khafra comments on The Irrationality Game - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Will_Newsome 03 October 2010 02:43AM

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Comment author: Perplexed 03 October 2010 04:49:29AM 21 points [-]

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%)

Comment author: khafra 04 October 2010 02:50:13PM 40 points [-]

Meh. What's the chances of some germanic guy sitting around looking at patents all day coming up with a theory that revolutionizes some field of science?

Comment author: BillyOblivion 05 October 2010 05:14:54AM 0 points [-]

Brilliant.