
Origin Story - bertdc
https://aeon.co/essays/physics-and-information-theory-give-a-glimpse-of-lifes-origins
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ncmncm
A key fact is always omitted from these stories.

So far as we know, nowhere in nature does any organism make a membrane _de
novo_. Every membrane in use anywhere came from extending an existing
membrane, and maybe splitting it.

So, arguably, the real basic stuff of life is not nucleotides, but the
primordial membrane we are still busy extending.

One thing we can be certain about is that the world where life originated was
very little like today's. Besides lacking oxygen, whatever got in the water
stayed until it degraded or stuck to something else. Today, anything of any
value gets eaten in short order.

We can imagine seas teeming with random nucleotides and RNA. A remarkably
simple RNA can reproduce others it bumps into. Once any two of them
encountered one another, the seas would instantly be filled with (near) copies
of whichever was even infinitesimally faster at it. It wouldn't matter if they
were unstable, because they would always be making more.

When you have trapped some in a semipermiable membrane, you are most of the
way to life as we know it.

~~~
acqq
“The Role of Lipid Membranes in Life’s Origin”

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5370405/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5370405/)

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willswire
Is it really so preposterous to consider the role of intelligent design?

~~~
afiori
it's role here is the same as relating the beginning of the universe.

from an experimental standpoint it is completely possible that the universe
started a few minutes ago or that the laws of physics changed in completely
random ways, but we still want to study how the universe could have started
given our current understanding of it.

there is no reason why the big bang is a truer hypothesis than intelligent
design/creationism for the beginning of the universe, but one of them can help
us improve our understanding of our current universe the other does not.

the situation is the same for the creation/evolution of life: assuming
darwinism helps developing new drugs and intelligent design does not.

personally I take it as: if an intelligent entity created of guided the
universe it also carefully added the traces of an undesigned origin for us to
study.

~~~
willswire
I appreciate your thoughts and reply - thanks!

