Scientists from California claim they support the emerging theory that life on Earth began in clay rather than the sea.
The discovery, announced at a symposium, showed that ordinary clay contains two basic properties essential to life: the capacities to store and transfer energy.
With such energy, coming from radioactive decay and other sources, the early clays could have acted as "chemical factories" for processing inorganic raw materials into the more complex molecules from which the first life arose some 4 billion years ago.
In their analysis of common ceramic clay, the scientists said they found evidence that "mistakes" made normally and repeatedly in the formation of clay crystals presumably create the condition by which the material traps energy and holds it for perhaps thousands of years.
Such defect in the clay microstructure could also be sites for storing information necessary to direct the chemical reactions and organize the eventual proto-organisms.
It would seem that an accumulation of chemical mistakes led to life on Earth.
The clay minerals appear to be able to store and transfer energy through the temporary capture of highly energetic electrons at sites of irregularities in the clay's interior structure. These may also explain the processes of clay catalysis and replication.
Clay has the ability to act as a catalyst in important chemical reactions and could even be capable of such lifelike attributes as self-replication.
Armin Weiss of Univ. of Munich reports oberving the reproiduction of clay crystal structures from a "parent" clay to several generations of "daughter" clays.
It is evocative of the biblical account in Gensis where it is written: And the Lord Gd formed man of dust and of the ground." In common usage this primodrial dust is called clay.
Research was conducted by a team of scientists at the National Areonautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center in Mountainview, Calif., where studies of the origin of life have been underway for years in part to learn how to search for life in other worlds. The leader was Dr. Lelia Coyne, research associate at Ames and San Jose Sate University.
The "primordial soup" theory by A.I. Oparin in the 1930's set forth that vast stores f compounds that contained carbon and hydrogen and some other chemicals accumulated particularly in the Earth's early waters. Energy from lightning and solar radiation then caused the compounds to evolve spontantously into living matter."
Source: "New York Times" 4/3/85
Did life actually evolve from earth rather than water? An evolving concept known as Life from Clay Theory is based on the idea that clay, as a substance with it transferance properties, provides the necessary factor to spark life from organic matter.
