mean only those with C-C bonds, your audience is very likely to get the wrong end of the stick.
Before there were cells there were likely simpler “naked” replicators.
I believe you are wrong if you are talking about replicating information-bearing molecules or crystals. 70% confidence.
Surely though, this radically transforms your claim …
Not really. My original claim didn’t even mention autotrophy. I added it as explanation of why Wachtershauser is so completely divergent from other ideas regarding the origin.
Contrary to your reference HCN is also considered inorganic, along with CO and CO2 and their hydrates. If you want to consider formaldehyde as an organic, and hence as a nutrient for a heterotroph, go ahead—I strongly doubt that it was the original carbon source in any case. 70% confidence.
Before there were cells there were likely simpler “naked” replicators.
I believe you are wrong if you are talking about replicating information-bearing molecules or crystals. 70% confidence.
Replication happens naturally, in crystal growth processes. Of course, that doesn’t prove that early mineral copying processes ultimately led to modern organisms, but it makes me pretty confident of my specific statement above—maybe 90% confidence—and most of the remaining probability mass comes from panspermia and cosmic evolution scenarios—where the origin of life takes place far, far away.
Replication happens naturally, in crystal growth processes. Of course, that doesn’t prove that early mineral copying processes ultimately led to modern organisms, but it makes me pretty confident of my specific statement above.
Ok, it is possible that there were information-bearing replicating crystals. Before organic forms of life. Totally irrelevant to LAWKI, but first. The only thing that makes me doubt that suggestion is that no one—including the abstract of the reference you provide—has given an example of an information-bearing replicating crystal. Good arguments for why that kind of thing might be possible, yes. But actual evidence of it happening somewhat naturally, no.
I’ve seen examples of information bearing crystals that repeat the same information layer-after-layer. And I’ve seen non-information-bearing crystals that actually do something comparable to reproduction (splitting, growth, splitting again). I’ve just never seen a paper where both were happening at the same time.
The clay theory is just not going to be taken seriously until someone has a population of clay “organisms” replicating away in a lab and then starts running long-term evolution experiments on them like Lenski is doing with bacteria.
I am puzzled by your terminology. Replication implies high-fidelity copying of information. That is what some crystals (e.g. barium ferrites) can do. It is an “information bearing replicating crystal”. So, what exactly are you asking for? and why are the polytypic layer structures in barium ferrites not it?
You ask for splitting. However, one of the key insights in this area is that you can have evolution-without splitting—via “vegetative reproduction”:
Not that splitting is terribly demanding. Make anything big enough and it will break up—if only under its own weight. The real issue is whether the split introduces mutations that lead to a meltdown. That is a potential problem for 1D crystals—but 2D ones don’t depend on splitting—and if there are splits there are still likely to be operational viable growth fronts after the split.
The clay theory is just not going to be taken seriously until someone has a population of clay “organisms” replicating away in a lab and then starts running long-term evolution experiments on them like Lenski is doing with bacteria.
No-one else can make life from primitive materials yet either—this requirement strikes against every OOL theory equally.
To recap, the main reason for thinking Crystalline Ancestry is true is because clay mineral crystals actually replicate patterns of reasonable size with high fidelity under plausible pre-biotic conditions (and this is the #1 requirement for any evolving system) - whereas no other pre-biotically plausible structure has been demonstrated to do so.
However, it’s a reasonable request to want to see evolution based on the theory in the lab. Growing many clays in the lab is terribly difficult—and often takes forever—but success there would be interesting. However, much of the existing work has been done with “found” natural clays. They seem to be a more obvious focus—in some respects.
Downvoted for the sheer number of reversals of what used to be my background assumptions about biology without an obvious identification of a single lever that could be used to push on all of those variables.
I am now interested in Wachtershauser, but it takes more than a good LW post to make me think that everything I know is wrong and that it was all disproved by the same person.
You have raised my belief in your proposition from near-zero to about 30%, but that’s still way short of 70%.
Downvoted for the sheer number of reversals of what used to be my background assumptions about biology without an obvious identification of a single lever that could be used to push on all of those variables.
I am now interested in Wachtershauser, but it takes more than a good LW post to make me think that everything I know is wrong and that it was all disproved by the same person.
Well, he hasn’t disproved anything, merely offered an alternative hypothesis. A convincing one, IMHO.
But there is a “single lever”. Wachtershauser believes that the origin of life was “autotrophic”. Everyone else—Miller, Orgel, Deamer, Dyson, even Morowitz on his bad days, thinks that the first living things were “heterotrophic”. And since defining those two terms and explaining their significance would take more work than I want to expend right now, I’ll leave the explaining to wikipedia and Google. I’ll be happy to answer follow-up questions, though.
Everyone else—Miller, Orgel, Deamer, Dyson, even Morowitz on his bad days, thinks that the first living things were “heterotrophic”.
Er, that is certainly not true of A. G. Cairns-Smith! He had the first organisms made of inorganic compounds and getting energy from supersaturated solutions way back in the 1960s—long before Wachtershauser weighed in on the topic.
Cairns-Smith thinks that the first living things were clay—completely inorganic, yes.
So, to include him in my listing of the deluded heterotrophic theorists, I would have to point out that he believes that the first organism incorporating organic carbon got that organic carbon from the environment (soup) rather than making it itself.
back in the 1960s—long before Wachtershauser weighed in
We are only talking about 15 years or so. And it doesn’t mean much to be first. Nor to be clever. You also need to be right. Wachtershauser got the important stuff right.
You would have to point that out, yes, and it would be nicest if you could supply references. I don’t remember Cairns-Smith expressing strong views on that topic.
He tended to address the entry of carbon along the lines of:
look, the entry of carbon came later; natural selection did it; all it needed was some possible paths, and so—since the details of what happened are lost in the mists of time—here is an example of one...
Wachtershauser got the important stuff right.
Possibly—but only if you are talking about the origin of cells. In Crystalline Ancestry, cells are seen as high tech developments that came along well after the origin of living and evolving systems—and the story of the origin of evolution and natural selection is quite different from Wachtershauser’s story. From that perspective Wachtershauser was not really wrong—he just wasn’t describing the actual origin, but rather some events that happened much later on.
You would have to point that out, yes, and it would be nicest if you could supply references. I don’t remember Cairns-Smith expressing strong views on that topic.
He tended to address the entry of carbon along the lines of:
look, the entry of carbon came later; natural selection did it; all it needed was some possible paths, and so here is an example of one...
Ok, I reread Chapter 8 (“Entry of Carbon”) in “Genetic Takeover”. You are right that he mostly remains agnostic on the question of autotrophic vs heterotrophic. That, in itself is remarkable and admirable. But, in his discussion of the origin of organic chirality (pp307-308) he seems to be pretty clearly assuming heterotrophy—he talks of selecting molecules of the desired handedness from racemic mixtures, rather than simply pointing out that the chiral crystal (flaw) structure will naturally lead to chiral organic synthesis.
Heterotrophy is kind-of allowed after you have an ecosystem of creatures that are messing about with organic chemistry as part of their living processes. At that stage there might well be an organic soup created by their waste products, decayed carcases, etc.
This autotrophic vs heterotrophic scene is your area interest—and efforts to paint Cairns-Smith as a heterotrophic theorist strike me as a bit of a misguided smear campaign. His proposed earliest creatures are made of clay! They “eat” supersaturated mineral solutions. You can’t get much less “organic” than that.
Yes, from your (Cairns-Smith) viewpoint that may be what you think Wachtershauser was saying. However, what he actually said is that Cairns-Smith is wrong. Full stop.
Please, Tim, we’ve been through this many times. Your favorite theory and my favorite theory are completely different.
If you want to provide links to your clay origin web pages, please do so. Don’t demand that I provide them with free advertising. But if I am putting your words into Cairns-Smith’s mouth, then I apologize.
That is a bit of a strange response, IMO. I don’t know if you can be bothered with continuing our OOL discussion here—but, as you probably know, I don’t think there’s any good evidence that Cairns-Smith was incorrect—from Wachtershauser—or anyone else—and if you know differently, I would be delighted to hear about it!
Maybe that’s not what you are saying. Maybe you are just saying that you think Wachtershauser provided a complete story that you find parsimonious—and which doesn’t require earlier stages. That would not be so newsworthy for me, I already know all that.
I have no idea whether to disagree with this or not (the Wiki god barely has any info on the guy!) but I’m tempted to downvote this anyway for being so provocative! ;)
Unfortunately, most of Wachtershauser’s papers are behind paywalls. This paper (one of his first publications) is an exception. Ignore everything beyond the first 15 pages or so.
Unless you are familiar with the work of a German patent attorney named Gunter Wachtershauser, just about everything you have read about the origin of life on earth is wrong. More specifically, there was no “prebiotic soup” providing organic nutrient molecules to the first cells or proto-cells, there was no RNA world in which self-replicating molecules evolved into cells, the Miller experiment is a red herring and the chemical processes it deals with never happened on earth until Miller came along. Life didn’t invent proteins for a long time after life first originated. 500 million years or so. About as long as the time from the “Cambrian explosion” to us.
I’m not saying Wachtershauser got it all right. But I am saying that everyone else except people inspired by Wachtershauser definitely got it all wrong. (70%)
Meh. What’s the chances of some germanic guy sitting around looking at patents all day coming up with a theory that revolutionizes some field of science?
Brilliant.
You make the “metabolism first” school of thought sound like a minority contrarian position to the mainstream “genes first” hypothesis. I was under the impression that they were simply competing hypotheses with the jury being still out on the big question. That’s how they presented the issue in my astrobiology class, anyway.
It was a minority, contrarian position just a decade ago. But Wachtershauser’s position is not just “metabolism first”. It is also “strictly autotrophic” and “lipid first”. So I think it is still fair to call it a minority opinion.
Downvoted because it approximately matches what I (literally) covered in Biology 101 a month ago. (70% seems right because to be perfectly honest I didn’t pay that much attention and the Gunter guy may or may not have been relevant.)
Interesting. They are actually teaching this stuff now! Was the Origins material from the textbook, or from lectures? If textbook, could you name the book?
Lectures. And the lecturer noted that the lecture notes from last year would be obsolete, since the science had changed.
To clarify, you do think there was an “RNA world”—but it just post-dated cell walls.
An RNA world before cell walls is really a completely ridiculous idea.
...and of course, I am obviously not going to agree with the last line. IMO, Wachtershauser came along rather late, long after the guts of the problem were sorted out.
Yes, except that what it post-dated was cell membranes, not cell walls. The distinction is important. I do think that there was an “RNA world” stage in life’s evolution when living cells could be modeled as “bags full of RNA”. But I believe that there was an earlier stage when they could be modeled as simply “bags full of water and minerals” and an even earlier stage when life consisted of “patches of living bag material adhering to the surface of minerals”.
Nope. No organic nutrients whatsoever. Autotrophic. This is the key idea that distinguishes Wachtershauser from almost everyone else. Yes, membrane materials are organic, but they were made (on site and just-in-time) by the first living membranes (on mineral surfaces).
Of course. It amused me as I wrote my piece that you could write a strictly parallel contrarian position on the origin-of-life question. “Unless you are familiar with the work of Glascow chemist Graham Cairns-Smith, everything you have read about the origin of life on earth is wrong”.
I shouldn’t argue the “No organic nutrients whatsoever.” point too much—and indeed, I thought I deleted it from my comment pretty quickly. Yes, maybe everything organic was made from inorganic CO2 at the time of the first cells—but do we really know that with 70% confidence? No organic nutrients seems like quite a strong claim.
Well, actually I think the carbon sources were more likely inorganic CO and inorganic HCN, with H2CO (formaldehyde) a possibility. “Organic”, in this claim, means having a C-C bond. And yes, I believe it with 70% confidence. Autotrophy came first. Heterotrophy came later.
It is. It is the claim which forces a kind of intellectual honesty on the rest of your origin theory. You can’t just postulate that some needed chemical arrived on a handy comet or something. If you need a molecule, you must figure out the chemistry of how to make it from the materials already at hand. Wachtershauser didn’t suggests vents as the site of the origin simply because vents were new and “hot” at the time of his proposal. He did so because his chemical training told him that forming carbon-carbon bonds in high yields without enzymes requires a high-pressure high-temperature metal-catalyzed process like Fischer-Tropsch. And then he realized that vents provided an environment where this kind of chemistry could take place naturally.
I won’t argue with the “Autotrophy came first. Heterotrophy came later.” However, you were talking about the origin of cells here—and they “came later” too. Before there were cells there were very likely simpler “naked” replicators—including ones on mineral surfaces.
Surely though, this radically transforms your original claim:
Surely that is not what “organic” normally means in this context! E.g. see:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/organic_compound
Formaldehyde is an organic compound.
If you say “organic nutrient molecules” and it actually turns out you mean only those with C-C bonds, your audience is very likely to get the wrong end of the stick.
I believe you are wrong if you are talking about replicating information-bearing molecules or crystals. 70% confidence.
Not really. My original claim didn’t even mention autotrophy. I added it as explanation of why Wachtershauser is so completely divergent from other ideas regarding the origin.
Contrary to your reference HCN is also considered inorganic, along with CO and CO2 and their hydrates. If you want to consider formaldehyde as an organic, and hence as a nutrient for a heterotroph, go ahead—I strongly doubt that it was the original carbon source in any case. 70% confidence.
Replication happens naturally, in crystal growth processes. Of course, that doesn’t prove that early mineral copying processes ultimately led to modern organisms, but it makes me pretty confident of my specific statement above—maybe 90% confidence—and most of the remaining probability mass comes from panspermia and cosmic evolution scenarios—where the origin of life takes place far, far away.
Ok, it is possible that there were information-bearing replicating crystals. Before organic forms of life. Totally irrelevant to LAWKI, but first. The only thing that makes me doubt that suggestion is that no one—including the abstract of the reference you provide—has given an example of an information-bearing replicating crystal. Good arguments for why that kind of thing might be possible, yes. But actual evidence of it happening somewhat naturally, no.
I’ve seen examples of information bearing crystals that repeat the same information layer-after-layer. And I’ve seen non-information-bearing crystals that actually do something comparable to reproduction (splitting, growth, splitting again). I’ve just never seen a paper where both were happening at the same time.
The clay theory is just not going to be taken seriously until someone has a population of clay “organisms” replicating away in a lab and then starts running long-term evolution experiments on them like Lenski is doing with bacteria.
I am puzzled by your terminology. Replication implies high-fidelity copying of information. That is what some crystals (e.g. barium ferrites) can do. It is an “information bearing replicating crystal”. So, what exactly are you asking for? and why are the polytypic layer structures in barium ferrites not it?
You ask for splitting. However, one of the key insights in this area is that you can have evolution-without splitting—via “vegetative reproduction”:
http://originoflife.net/vegetative_reproduction/
For some plant evolution, you don’t need splitting, only growth. Much the same is true for some “2D” crystals too.
Not that splitting is terribly demanding. Make anything big enough and it will break up—if only under its own weight. The real issue is whether the split introduces mutations that lead to a meltdown. That is a potential problem for 1D crystals—but 2D ones don’t depend on splitting—and if there are splits there are still likely to be operational viable growth fronts after the split.
No-one else can make life from primitive materials yet either—this requirement strikes against every OOL theory equally.
To recap, the main reason for thinking Crystalline Ancestry is true is because clay mineral crystals actually replicate patterns of reasonable size with high fidelity under plausible pre-biotic conditions (and this is the #1 requirement for any evolving system) - whereas no other pre-biotically plausible structure has been demonstrated to do so.
However, it’s a reasonable request to want to see evolution based on the theory in the lab. Growing many clays in the lab is terribly difficult—and often takes forever—but success there would be interesting. However, much of the existing work has been done with “found” natural clays. They seem to be a more obvious focus—in some respects.
I agree that this is plausible. I haven’t investigated, so I don’t know if 70% is reasonable or not.
Downvoted for the sheer number of reversals of what used to be my background assumptions about biology without an obvious identification of a single lever that could be used to push on all of those variables.
I am now interested in Wachtershauser, but it takes more than a good LW post to make me think that everything I know is wrong and that it was all disproved by the same person.
You have raised my belief in your proposition from near-zero to about 30%, but that’s still way short of 70%.
Errh. If you are disagreeing with me, doesn’t that mean you should upvote?
Sorry, I got confused. Duly changed.
Well, he hasn’t disproved anything, merely offered an alternative hypothesis. A convincing one, IMHO.
But there is a “single lever”. Wachtershauser believes that the origin of life was “autotrophic”. Everyone else—Miller, Orgel, Deamer, Dyson, even Morowitz on his bad days, thinks that the first living things were “heterotrophic”. And since defining those two terms and explaining their significance would take more work than I want to expend right now, I’ll leave the explaining to wikipedia and Google. I’ll be happy to answer follow-up questions, though.
Er, that is certainly not true of A. G. Cairns-Smith! He had the first organisms made of inorganic compounds and getting energy from supersaturated solutions way back in the 1960s—long before Wachtershauser weighed in on the topic.
Cairns-Smith thinks that the first living things were clay—completely inorganic, yes. So, to include him in my listing of the deluded heterotrophic theorists, I would have to point out that he believes that the first organism incorporating organic carbon got that organic carbon from the environment (soup) rather than making it itself.
We are only talking about 15 years or so. And it doesn’t mean much to be first. Nor to be clever. You also need to be right. Wachtershauser got the important stuff right.
You would have to point that out, yes, and it would be nicest if you could supply references. I don’t remember Cairns-Smith expressing strong views on that topic.
He tended to address the entry of carbon along the lines of:
look, the entry of carbon came later; natural selection did it; all it needed was some possible paths, and so—since the details of what happened are lost in the mists of time—here is an example of one...
Possibly—but only if you are talking about the origin of cells. In Crystalline Ancestry, cells are seen as high tech developments that came along well after the origin of living and evolving systems—and the story of the origin of evolution and natural selection is quite different from Wachtershauser’s story. From that perspective Wachtershauser was not really wrong—he just wasn’t describing the actual origin, but rather some events that happened much later on.
Ok, I reread Chapter 8 (“Entry of Carbon”) in “Genetic Takeover”. You are right that he mostly remains agnostic on the question of autotrophic vs heterotrophic. That, in itself is remarkable and admirable. But, in his discussion of the origin of organic chirality (pp307-308) he seems to be pretty clearly assuming heterotrophy—he talks of selecting molecules of the desired handedness from racemic mixtures, rather than simply pointing out that the chiral crystal (flaw) structure will naturally lead to chiral organic synthesis.
Heterotrophy is kind-of allowed after you have an ecosystem of creatures that are messing about with organic chemistry as part of their living processes. At that stage there might well be an organic soup created by their waste products, decayed carcases, etc.
This autotrophic vs heterotrophic scene is your area interest—and efforts to paint Cairns-Smith as a heterotrophic theorist strike me as a bit of a misguided smear campaign. His proposed earliest creatures are made of clay! They “eat” supersaturated mineral solutions. You can’t get much less “organic” than that.
Yes, from your (Cairns-Smith) viewpoint that may be what you think Wachtershauser was saying. However, what he actually said is that Cairns-Smith is wrong. Full stop.
Please, Tim, we’ve been through this many times. Your favorite theory and my favorite theory are completely different.
If you want to provide links to your clay origin web pages, please do so. Don’t demand that I provide them with free advertising. But if I am putting your words into Cairns-Smith’s mouth, then I apologize.
That is a bit of a strange response, IMO. I don’t know if you can be bothered with continuing our OOL discussion here—but, as you probably know, I don’t think there’s any good evidence that Cairns-Smith was incorrect—from Wachtershauser—or anyone else—and if you know differently, I would be delighted to hear about it!
Maybe that’s not what you are saying. Maybe you are just saying that you think Wachtershauser provided a complete story that you find parsimonious—and which doesn’t require earlier stages. That would not be so newsworthy for me, I already know all that.
Then you should upvote, not downvote!
I have no idea whether to disagree with this or not (the Wiki god barely has any info on the guy!) but I’m tempted to downvote this anyway for being so provocative! ;)
Unfortunately, most of Wachtershauser’s papers are behind paywalls. This paper (one of his first publications) is an exception. Ignore everything beyond the first 15 pages or so.
This New York Times article is surprisingly good for pop-science journalism.