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Primordial soup rejected
Feb 3
For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a 'primordial soup' of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the 'soup' theory has been over turned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays
"Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won't work at all," said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London.
The soup theory was proposed in 1929 when J.B.S Haldane published his influential essay on the origin of life in which he argued that UV radiation provided the energy to convert methane, ammonia and water into the first organic compounds in the oceans of the early earth.
However critics of the soup theory point out that there is no sustained driving force to make anything react; and without an energy source, life as we know it can't exist.
"Despite bioenergetic and thermodynamic failings the 80-year-old concept of primordial soup remains central to mainstream thinking on the origin of life," said senior author, William Martin, an evolutionary biologist from the Insitute of Botany III in Düsseldorf. "But soup has no capacity for producing the energy vital for life."
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