The title is “A new model for the origin of life: A new model for the origin of life: Coupled phases and combinatorial selection in fluctuating hydrothermal pools.”
https://youtu.be/nk_R55O24t4?feature=shared

Summary: “Hydrothermal fields on the prebiotic Earth are candidate environments for biogenesis. We propose a model in which molecular systems driven by cycles of hydration and dehydration in such sites undergo chemical evolution and selection in a
dehydrated surface phase followed by encapsulation and combinatorial selection in a hydrated phase. This model is partly supported by recent science, and lies partly in the realm of speculation including a hypothesized pathway for the parallel evolution
of the functional machinery of life. Complex models like this present challenges for science in the 21st century and we will describe a new technology to enable the simulation of such models.”

I say “excellent presentation” because it is a well-explained overview of a model these leading OoL researchers have collaborated extensively on. Commendably, their approach attempts to resolve the “water paradox” with cycles of hydration and
dehydration, the salt problem using freshwater hydrothermal pools, it seeks a systems chemistry approach moving reactions away from equilibrium, and urges getting out of glasswear and into prebiotically plausible natural environments.

THIS I BELIEVE IS ONE OF THE MOST RECENT AND BEST HOLISTIC OOL MODELS ON OFFER, FROM LEADERS IN THE FIELD.

Some observations and comments.

* 3:51 Off the bat Damer asked the question, “Why does the community need a new model for the origin of life?”

He then answers in a way remarkably similar to criticisms by James Tour and William Bains.

* 6:51 “Freeman Dyson who I confer with what about once a year on this project, and he kind of gives us a thumbs up, in general had this idea that life began with little bags of garbage and these are lipid bags in solution the garbage is the dirty
water that is the random chemical compound components, and that somehow this dirty water started to do metabolism and that it could replicate its contents and then the bags would grow and split in two, and if they split in two now quickly enough and
reliably enough, you'd have life, but that's a you know it sounds a little kind of flippant, but in fact this is a very profound insight as to how life may have started…”

See: https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/Ki5fLxziHos/m/QeqGRxj2AQAJ

* 11:54 “so here we have a sort of putative environment for what we're talking about. You'll notice that there's sort of this slurry here that sort of represents the fact that perhaps this pool dried down many times and it's rehydrated many times and
it turns out when this happens that things are deposited on the edge of the pool think of them like think of this like a bathtub ring in your bathtub…”

Displayed is a photo of pool with chemical deposits visible from changing water levels. Kudos for proposing a process and locating it in prebiotically plausible natural environment.

How/where from the supply of free lipids and nucleotides and/or amino acids? Dilution of these monomers in the pool a problem, despite the drying-concentrating effect.
No mention of a mechanism for chirality necessity.

But an interesting and innovative scenario all the same. It does offer a stepwise pathway for pre-biotic evolution.

* 19:54 “I think there's two dozen volcanoes on Kamchatka; I think there's several hundred hydrothermal systems the size of Yellowstone on Kamchatka, it's just an enormous system so on the early Earth the hydrothermal field attached you know on a
volcanic island would have been one of the most chemically rich and dynamic environments.”

Arguing against myself for a moment: it would be easy to under-appreciate that you get to roll the dice an incomprehensibly large number of times.

* 23:48 “let's look at here's our a primitive protocell on the way to life in our system that has as we mentioned before pores it has a membrane of course it has something that's stabilizing the membrane something like a primitive cytoskeleton it has
the beginnings of a metabolic system it has the beginnings of replicator and in all of this it has to have some kind of emergent feedback mechanism that controls the rates of everything because as soon as you get a chemical reaction that goes around and
generates products it can get out of control you need to have a regulatory mechanism that controls those rates…”

All that from recycled little bags of garbage. But I accept it’s a hypothesis ready for testing. Let the empirical verification begin.

* 27:29 “…when the proto cell is able to do the trick of dividing its contents dividing itself and creating daughter cells”

Usefully accurate and repeatable cell division that duplicates and separates the protocell’s polymers prior to pinching and splitting? Wow.

* 49:16 “with one of our instruments here's how we test the hypothesis. we're going to make an anaerobic condition we just chose carbon dioxide we could use others if we wished such as nitrogen for example but we cannot have oxygen there that these
temperatures oxygen begins to attack the molecules we want to have an anaerobic environment…”

Credit for the experimental commitment. Let’s see what emerges.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Wednesday, September 27, 2023 at 12:10:49 AM UTC+10, MarkE wrote:

The title is “A new model for the origin of life: A new model for the origin of life: Coupled phases and combinatorial selection in fluctuating hydrothermal pools.”
https://youtu.be/nk_R55O24t4?feature=shared

Summary: “Hydrothermal fields on the prebiotic Earth are candidate environments for biogenesis. We propose a model in which molecular systems driven by cycles of hydration and dehydration in such sites undergo chemical evolution and selection in a

dehydrated surface phase followed by encapsulation and combinatorial selection in a hydrated phase. This model is partly supported by recent science, and lies partly in the realm of speculation including a hypothesized pathway for the parallel evolution
of the functional machinery of life. Complex models like this present challenges for science in the 21st century and we will describe a new technology to enable the simulation of such models.”

I say “excellent presentation” because it is a well-explained overview of a model these leading OoL researchers have collaborated extensively on. Commendably, their approach attempts to resolve the “water paradox” with cycles of hydration and

dehydration, the salt problem using freshwater hydrothermal pools, it seeks a systems chemistry approach moving reactions away from equilibrium, and urges getting out of glasswear and into prebiotically plausible natural environments.

THIS I BELIEVE IS ONE OF THE MOST RECENT AND BEST HOLISTIC OOL MODELS ON OFFER, FROM LEADERS IN THE FIELD.

Some observations and comments.

* 3:51 Off the bat Damer asked the question, “Why does the community need a new model for the origin of life?”

He then answers in a way remarkably similar to criticisms by James Tour and William Bains.

* 6:51 “Freeman Dyson who I confer with what about once a year on this project, and he kind of gives us a thumbs up, in general had this idea that life began with little bags of garbage and these are lipid bags in solution the garbage is the dirty

water that is the random chemical compound components, and that somehow this dirty water started to do metabolism and that it could replicate its contents and then the bags would grow and split in two, and if they split in two now quickly enough and
reliably enough, you'd have life, but that's a you know it sounds a little kind of flippant, but in fact this is a very profound insight as to how life may have started…”

See: https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/Ki5fLxziHos/m/QeqGRxj2AQAJ

* 11:54 “so here we have a sort of putative environment for what we're talking about. You'll notice that there's sort of this slurry here that sort of represents the fact that perhaps this pool dried down many times and it's rehydrated many times and

it turns out when this happens that things are deposited on the edge of the pool think of them like think of this like a bathtub ring in your bathtub…”

Displayed is a photo of pool with chemical deposits visible from changing water levels. Kudos for proposing a process and locating it in prebiotically plausible natural environment.

How/where from the supply of free lipids and nucleotides and/or amino acids? Dilution of these monomers in the pool a problem, despite the drying-concentrating effect.
No mention of a mechanism for chirality necessity.

But an interesting and innovative scenario all the same. It does offer a stepwise pathway for pre-biotic evolution.

* 19:54 “I think there's two dozen volcanoes on Kamchatka; I think there's several hundred hydrothermal systems the size of Yellowstone on Kamchatka, it's just an enormous system so on the early Earth the hydrothermal field attached you know on a

volcanic island would have been one of the most chemically rich and dynamic environments.”

Arguing against myself for a moment: it would be easy to under-appreciate that you get to roll the dice an incomprehensibly large number of times.

* 23:48 “let's look at here's our a primitive protocell on the way to life in our system that has as we mentioned before pores it has a membrane of course it has something that's stabilizing the membrane something like a primitive cytoskeleton it has

the beginnings of a metabolic system it has the beginnings of replicator and in all of this it has to have some kind of emergent feedback mechanism that controls the rates of everything because as soon as you get a chemical reaction that goes around and
generates products it can get out of control you need to have a regulatory mechanism that controls those rates…”

All that from recycled little bags of garbage. But I accept it’s a hypothesis ready for testing. Let the empirical verification begin.

* 27:29 “…when the proto cell is able to do the trick of dividing its contents dividing itself and creating daughter cells”

Usefully accurate and repeatable cell division that duplicates and separates the protocell’s polymers prior to pinching and splitting? Wow.

* 49:16 “with one of our instruments here's how we test the hypothesis. we're going to make an anaerobic condition we just chose carbon dioxide we could use others if we wished such as nitrogen for example but we cannot have oxygen there that these

temperatures oxygen begins to attack the molecules we want to have an anaerobic environment…”

Credit for the experimental commitment. Let’s see what emerges.

This talk is from 2015, though David Deamer's book "Assembling Life" that is based on this was published in 2019. Note Bruce Damer's call for a new approach to OoL, and note the uncanny alignment with Tour, Bains, Long Story Short, etc:

4:29 “[OoL research has] been mainly focused on individual solution chemistry experiments where they want to show polymerization over here, or they want to show metabolism over here, and Dave and I believe that it's time for the field to go from
incremental progress to substantial progress. So, these are the four points we've come up with to make substantial progress in the origin of life, and the first one is to employ something called system chemistry, having sufficient complexity so instead
of one experiment say about proteins, now you have an experiment about the encapsulation of proteins for example, and informational molecules built from nucleotides in an environment that would say be like an analog of the early Earth, build a complex
experiment. Something we're calling sufficient complexity, and all of these experiments have to move the reactions away from equilibrium. And what do we mean by that? Well, in in your high school chemistry experiments, something starts foaming something
changes color and then the experiment winds down and stops. Well, life didn't get started that way. Life got started by a continuous run-up of complexity and building upon in a sense nature as a ratchet. So we have to figure out how to build experiments
that move will move away from equilibrium…”

6:31 “You can't sit in a laboratory just using glassware. You have to go to the field. You have to go to hot springs, you have to go to […] Iceland and come check and sit down and see what the natural environment is like, rather than being in the
ethereal world of pure reactants and things like that…”

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Tuesday, September 26, 2023 at 4:30:49 PM UTC-7, MarkE wrote:

On Wednesday, September 27, 2023 at 12:10:49 AM UTC+10, MarkE wrote:

The title is “A new model for the origin of life: A new model for the origin of life: Coupled phases and combinatorial selection in fluctuating hydrothermal pools.”
https://youtu.be/nk_R55O24t4?feature=shared

Summary: “Hydrothermal fields on the prebiotic Earth are candidate environments for biogenesis. We propose a model in which molecular systems driven by cycles of hydration and dehydration in such sites undergo chemical evolution and selection in a

dehydrated surface phase followed by encapsulation and combinatorial selection in a hydrated phase. This model is partly supported by recent science, and lies partly in the realm of speculation including a hypothesized pathway for the parallel evolution
of the functional machinery of life. Complex models like this present challenges for science in the 21st century and we will describe a new technology to enable the simulation of such models.”

I say “excellent presentation” because it is a well-explained overview of a model these leading OoL researchers have collaborated extensively on. Commendably, their approach attempts to resolve the “water paradox” with cycles of hydration and

dehydration, the salt problem using freshwater hydrothermal pools, it seeks a systems chemistry approach moving reactions away from equilibrium, and urges getting out of glasswear and into prebiotically plausible natural environments.

THIS I BELIEVE IS ONE OF THE MOST RECENT AND BEST HOLISTIC OOL MODELS ON OFFER, FROM LEADERS IN THE FIELD.

Some observations and comments.

* 3:51 Off the bat Damer asked the question, “Why does the community need a new model for the origin of life?”

He then answers in a way remarkably similar to criticisms by James Tour and William Bains.

* 6:51 “Freeman Dyson who I confer with what about once a year on this project, and he kind of gives us a thumbs up, in general had this idea that life began with little bags of garbage and these are lipid bags in solution the garbage is the dirty

water that is the random chemical compound components, and that somehow this dirty water started to do metabolism and that it could replicate its contents and then the bags would grow and split in two, and if they split in two now quickly enough and
reliably enough, you'd have life, but that's a you know it sounds a little kind of flippant, but in fact this is a very profound insight as to how life may have started…”

See: https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/Ki5fLxziHos/m/QeqGRxj2AQAJ

* 11:54 “so here we have a sort of putative environment for what we're talking about. You'll notice that there's sort of this slurry here that sort of represents the fact that perhaps this pool dried down many times and it's rehydrated many times

and it turns out when this happens that things are deposited on the edge of the pool think of them like think of this like a bathtub ring in your bathtub…”

Displayed is a photo of pool with chemical deposits visible from changing water levels. Kudos for proposing a process and locating it in prebiotically plausible natural environment.

How/where from the supply of free lipids and nucleotides and/or amino acids?
Dilution of these monomers in the pool a problem, despite the drying-concentrating effect.
No mention of a mechanism for chirality necessity.

But an interesting and innovative scenario all the same. It does offer a stepwise pathway for pre-biotic evolution.

* 19:54 “I think there's two dozen volcanoes on Kamchatka; I think there's several hundred hydrothermal systems the size of Yellowstone on Kamchatka, it's just an enormous system so on the early Earth the hydrothermal field attached you know on a

volcanic island would have been one of the most chemically rich and dynamic environments.”

Arguing against myself for a moment: it would be easy to under-appreciate that you get to roll the dice an incomprehensibly large number of times.

* 23:48 “let's look at here's our a primitive protocell on the way to life in our system that has as we mentioned before pores it has a membrane of course it has something that's stabilizing the membrane something like a primitive cytoskeleton it

has the beginnings of a metabolic system it has the beginnings of replicator and in all of this it has to have some kind of emergent feedback mechanism that controls the rates of everything because as soon as you get a chemical reaction that goes around
and generates products it can get out of control you need to have a regulatory mechanism that controls those rates…”

All that from recycled little bags of garbage. But I accept it’s a hypothesis ready for testing. Let the empirical verification begin.

* 27:29 “…when the proto cell is able to do the trick of dividing its contents dividing itself and creating daughter cells”

Usefully accurate and repeatable cell division that duplicates and separates the protocell’s polymers prior to pinching and splitting? Wow.

* 49:16 “with one of our instruments here's how we test the hypothesis. we're going to make an anaerobic condition we just chose carbon dioxide we could use others if we wished such as nitrogen for example but we cannot have oxygen there that these

temperatures oxygen begins to attack the molecules we want to have an anaerobic environment…”

Credit for the experimental commitment. Let’s see what emerges.

This talk is from 2015, though David Deamer's book "Assembling Life" that is based on this was published in 2019. Note Bruce Damer's call for a new approach to OoL, and note the uncanny alignment with Tour, Bains, Long Story Short, etc:

4:29 “[OoL research has] been mainly focused on individual solution chemistry experiments where they want to show polymerization over here, or they want to show metabolism over here, and Dave and I believe that it's time for the field to go from

incremental progress to substantial progress. So, these are the four points we've come up with to make substantial progress in the origin of life, and the first one is to employ something called system chemistry, having sufficient complexity so instead
of one experiment say about proteins, now you have an experiment about the encapsulation of proteins for example, and informational molecules built from nucleotides in an environment that would say be like an analog of the early Earth, build a complex
experiment. Something we're calling sufficient complexity, and all of these experiments have to move the reactions away from equilibrium. And what do we mean by that? Well, in in your high school chemistry experiments, something starts foaming something
changes color and then the experiment winds down and stops. Well, life didn't get started that way. Life got started by a continuous run-up of complexity and building upon in a sense nature as a ratchet. So we have to figure out how to build experiments
that move will move away from equilibrium…”

6:31 “You can't sit in a laboratory just using glassware. You have to go to the field. You have to go to hot springs, you have to go to […] Iceland and come check and sit down and see what the natural environment is like, rather than being in the

ethereal world of pure reactants and things like that…”


Deamer's current work has focused on hot springs including lab and field work.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Thursday, September 28, 2023 at 12:45:50 PM UTC+10, Gary Hurd wrote:

On Tuesday, September 26, 2023 at 4:30:49 PM UTC-7, MarkE wrote:

On Wednesday, September 27, 2023 at 12:10:49 AM UTC+10, MarkE wrote:

The title is “A new model for the origin of life: A new model for the origin of life: Coupled phases and combinatorial selection in fluctuating hydrothermal pools.”
https://youtu.be/nk_R55O24t4?feature=shared

Summary: “Hydrothermal fields on the prebiotic Earth are candidate environments for biogenesis. We propose a model in which molecular systems driven by cycles of hydration and dehydration in such sites undergo chemical evolution and selection in

a dehydrated surface phase followed by encapsulation and combinatorial selection in a hydrated phase. This model is partly supported by recent science, and lies partly in the realm of speculation including a hypothesized pathway for the parallel
evolution of the functional machinery of life. Complex models like this present challenges for science in the 21st century and we will describe a new technology to enable the simulation of such models.”

I say “excellent presentation” because it is a well-explained overview of a model these leading OoL researchers have collaborated extensively on. Commendably, their approach attempts to resolve the “water paradox” with cycles of hydration

and dehydration, the salt problem using freshwater hydrothermal pools, it seeks a systems chemistry approach moving reactions away from equilibrium, and urges getting out of glasswear and into prebiotically plausible natural environments.

THIS I BELIEVE IS ONE OF THE MOST RECENT AND BEST HOLISTIC OOL MODELS ON OFFER, FROM LEADERS IN THE FIELD.

Some observations and comments.

* 3:51 Off the bat Damer asked the question, “Why does the community need a new model for the origin of life?”

He then answers in a way remarkably similar to criticisms by James Tour and William Bains.

* 6:51 “Freeman Dyson who I confer with what about once a year on this project, and he kind of gives us a thumbs up, in general had this idea that life began with little bags of garbage and these are lipid bags in solution the garbage is the

dirty water that is the random chemical compound components, and that somehow this dirty water started to do metabolism and that it could replicate its contents and then the bags would grow and split in two, and if they split in two now quickly enough
and reliably enough, you'd have life, but that's a you know it sounds a little kind of flippant, but in fact this is a very profound insight as to how life may have started…”

See: https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/Ki5fLxziHos/m/QeqGRxj2AQAJ

* 11:54 “so here we have a sort of putative environment for what we're talking about. You'll notice that there's sort of this slurry here that sort of represents the fact that perhaps this pool dried down many times and it's rehydrated many times

and it turns out when this happens that things are deposited on the edge of the pool think of them like think of this like a bathtub ring in your bathtub…”

Displayed is a photo of pool with chemical deposits visible from changing water levels. Kudos for proposing a process and locating it in prebiotically plausible natural environment.

How/where from the supply of free lipids and nucleotides and/or amino acids?
Dilution of these monomers in the pool a problem, despite the drying-concentrating effect.
No mention of a mechanism for chirality necessity.

But an interesting and innovative scenario all the same. It does offer a stepwise pathway for pre-biotic evolution.

* 19:54 “I think there's two dozen volcanoes on Kamchatka; I think there's several hundred hydrothermal systems the size of Yellowstone on Kamchatka, it's just an enormous system so on the early Earth the hydrothermal field attached you know on a

volcanic island would have been one of the most chemically rich and dynamic environments.”

Arguing against myself for a moment: it would be easy to under-appreciate that you get to roll the dice an incomprehensibly large number of times.

* 23:48 “let's look at here's our a primitive protocell on the way to life in our system that has as we mentioned before pores it has a membrane of course it has something that's stabilizing the membrane something like a primitive cytoskeleton it

has the beginnings of a metabolic system it has the beginnings of replicator and in all of this it has to have some kind of emergent feedback mechanism that controls the rates of everything because as soon as you get a chemical reaction that goes around
and generates products it can get out of control you need to have a regulatory mechanism that controls those rates…”

All that from recycled little bags of garbage. But I accept it’s a hypothesis ready for testing. Let the empirical verification begin.

* 27:29 “…when the proto cell is able to do the trick of dividing its contents dividing itself and creating daughter cells”

Usefully accurate and repeatable cell division that duplicates and separates the protocell’s polymers prior to pinching and splitting? Wow.

* 49:16 “with one of our instruments here's how we test the hypothesis. we're going to make an anaerobic condition we just chose carbon dioxide we could use others if we wished such as nitrogen for example but we cannot have oxygen there that

these temperatures oxygen begins to attack the molecules we want to have an anaerobic environment…”

Credit for the experimental commitment. Let’s see what emerges.

This talk is from 2015, though David Deamer's book "Assembling Life" that is based on this was published in 2019. Note Bruce Damer's call for a new approach to OoL, and note the uncanny alignment with Tour, Bains, Long Story Short, etc:

4:29 “[OoL research has] been mainly focused on individual solution chemistry experiments where they want to show polymerization over here, or they want to show metabolism over here, and Dave and I believe that it's time for the field to go from

incremental progress to substantial progress. So, these are the four points we've come up with to make substantial progress in the origin of life, and the first one is to employ something called system chemistry, having sufficient complexity so instead
of one experiment say about proteins, now you have an experiment about the encapsulation of proteins for example, and informational molecules built from nucleotides in an environment that would say be like an analog of the early Earth, build a complex
experiment. Something we're calling sufficient complexity, and all of these experiments have to move the reactions away from equilibrium. And what do we mean by that? Well, in in your high school chemistry experiments, something starts foaming something
changes color and then the experiment winds down and stops. Well, life didn't get started that way. Life got started by a continuous run-up of complexity and building upon in a sense nature as a ratchet. So we have to figure out how to build experiments
that move will move away from equilibrium…”

6:31 “You can't sit in a laboratory just using glassware. You have to go to the field. You have to go to hot springs, you have to go to […] Iceland and come check and sit down and see what the natural environment is like, rather than being in the

ethereal world of pure reactants and things like that…”

Deamer's current work has focused on hot springs including lab and field work.

Yes - not quoting this to suggest otherwise, rather to show an OoL leader criticising their colleagues for not doing this (these are very similar to criticisms made by James Tour).

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)