OOL

golden-bubbles-of-sludge-gas-on-a-swamp-stockpack-adobe-stock.jpg
Golden bubbles of sludge gas on a swamp
Photo by Ina on Adobe Stock

New Origin-of-Life Proposal Revives a Hopeful Monster

On this episode of ID the Future, host Eric Anderson talks with scientist and fellow engineer Rob Stadler about a recent origin-of-life paper and how the authors paint themselves into a corner. The context for the paper is this: Decades of research have undermined the three great hopes for a purely naturalistic origin of life — scenarios starting with some sort of metabolism, scenarios starting with some kind of membrane, and scenarios starting with RNA. All three are necessary for cellular life; none seems able to have come ahead of the others. So now some recent work described in an article in New Scientist suggests it all happened at once in a sort of “chemical big bang.” It’s the return Read More ›