• How Did Life Begin?
    The Origin of Life—Five Questions Worth Asking

    • “Some writers,” says Robert Shapiro, professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University, “have presumed that all life’s building blocks could be formed with ease in Miller-type experiments and were present in meteorites. This is not the case.”2b

      Consider the RNA molecule. It is constructed of smaller molecules called nucleotides. A nucleotide is a different molecule from an amino acid and is only slightly more complex. Shapiro says that “no nucleotides of any kind have been reported as products of spark-discharge experiments or in studies of meteorites.”3 He further states that the probability of a self-replicating RNA molecule randomly assembling from a pool of chemical building blocks “is so vanishingly small that its happening even once anywhere in the visible universe would count as a piece of exceptional good luck.”4

      RNA, proteins, and ribosomes

      RNA (1) is required to make proteins (2), yet proteins are involved in the production of RNA. How could either one arise by chance, let alone both? Ribosomes (3) will be discussed in section 2.

  • How Did Life Begin?
    The Origin of Life—Five Questions Worth Asking

    • b Professor Shapiro does not believe that life was created. He believes that life arose by chance in some fashion not yet fully understood. In 2009, scientists at the University of Manchester, England, reported making some nucleotides in their lab. However, Shapiro states that their recipe “definitely does not meet my criteria for a plausible pathway to the RNA world.”