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JohannesDahlstrom comments on The Irrationality Game - Less Wrong
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Unless you are familiar with the work of a German patent attorney named Gunter Wachtershauser, just about everything you have read about the origin of life on earth is wrong. More specifically, there was no "prebiotic soup" providing organic nutrient molecules to the first cells or proto-cells, there was no RNA world in which self-replicating molecules evolved into cells, the Miller experiment is a red herring and the chemical processes it deals with never happened on earth until Miller came along. Life didn't invent proteins for a long time after life first originated. 500 million years or so. About as long as the time from the "Cambrian explosion" to us.
I'm not saying Wachtershauser got it all right. But I am saying that everyone else except people inspired by Wachtershauser definitely got it all wrong. (70%)
You make the "metabolism first" school of thought sound like a minority contrarian position to the mainstream "genes first" hypothesis. I was under the impression that they were simply competing hypotheses with the jury being still out on the big question. That's how they presented the issue in my astrobiology class, anyway.
It was a minority, contrarian position just a decade ago. But Wachtershauser's position is not just "metabolism first". It is also "strictly autotrophic" and "lipid first". So I think it is still fair to call it a minority opinion.