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Mechanisms of the Origin of Life

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Abstract

Any theory purporting to account for life cannot avoid facing the fundamental question about how life originated on this planet. One of the most physically realistic models of the origin of biological information (and hence of life) that I know of was proposed by P. W. Anderson and his coworkers (1983, 1987) (see Fig. 13.1). The model was based on thermal cycling (i.e., the cyclical changes of the temperature on the surface of the earth due to its daily rotation around its axis) of an RNA “soup” presumed to be present somewhere on the primordial earth surface some 3.5 billion years ago. The following quotation from Anderson (1987) describes the key ideas behind his model:

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Correspondence to Sungchul Ji PhD .

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Ji, S. (2012). Mechanisms of the Origin of Life. In: Molecular Theory of the Living Cell. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2152-8_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2152-8_13

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