From Robert Shapiro:

Since then, so-called prebiotic chemistry, which is of course falsely named, because we have no reason to believe that what they're doing would ever lead to life "” I just call it 'investigator influenced abiotic organic chemistry' "” has fallen into the same trap. In the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about two months ago there was a paper "” I think it was theoretical "” they showed that in certain hydro-thermal events, convection forces and other attractive forces, about which I am unable to comment, would serve to concentrate organic molecules, so that organic molecules would get much more concentrated in the bottom of this than they would in the ordinary ocean.

Very nice, perhaps it's a good place for the origin of life, and interesting finding, but then there was another commentary paper in the Proceedings by another invited commentator, who said, Great advance for RNA world because if you put nucleotides in, they'll be concentrated enough to form RNA; and if you put RNA in, the RNA will come together and form aggregates, giving you much more chance of forming a ribosome or whatever. I looked at the paper and thought, How did nucleotides come in? How did RNA come in? How did anything come in? The point is, you would take whatever mess prebiotic chemistry gives you and you would concentrate that mess so it's relevant to RNA or the origin of life "” it's all in the eye of the beholder. And almost all of prebiotic chemistry is like this; they take chemicals of their own selection.

People were talking about Steve Benner and his borate paper where he selected, of his own free will, the chemical formaldehyde, the chemical acid-aldehyde, and the mineral borate, and he decided to mix them together and got a product that he himself said was significant in leading to the origin of RNA world, and I, looking at the same thing, see only the hands of Steve Benner reaching to the shelf of organic chemicals, picking formaldehyde, and from another shelf, picking acidaldehyde, etc. Excluding them carefully. Picking a mineral which occurs only in selective places on the Earth and putting it in in heavy doses. And at the end getting a complex of ribose and borate, which by itself would be of no use for making RNA, because the borate loves to hold onto the ribose, and as long as it holds onto the ribose it can't be used to make RNA. If it lets go of the ribose, then the ribose becomes vulnerable to destruction by all the other environmental agents.

The half-life of pure ribose in solution, a different experiment and a very good one, by Stanley Miller is of the order of one or two hours, and all of the other sugars prominent in Earth biology have similar instability.

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