Chance and the origin of life
- 1 December 1977
- journal article
- conference paper
- Published by Springer Nature in Discover Life
- Vol. 8 (4) , 287-298
- https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00927902
Abstract
Random chemical reactions in the Earth's primitive hydrosphere could have generated no more than 200 bits of information, whereas the first Darwinian organism must have encoded about a million bits, and therefore could not have arisen by chance. This information gap is bridged by separating reproduction from organism, and postulating a reproductive chemical community that would generate information by proto-Darwinian evolution. The information content of the initial comunity could have been as low as 160 bits, and its evolution might have led to the first Darwinian cell.This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit:
- A speculation on the origin of protein synthesisDiscover Life, 1976
- Molecular AstronomyPublications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 1976
- Entropy of the genetic information and evolutionDiscover Life, 1975
- Remarks on the chemical conditions on the surface of the primitive Earth and the probability of the evolution of lifeDiscover Life, 1975