Geomicrobiology: Molecular and Environmental Perspective
This book is an interdisciplinary review of recent developments in topics including origin of life, microbial-mineral interactions, and microbial processes functioning in marine and terrestrial environments. A major component of this book addresses molecu
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Chemoautotrophic Origin of Life: The Iron–Sulfur World Hypothesis Günter Wächtershäuser
Introduction The study of the origin of life is an immature science. If we apply the strictures of Immanuel Kant it may not be considered a mature science until it can be said to have embarked on a course of orderly progress. Indeed, if we review the development of research into the origin of life, we have to admit that it is still far from presenting the image of progress. It may be best characterized as an exercise of randomly groping around – and doing so at a number of different levels. At the philosophical level we still are faced with the conflict between mechanistic explanations and teleological judgments. Biochemistry is providing ever more refined mechanistic explanations of the chemistry of life, down to the finest molecular details. A theory of biology, by contrast, would have to treat organisms, i.e. organized beings, as integrated wholes. Biochemistry is reductionistic and mechanistic while biology is holistic and teleological. This provides us with our first question. What would count as a solution of the problem of the origin of life – a molecular reaction mechanism or a primordial organism? Kant of course held that a natural science would be impossible without mechanistic explanations (Kant 1790). Applying this requirement he suggested that a full replacement of all teleological notions of “natural purposes” (end-means relations or functions within a whole organism or between an organism and its environment) by mechanisms would be impossible. Kant did see a “ray of hope” that a mechanistic theory of evolution, i.e. of transformations from one type of organism to another might one day be achievable. He was, however, convinced that a scientific theory of the origin of life, defined as replacement of all teleological judgments by mechanistic explanations, would be impossible. It would require postulating an ultimate ancestral organism, which would have to be endowed with the
G. Wächtershäuser (*) D-80333 Munich, Weinstr. 8, Germany e-mail: [email protected] L.L. Barton et al. (eds.), Geomicrobiology: Molecular and Environmental Perspective, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9204-5_1, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
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means toward the ends of all future organisms, and so it would remain inescapably teleological. This then is our problem: to postulate a primordial organism – here termed “pioneer organism”, which is at the same time mechanistic and organizational. Central to this effort will be the notion of a “synthetic autocatalysis”, the chemical equivalent of biological reproduction, which is a chemical reaction mechanism and at the same time a functional whole, and by being synthetic it is endowed from the start with the primary vector of complexity increase. The problem of the origin of life is situated within three major scientific disciplines: biology, geology and chemistry. Biology and geology are both sciences of natural history, interconnected in a multitude of ways. Geologic
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