Chapter category: Evolution
The Genomic Potential Hypothesis: Introduction
The Genomic Potential Hypothesis: A Chemist's View of the Origins, Evolution and Unfolding of Life
Edited by: Christian SchwabeISBN: 1-58706-044-2
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Chapter authors:
Christian Schwabe
The Genomic Potential Hypothesis is a biochemists' view of the origin, evolution, and development of life. Large numbers are second nature to a biochemist and though he rarely ever thinks of it explicitly, the concept of mass action is a part of the definition of chemistry. The origin of life, from that perspective, will turn into an event that occurs on the molar scale in units of 1023 and is driven not by needs of biological systems but by mass action, energetics, structure, and kinetics. The outcome of every reaction will be a normal distribution of compounds around a major group and progression in self -assembly will be a shift from one major group to another. Nucleic acids are a bottleneck, a gate that herds the mixtures of chemicals onto the path to life. Beyond those requirements chemistry will go into every favorable direction and complex functions that are uniform in all life forms and which have been considered frozen accidents in the past are, to a biochemist, testimony to the fact that no alternative assembly was possible.
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