Chemical Origin of Life

[Anomalocaris]

I see. I guess the 'contrversial' part is about if something that is 'not a discrete life form' can speciate, but now that I think about it, it might not be illogical to conclude that it can.

The concept is the full collection of traits and abilities needed to make something a life didn't develop all at once. Instead there had been a protracted process in which selection pressure conceptually similar to those governing biological evolution had steered and governed the development of the individual complex chemical reaction to create features required for life, and then step by step assembled them into a working organism.

During each step, random chemistry evolved in chemically possible direction, But only those which are physically or thermodynamically favored to build one upon another, to replicate, would survive, and contributed to creating yet more complex chemistry, and have the opportunity to leave traces in the functioning of the any organism that eventually arose down the line. Here the different sets of complex chemical reactions may be roughly said to represent an analogue of species. Most have no future, and would leave no trace of themselves in later life. Some form good building blocks for assembly into something even closer to life. These pre-biotic chemical processes left their markers in the fundamental chemistry of life.

It is the ubiquitous presence of these chemistry in life, and their total dominance over all parts at all levels of all functions shown to present or required in life, that convinced us life arose out of complex organic chemistry.

With the difference between Archea and other forms of cells, we may have a glimpse of the nature of the last few steps in complex chemistry process on the road to bonafide life, BEFORE it has quite gotten to the stage of what we would call life.

We may not be able to duplicate the entire chemical process from scum to life, but we may gortunitously been given an snap shots of the chemical process right before the golden moment of the actual creation of the linage of life that led to us.