Re: Proper Form, origin of life

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

David,

Thanks for clarifications. I hope you won't longer feel any
intimidation. Maybe some aspects in this online community
are a bit heavy, but at the core I think we are all just
searchers and mostly try to help each other along our varying
journeys. I would think intimidation and inhibitions and
fears of what to say as politically correct would limit our
chances to learn and be creative and honest.

You could always spoof any of this membership, inclusion vs
ostracism stuff if you wanted to you. Maybe with Woody Allen's
line about "I wouldn't want to be part of any group that would
have me as a member" or something.

I wrastle with attitude and optimism and fun vs heavy, serious,
purpose a lot. On one extreme is Aldo Leopold who said "The
penalty of an ecological education is you live alone in a world
of wounds." On the other extreme my son gave me a coloring book
page with a steam engine named Percy and the caption said "Percy
is cheerful and makes work fun for everyone." While my head is
with Leopold, my heart is with Percy.

Origin of life is part of my work too, serious and fun. I try
to help make it cheerful for everyone as possible. It is great
that this is your question too.

One question re: your questions below - what is the apparatus
you speak of? I don't have one of those in any of my mythical
and hypothetical OOLife scenarios. Just curious and hoping you
turn me on to new angles...

As for my imagination of it, I put the event at the estuarine
turbidity maximum zone where the freshwater of rivers meets the
estuarine circulation generated by tidal flow from ocean. The
ETM still exists and is an abiotic recirculation spot like a
washing machine that also traps particles coming from land or
sea and mixes them all together. It also has a kind of membrane
at the place where fresh colder water on top forms a natural
division with the salty warmer water below. Particles settle out
all the way to sediments but then get swept up again and
resuspended. Combine this free, abiotic recycling system with
solar energy input on top and HT Odum's idea of the ecological
origin of life preceding organisms (production and respiration
or consumption coupled via "circulating seas" as he put it) and
that my origin of community first, which then generates cells
much later after many iterations of composing/combining and
decomposing/detaching molecular forms.

The HT Odum diagram is posted (without permission, oops) on my
web at http://al.umces.edu/~fiscus/research

The original closure to me was functional, not spatial like a
protocell or vesicle, bubble thingy. The two coupled complementary
functions are composition (proto-plant, proto-autotroph) and
decomposition (proto-animal, proto-heterotroph). These two are
more basic and generative functions, especially in combination
and coordination and interdependence, that either metabolism or
genetics. And metabolism and genetics both share the feature of
having composition and decompostion of molecular strings/forms
within them.

As for some of the whys and why here, I see water as very crucial
and life very much water like in many specific and general ways.

As for causes I think of it as a capacity or potential that exists
everywhere in the universe and that creation happens continually.
Perhaps similar as to you saying so about communities.

I look forward to any more conversations on this...and I'm open
to debate and correction and conversion to new views...

off to help get kids to bed...

Dan


Quoting David Macy <***>:

> Dan,
>
>     Oof!  It did not even occur to me that the title could be taken as bad
> spam.  No, I feel myself to be the fresh meat.  Most of you on the list
> strike me as capable and ambitious thinkers.  In all honesty there is an
> intimidation factor that accompanies that.  I thought that I would make an
> attempt at an equally provocative or at least a flamboyant entrance.  I wish
> to squeeze every drop of understanding from you, but I intend no offense!
>
> Yes, the overflowing cup I'm referring to is intended to be a physical
> pre-biotic soup.  I feel also though that there may be analogies between the
> emergence of life and the establishment of societies of many types.  My focus
> is the emergence of life, for many reasons.  The non-living to living
> transition.  Not only Earth's original but also experimentally induced, which
> probably need not be constrained to a single chemical context.
>
> Here are some of the why questions that occur to me.
>
> Why did life emerge in the cup?
> Why could life be established here?
> Why was life not there before the influence or apparatus was observed to act
> on it?
> Why did it we observe it's establishment after the influence or apparatus had
> been removed?
> Why would someone  wish to establish life in an overflowing cup?
> Why is life observed emerging as community/ecology?
> Why did we agree that what we had observed were organisms?
> ...
>
> Of this I am certain, that a scenario akin to what I've roughly outlined is
> possible. Certain as if I had witnessed it, though I have not.
>
> In all honesty Dan, I am perhaps a little too accustomed to contemplating
> these particular kinds of things alone.  Ocassionally with the company of
> others or while considering the published work of others, but mostly by
> myself.  Please grant me some time to adjust.
>
>
> David
>
>
>
>
>
>




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