Jump start to the origin of life?

Was the origin of life willy-nilly? Or was it primed by pre-existing affinities in non-living matter that gave the creation of the first replicating for of life a jump start? New Research suggests the latter:

The chemical components crucial to the start of life on Earth may have primed and protected each other in never-before-realized ways, according to new research led by University of Washington scientists. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-natural-affinitiesunrecognized-nowmay-stage-life.html#jCpIt could mean a simpler scenario for how that first spark of life came about on the planet, according to Sarah Keller, UW professor of chemistry, and Roy Black, UW affiliate professor of bioengineering, both co-authors of a paper published online July 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This article reminds me of some of the theoretical work done by Stuart Kaufmann of the Santa Fe Institute. Both the affinity of matter to tend toward life and autocatalysis reduce the space of possibilities, making life less of a needle in a haystack proposition.

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Read more about the article Nothing positive about this ratio

Nothing positive about this ratio

The one (academic) thing I remember most from my undergraduate days is my Thermodynamics professor Dr. Will Sutton’s mantra: “Check your sources. Check your sources. Check your sources.” Makes perfect sense and I took that as a universal given but after reading a few PhD dissertations recently, I was wondering if it applies to the soft sciences.

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Lesson in peresistence

At the St. Louis Zoo yesterday, I watched this drama unfold. A bird landed in the prairie dog area and decided that it wanted the prairie dog to share its food. The prairie dog (and yet another prairie dog) remained stoic throughout this ordeal (this is a series of 13 photos), which begs for cartoon captions. IMG_3814 zoo orangutans harty prarie dog IMG_3817 zoo orangutans harty prarie dog IMG_3818 zoo orangutans harty prarie dog [More . . . ]

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Sound patterns

Beware the gut feeling that like begets like and that we should thus be able to anticipate effects from their causes. This leads far too many of us to doubt that sentience can emerge from primal goo. Those of us (like me) who are enthralled by complexity know that like begets like is far too often untrue. I've constantly seen that nature creates elaborate macro patterns using only a dynamic process involving far-too-simple component parts. With that background, take a look at these sand patterns generated by nothing but sound waves. I knew what was coming and I still felt chills when the patterns emerged. There is a deep lesson in these shallow grains of sand. Here's a web page with further explanation.

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