Epicurus is finally victorious?

 Is Epicurus Smiling?

Paul Nelson

SciTechDaily reports on “The Amyloid Hypothesis: Rewriting Life’s Origin Story.” The original research paper mentioned in the news story is open access at the Journal of the American Chemical Society: “An Analysis of Nucleotide–Amyloid Interactions Reveals Selective Binding to Codon-Sized RNA.”

Here are the opening sentences of the research article, with my emphases:

Questions concerning the origin of life are often couched in terms of what sort of molecule arose first. The linear thinking in this approach to prebiotic chemistry, perhaps guided by a need to solve the chicken–egg paradox embedded firmly in the central dogma of molecular biology, is predestined to fall short of its goal. That is, the elaborate chemical networks that support life could not have originated from a few exceedingly complex molecules, but rather it is more likely that systems of simpler, more abundant molecules were involved.

Says Who?

Not Eugene Koonin. In 2007, he pointed out that any abiogenesis scenario requires a cosmological background theory against which any local event probabilities (e.g., the origin of life on Earth) must be evaluated. If we make the universe big enough and old enough, or avail ourselves of an infinite multiverse — i.e., purchase all the lottery tickets — then “a few exceedingly complex molecules” are ours for the asking. We win the lottery of the origin of life via a natural pathway. And Epicurus smiles in his Athenian tomb.

Here is how Koonin put it :

The plausibility of different models for the origin of life on earth directly depends on the adopted cosmological scenario. In an infinite universe (multiverse), emergence of highly complex systems by chance is inevitable. Therefore, under this cosmology, an entity as complex as a coupled translation-replication system should be considered a viable breakthrough stage for the onset of biological evolution.

Why Bother?

Of course, Saroj K. Rout and his co-authors want to raise the probabilities of the many undirected chemical pathways to the living state as high as they can. Hence, this paper on the possible interactions between amyloid and proto-nucleic acids.

But it’s unclear, if Koonin is correct, why they should bother. Who cares if a natural pathway from chemistry to “a few exceedingly complex molecules” can be elucidated?

Remember, the emergence of highly complex systems by chance is inevitable. So just relax.