Chemical Origin of Life

[Anomalocaris]

You make the unwarrented assumption that neither species nor evolution existed until after what might be termed the first life. This is probably not true.

Life on earth can be biochemically separated into two fundamental division - The Archea and everything else. At cellular level they look similar, functions broadly similarly on a high level, but are chemically incompatible biochemically at a basic level. It appears chemically, there is no way for a functioning organism in one division to embark upon the first evolution step to change from one division to another without immediately dying.

This suggest the chemical division in life on earth originated at a part of biochemical speciation process BEFORE the process culmated in life. There were already two species of self-contained pre-organisms that didn't quite fulfil all the requirements of life. These two species then each individually evolved into true life through additional speciation along two different trees.

Thus speciation not only explains why there are so many different form of life, it may in fact be a characteristic of the chemical process that led to the origin of life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea#Ori..._evolution

I'm not sure how you are saying speciation led to the origin of life. It says [in the link] that it is believed that Archea are one of the three domains, which speciated off from the first cells. It doesn't have anything to do with how the first cells originated, but with what happened immediately afterward.

You can create as many domain to include all life as you want. The key is not whether archea is life, it is how is archea related to other life. Was the last common ancester between archea and other domains of life on earth also a living cell in itself.

Here it get contraversal. There are different theories about relationships of Archea to everything else. The difficulty is biochemistry of how informaton is processed through the cell membrane is sufficiently different between archea any everything else that it seem impossible for any living, functioning cell to have been the intermediate stage between archea and all other forms of living cells. So it seems nothing with functioning cell membrane evolve as a functioning cell from Archea to other cells, or vice versa. Nor could any functioning cell with a membrane be capable of evolving into both Archea and other forms of cells.

So one theory suggest the biochemical different must occurred when ancesters of archea and other cells didn't actually have a cell membrane. In other words, not a discrete life form. This theory suggests the process that led eventually to life first occurred in poreous rocks that lines hot hydro-thermal vents on the ocean floor. The hot temperature of the vent water and the complex chemical present in the water allowed increasingly complex organic chemistry processes to occur.

Somewhere along the way, chemistry become complicated enough to produce RNA, prelude to DNA. This allowed parts of chemistry occurring in some pores to be replicated through coded information in adjacent pores. Mutations in the process allowed some of the pores to acquire slightly different chemical processes than others. Hence incipient speciation. Some of the processes are suitable for additional mutation, and chance for additional gains in complexity, some are not. hence evolution by natural selection. But hitherto the chemistry is not contained in any self sustaining physical package. Hence no life. Somewhere along the way, some pores acquired a coating of complex organic chemicals coded in RNA that could stand alone, if expelled from the pore. Hence tcell mambrane and first proto-cell. No protocell membrane could, as far as we can tell, evolve form Archea chemistry to other cellular chemistry in the environment outside the pores of rocks around hydrothermal vents. So the process to create protocell must have arisen at least twice.