Chapter 24 Page 490 Paragraph 1
"Laboratory analogs of primeval Earth have produced all 20 amino acids commonly found in organisms, several sugars, lipids, the purine and primidine bases present in the nucleotides of DNA and RNA, and even ATP (if phosphate is added to the flask). Before there was life, its chemical building blocks may have been accumulating as a natural stage in the chemical evolution of the planet"
Translation: all the necessary building blocks of modern life can form spontaneously and abiotically.
Chapter 24 Page 490 Paragraph 3
"Clay, even cool clay, may have been especially important as a substratum for the polymerization reactions prerequisite to life. Clay concentrates amino acids and other organic monomers from dilute solutions because the monomers bind to charged sites on the clay particles. At some of the bonding sites, metal atoms, such as iron and zinc, function as catalysts facilitating the reactions that link monomers..."
Translation: the building blocks of life can be polymerized spontaneously and abiotically.
Chapter 24 Page 490 Paragraph 5
"Laboratory experiments demonstrate that protobionts [I.E.- aggregates of abiotically produced molecules] could have formed spontaneously from abiotically produced organic compounds. When mixed with cool water, proteinoids self-assemble into tiny droplets called microspheres. Coated by a protein membrane that is selectively permeable, the microspheres undergo osmotic swelling or shrinking when placed in solutions of different salt concentrations. Some microspheres also store energy in the form of a membrane potential, a voltage across the surface. The protobionts can discharge the voltage in a nerve-like fashion; such excitability is characteristic of all life (which is not to say that microspheres are alive, only that they display some of the properties of life). Droplets of another type, called liposomes, form spontaneously when the organic ingredients include certain lipids. These lipids organize into a molecular bi-layer at the surface of the droplet, much like the lipid bi-layer of cell membranes. The liposomes behave dynamically, sometimes growing by engulfing smaller liposomes and then splitting, other times "giving birth" to smaller
liposomes. Still another type of protobiont, called a coacervate, is a droplet that self assembles when a solution of peptides, nucleic acids, and polysaccharides is shaken. If enzymes are included among the ingredients, they are incorporated into the coacervates. The coacervates are then able to absorb substrates from their surroundings and release the products of the reactions catalyzed by the enzymes."
Translation: objects that mimic several characteristics of life can assemble spontaneously and abiotically.
Chapter 24 Page 491 Paragraph 3
"Some scientists studying the origin of life envision an "RNA world" and are testing the hypothesis of RNA self replication. Short polymers of ribonucleotides have been produced abiotically in test tube experiments. If RNA is added to a test-tube solution containing monomers for making more RNA, sequences about five to then nucleotides long are copied from the template according to base-pairing rules. If zinc is added as a catalyst, sequences up to 40 nucleotides long are copied with less than 1% error."
Translation: genetic information can be synthesized spontaneously and abiotically.
Chapter 24 Page 491 Paragraph 4
"In the 1980s, Thomas Cech and his co-workers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, revolutionized thinking about the evolution of life when they discovered that RNA molecules are important catalysts in modern cells. This disproved the long-held view that only proteins (enzymes) serve as biological catalysts. Cech and others found that modern cells use RNA catalysts, called ribozymes, to do such things as remove introns from RNA. Ribozymes also help catalyze the synthesis of new RNA, notably ribosomal RNA, tRNA, and mRNA. Thus RNA is autocatalytic, and in the prebiotic world, long before there were enzymes or DNA, RNA molecules may have been fully capable of self-replication"
Translation: RNA can reproduce spontaneously and abiotically.
Chapter 24 Page 492 Paragraph 2
"Natural selection on the molecular level works on diverse populations of replicating autocatalytic RNA molecules. [...] Beginning with a diversity of RNA molecules that must compete for monomers to replicate, the sequence best suited to the temperature, salt concentration, and other features of the surrounding solution and having the greatest autocatalytic activity will prevail. [...] Natural selection has been observed operating on RNA populations in test tubes, and it probably happened in prebiotic times as well.
Translation: RNA evolves.
Chapter 24 Page 492 Paragraph 3
"The rudiments of RNA-directed protein synthesis may have been in the weak binding of specific amino acids to bases along RNA molecules, which functioned as simple templates holding a few amino acids together long enough for them to be linked. (Indeed, this is one function of rRNA in modern ribosomes.) If RNA happened to synthesize a short peptide that in turn behaved as an enzyme helping the RNA molecule to replicate, then the early chemical dynamics included cooperation as well as competition"
Translation: RNA can synthesize proteins and such characteristics were likely favored by natural selection.
Chapter 24 Page 492 Paragraph 5
"In this scenario, we have built a hypothetical antecedent of the cell by incorporating genetic information into an aggregate of molecules that selectively accumulates monomers from its surroundings and uses enzymes programmed by its genes to make polymers and carry out other chemical reactions. The protobiont grows and splits, distributing copied of its genes to offspring. [...]"
Translation: Primitive cells can arise spontaneously and abiotically.