The Origin of Life: American Scientist
"If this notion turns out to be true, it will have important implications for a deep philosophical question: whether we should understand the history of life in terms of the working out of predictable physical principles or of the agency of chance. We are, in fact, arguing that life will appear on any planet that reproduces the environmental and geological conditions that appeared on the early Earth, and that it will appear in order to solve precisely the sort of "stranded electron" problem discussed above. The currently popular view that complex life was something of a frozen accident was set forth in Jacques Monod's classic book Chance and Necessity (1970). We, of course, are arguing the opposite, if only for a significant part of basic chemical architecture....It has not escaped our notice that the mechanism we are postulating immediately suggests that life is widespread in the universe, and can be expected to develop on any planet whose chemistry resembles that of the early Earth."
Interesting explanation for how life emerged from inorganic matter. I think every "how" is explainable. It's the "why" that is so perplexing.
1 comment:
I think humans are so f*ing arrongant that they for one second believe that everything can be explained in the universe, given theories and laws that they themselves have described over time within their own perceptions of the conditions and space that they know. This includes Einstein. I don't think even he could remove himself from his own empirical perceptions of reality, thus termed under "truth and absolutes." I hope somewhere there are some other forms of life so sophisticated that they look upon us and say, "Is that all you could come up with? Roll that dice again."
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