I n their attempts to pin down the meaning of “life,” scientists and philosophers have offered dozens of definitions. Lately, researchers more or

The Incredible Conundrum of Life’s Origin

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2025-01-16 15:30:08

I n their attempts to pin down the meaning of “life,” scientists and philosophers have offered dozens of definitions. Lately, researchers more or less agree that, for something to be alive, it has to be able to reproduce and evolve by natural selection.

While these attempts might be getting us incrementally closer to understanding what life on Earth is, and what life elsewhere could be, none has proven particularly helpful in deciphering how life arose. So far, the most fruitful approach has involved creative experiments. These include ones aimed at finding a plausible path, based on what we know about the early Earth’s environment, by which rudimentary chemistry could have become simple biology. Not surprisingly, early attempts to do this encountered a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: The inability to determine what came first—the power to speed up critical chemical reactions, or the power to carry information.

Take, for instance, the main molecular components of life—the nucleic acids (RNA and DNA) and proteins. RNA and DNA are responsible for storing life’s operating instructions and all of the information that gets passed on from one generation to the next. Proteins are life’s workhorses, carrying out most of the biochemical functions of a cell. But making proteins requires the information encoded in RNA and DNA, while at the same time assembling RNA and DNA themselves requires proteins!