Summary
The average abundances of chemical elements in crustal rocks, river water and biological material are compared with the Suess-Urey22 abundances distribution (representing the most primitive distribution of the elements on earth). Crustal rocks can be considered still to have the most primitive elemental composition, whereas seawater shows the largest deviations form the cosmic Suess-Urey element distribution. Biological material ranks, in the series considered, between river water and seawater, still showing primitive characteristics. The relative elemental composition of biological material resembles river water more strongly than contemporary seawater: the ratios between the quantitatively most important elements (C, N and P) in living matter are almost equal to those in river water; also the concentration factors for the other elements are less variable than those in seawater. The latter appear to be inversely related to their concentrations in seawater: in living organisms, the elements having lower concentrations in seawater are concentrated more strongly. This differential concentration cannot be obtained by evaporation. The stability of the composition of biological material (evident by comparing species of widely diverging evolutionary development) and its similarity to the Suess-Urey distribution suggest an oceanic genesis early in the earth's history, before the oceans reached their present compositions.
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Acknowledgments. The author wishes to thank the participants in the summer school on chemical evolution and the origin of life (organized by the Council of Europe division for higher education and the research group on cosmic chemistry, chemical evolution and exobiology, at Stevensbeek, the Netherlands, 4–10 July 1983) for many stimulating discussions. Thanks are also due to Mr A. D. G. Dral and Dr J. J. Beukema, both colleagues at the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Texel, for critically reading and amending the manuscript.
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Spaargaren, D.H. Origin of life: Oceanic genesis, panspermia or Darwin's ‘warm little pond’?. Experientia 41, 719–727 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02012566
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02012566