theadvancedapes thought you might find this interesting.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Just read the abstract but I can't wait to dive into the PDF. The OOL question is one of the most interesting (and frustrating) questions that science can encounter.
To me, this is the thrust of the paper:There is good reason to think that the emergence of life on the Earth did not just involve a long string of random chemical events that fortuitously led to a simple living system. If life had emerged in such an arbitrary way, then the mechanistic question of abiogenesis would be fundamentally without explanation—a stupendously improbable chemical outcome whose likelihood of repetition would be virtually zero. However, the general view, now strongly supported by recent studies in systems chemistry, is that the process of abiogenesis was governed by underlying physico-chemical principles, and the central goal of OOL studies should therefore be to delineate those principles.
If true, and it seems probable that replicating chemical systems do actually evolve in a non-random fashion, then it should stand to reason that microbial life is common. If life was the product of random chemical interaction - as they state - then the chances of increased complexity would be virtually zero.
One of the authors they cite in the paper, Kauffman, has postulated that the emergence of life should be a general phenomenon due to its thermodynamic favorability, a somewhat counter-intuitive result. His argument basically says (simplified drastically): For randomness to result in life would require more time than has elapsed in the universe thus far (and a lot more; I can't remember the number off the top of my head, but I believe it's orders of magnitude). Therefore, it is mathematically impossible for life to have resulted from randomness. If not randomness, then it must be thermodynamically favorable for life to emerge.
You can download the whole PDF file It's just over my comprehension capacity.
Thanks. I've been posting a bunch of stuff from open access journals where you can get the PDF for free. Would it make for easier parsing to have a comment on each post linking straight to the PDF? Re: comprehension, a lot of straight journal articles are going to be pretty dense, but my hope is that going straight to the source will cut out a lot of science journalism BS and expose some underappreciated stories. Hopefully the message of each article are reasonably accessible even if there are some hairy details.