13 - Primordial Organic Cosmochemistry

Summary

Introduction

‘If we could conceive, in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonium and phospheric salts – light, heat, electricity etc. present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes …’

(Charles Darwin to his friend Hooker, 1871) (Anon., 1961)

Here in a nutshell is the entire concept of chemical evolution. What the experimentalist does is to try to recreate Darwin's warm little pond and to see whether those reactions that preceded the emergence of life can be retraced in the laboratory. Such ideas lay fallow for a long period of time until the Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin, in a dissertation published in Russia in 1924, contended that there was no fundamental difference between a living organism and lifeless matter and that the complex combinations, manifestations and properties so characteristic of life must have arisen in the process of the evolution of matter (Oparin, 1924). In 1928, Haldane had similar ideas. He described the formation of a primordial broth by the action of ultraviolet light on the Earth's primitive atmosphere (Haldane, 1929). The Oparin-Haldane hypothesis is the basis of the scientific study of the origin of life.

Primitive Earth's Atmosphere

The composition of the primitive atmosphere is of paramount importance for the synthesis of organic material. The primary Earth's atmosphere was probably formed from the gravitational capture of gases from the solar nebula (Rasool, 1972); however, it was rapidly lost during the early evolution of the Sun.