Here Be Dragons

CONCLUSIONS
soon as circumstances permitted it—speaks against that scenario. If
the appearance of life from the prebiotic soup was highly unlikely, we
would expect it to have been delayed as long as possible. We can't be
sure how long the prebiotic soup would have persisted in the absence
of life—a decrease in the rate of infalling material, combined with destruction
of organics at the deep-sea vents, would have caused an eventual
decline in the concentration of organics—but it certainly seems
that life could have waited for several hundreds of millions of years at
the least. The fact that life did not wait, but took advantage of pretty
much the first opportunity offered, suggests that there is nothing improbable
about that first spark.
The two scenarios advocated by Orgel and Kauffman—genelike
polymers versus autocatalytic sets—are really just extremes of a continuum:
the truth may be somewhere in the center. The first enzymes
probably did a terrible job as far as specificity and speed are concerned,
and the first genes probably did a terrible job as far as fidelity
and durability are concerned. But it didn't really matter, as long as
there was nothing better to compete with, and as long as there was
plenty of energy to squander. What mattered was that the system as a
whole had robustness, and that's where we find Kauffman's ideas a little
more persuasive. We probably would barely recognize the first living
system's enzymes as enzymes, or its genes as genes, and indeed
these functions may have overlapped extensively.
Although the emergence of life on Earth is so problematic, there are
avenues by which we can hope to find answers. The problem is tailormade
for laboratory experimentation. There is no reason that, within a
reasonable time, we should not be able to create a plausible autocatalytic
set and watch whether it does indeed "take on a life of its own."
There is no reason that we should not create a wide range of potential
RNA analogs or precursors to see whether any replicate themselves.
And there is no reason that the RNA world should not be brought back
to life, if it ever existed.
The question of the origin of terrestrial Life has a parallel in the
question of the origin of our individual lives. Once conception was
thought of as an infinitely mysterious event, requiring a hefty dose of
divine intervention. Now we see it as just one of the remarkable, but
basically explicable, processes that accompany the flow of life from
one generation to the next. In due time, we may see the origin of terrestrial
Life in the same way: as a predictable landmark in the flow of
matter from organic chemistry into biochemistry. And the clincher, of
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