How did inorganic chemicals eventually become you and me?

For the past three weeks, we’ve been talking about “the cosmic egg” that exploded and produced the space-time continuum of our universe. Out of all that energy, quantum particles were formed, which eventually became the matter that coalesced into stars and planets. Earth itself seems to have taken shape about 4.3 billion years ago. And the moment it began to cool down … life appeared!

This week, we had a great conversation with Dr. Stephen Freeland (studied at Oxford, York, and Cambridge; post-doc’d at Princeton; spent four years as project manager for NASA’s Astrobiology Institute) about what ideas he and his colleagues are working with when it comes to the the origin of life.

We’ve come a long way from Darwin’s warm, wet pond basking in the energetic rays of the sun, and from flashes of lightning turning that chemical soup into Earth’s first living cells. Now, the money seems to be on deep-sea thermal vents … “black smokers” … which continuously spew boiling hot, highly acidic water at the dark bottom of a frigid ocean. We have good reason to think that primordial life could have originated by tapping into that huge pH gradient, and found a cozy spot nestled between the two temperature extremes at the edges of those thermal vents where it eventually evolved into something that changed the very chemistry of the planet (they produced the oxygen on which all modern life now depends). This would certainly explain why living cells today are powered by “batteries” (called mitochondria) that look like tiny engulfed bacteria which themselves create a tremendous pH gradient to turn chemicals into energy and organic building blocks.

We also talked about:

• how our genetic machinery, which uses DNA as an information storage medium, is an upgrade on an earlier primordial system that used RNA (the “RNA World Hypothesis”), and how that primordial system was itself almost certainly an upgrade upon yet something else;
• our concerns about Intelligent Design as a legitimate scientific explanation (especially given its tendency to lean on God-of-the-gaps arguments);
• the relationship between matter and consciousness, even panpsychism;
• how life originating on other planets is not only a very distinct possibility, but seems to even be a “cosmic imperative”.

As always, tell us what you think …

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