Quote (zeratul87 @ Sep 3 2011 09:21pm)
lol? what's wrong with my grammar? and i'm sorry my interests lie outside your attention span.
basically one of the major problems with the original theory is that life was thought to begin in a primordial soup. one rich in two things: heat and sulfur. the ideal place would be the hydrothermic vents deep in the oceans. and therein lies the problem. the ocean is vast. just because a couple simple amino acids (and potentially nucleobases) were present, it does not mean those molecules would crash into eachother enough to form the complex building blocks of life. i mentioned heat earlier because the kinetic energy would be sufficient to promote formation, however ONLY if they made contact often enough. another problem with this theory is that entropy drives the dissociation of complex peptides and nucleobases.
now here's the new stuff. it's now believed that life began forming not in hot sulfur rich pools but in freezing water. it's believed that following the constant meteor collisions which plagued early earth that a dust cloud formed. this cloud blocked out our sun. a sun i may add that was still relatively young and gave off i think 50% less heat. at any rate the significance of this study is that within frozen water there are pockets. inside these pockets small amino acids and nucleobases would be sitting for millions of years. granted there's not very much kinetic energy, however the close proximity of these molecules is ideal for polyamination (or for polymer formation in general).
so you're thinking big deal right? i mean how can we test this theory? a gentlemen (who's name currently escapes me) kept a soup of cyanide (CN) and methane (CH4) i believe (or another carbon containing molecule) and froze it for a whole 30 years or something. (35?) at any rate he thawed it out recently and was amazed at what he found. not only did he find the same simple amino acids that were present in the heat+sulfur experiments from the years past, but found 7 other ones! in reality this is hard to believe. and even though there is irrefutable evidence of it, it's still difficult for skeptics such as myself to believe. as for the nucleobases, there were chains as long as 200 base pairs! the kicker for this however is that he put in an ribonucliecacid template in it. which i mean following it's initial formation would be present in large quantities. there is still a difficulty in discovering how the initial RNA, or RNA precursor originally formed.
i actually read it, however i didnt really understand most lol. but the parts i did were pretty cool