Study likens Earth’s evolution to creation of Frankenstein’s monster
When the Earth was born, it was a mess. Lightning storms and meteors likely bombarded the planet’s surface, a barren wasteland with little but chemicals present. How life formed amid such chaos is a mystery billions of years old. Now, a new study offers evidence that the first building blocks may have matched their environment, evolving in a less orderly way than previously thought. “Years ago, the naive idea that pools of pure concentrated ribonucleotides might be present on the primitive Earth was mocked by [famed British chemist] Leslie Orgel as ‘the molecular biologist’s dream,’” said Jack Szostak, a Nobel Prize laureate, professor of chemistry and chemical biology and genetics at Harvard University, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “But how relatively modern homogeneous RNA could emerge from a heterogeneous mixture of different starting materials was unknown.” In a paper recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society,...