Origin of Life: The Point of No Return

Abstract

Origin of life research is one of the greatest scientific frontiers of mankind. Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain how life began. Although different hypotheses emphasize different initial phenomena, all of them agree around one important concept: at some point, along with the chain of events toward life, Darwinian evolution emerged. There is no consensus, however, how this occurred. Frequently, the mechanism leading to Darwinian evolution is not addressed and it is assumed that this problem could be solved later, with experimental proof of the hypothesis. Here, the author first defines the minimum components required for Darwinian evolution and then from this standpoint, analyzes some of the hypotheses for the origin of life. Distinctive features of Darwinian evolution and life rooted in the interaction between information and its corresponding structure/function are then reviewed. Due to the obligatory dependency of the information and structure subject to Darwinian evolution, these components must be locked in their origin. One of the most distinctive characteristics of Darwinian evolution in comparison with all other processes is the establishment of a fundamentally new level of matter capable of evolving and adapting. Therefore, the initiation of Darwinian evolution is the “point of no return” after which life begins. In summary: a definition and a mechanism for Darwinian evolution are provided together with a critical analysis of some of the hypotheses for the origin of life.

Spatial Information in the Emergence of Life

“…The prion propagation example reveals the current optimization conditions for conformational information functionality and supports the affirmation that (homo) chirality is related to improving the conformational information flow. The general assumption in the presented work here is that the first (functional) prebiotic information was the explicit conformational information (Cruz-Rosas et al, 2017, 2020. The argument of the prebiotic emergence of functional information is based on a system response toward the milieu.…”

“…Working at a supramolecular level, the shape-structuring on the system constituents represents a spatial information source for prebiotic dynamics (Cruz-Rosas et al, 2020). The emergence of potentially biogenic systems supported by this type of explicit information has been theoretically addressed (Ogayar and Sánchez-Pérez, 1998;Maury, 2015Maury, , 2018Cruz-Rosas et al, 2017, 2020). An essential result in those works is that molecular geometries correlate with concrete milieu conditions because a set of parameters converged on their spatial structuring.…”

“…In this sense, the same protein sequence and handedness reinforce this optimal flow of conformational information in prion propagation. Accordingly, resilient and self-propagating prion-like conformations have been proposed to support a potential biogenic dynamic (Ogayar and Sánchez-Pérez, 1998;Maury, 2015Maury, , 2018Cruz-Rosas et al, 2017, 2020.…”

“…Regarding folded polymers, the spatial information is conformational (Maury, 2015;Cruz-Rosas et al, 2020). The self-propagating capability and relative simplicity of this conformational information have been pointed out as supporting plausible biogenic dynamics (Ogayar and Sánchez-Pérez, 1998;Maury, 2015Maury, , 2018Cruz-Rosas et al, 2017, 2020. Theoretically, the spreading of resilient conformations among prebiotic peptides allows the structural counteraction of milieu perturbations, defining a starting point for an active response toward surroundings by prebiotic systems (Cruz-Rosas et al, 2017;Kompanichenko, 2017a).…”

Proto‐proteins in Protocells

“…Overall, although we cannot provide here a comprehensive review of the current literature, a peptide‐RNA world [42,49–52] is in the view of many researchers the most feasible scenario [53] . The following sections address the peptide side of such a world, and specifically how the early peptides could have paved the road to modern proteins.…”