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Full Description
In recent years, an ever-increasing amount of research has been conducted on the physico-chemical basis of the origin and evolution of life, or protobiology. Many questions are raised in this endeavor: What research methodology should be employed? What sort of dependable facts are available as a firm frame of reference upon which the physico-chemical origin of life or protolife could be examined? Is the origin due exclusively to chance events? If not, what is then responsible for the origin? What physical reality underlies the evolutionarily selective process leading to the origin? What role does variation assume and how is it generated in the course of evolution? Many research workers have pursued various avenues toward answering the stated questions. Among them, we believe Sidney W. Fox has been playing a very unique and pivotal role over the past quarter of a century, presiding over 240 man-years or more of labo ratory work. His laboratory syntheses of thermal proteins called proteinoids and proteinoid micro spheres have emphasized the prin ciple of the self-sequencing of amino acids as a key concept of protobiological synthesis. The significance of his contribution is seen in presenting the experimental evidence that the origin of life is largely due to nonrandom events. This discovery marks a new epoch in the conceptual development of studying the origin of life by focusing on the molecular processes that underlied the emergence and evolution of protobiological information.
Contents
Molecular Evolution and Protobiology: An Overview.- Historical and Personal Reviews.- Conceptual Origin of Thermal Heteropolycondensation of Amino Acids.- Some Early Historical Aspects of the Thermal Polycondensation of Amino Acids.- The Development of the Proteinoid Model for the Origin of Life.- Prebiological Evolution: The Constructionist Approach to the Origin of Life.- The Origin and Evolution of Sidney Walter Fox, Experimentalist.- Prebiotic Molecules.- One-Carbon Compounds in the Prebiotic Syntheses of Biomolecules.- Formation of Bioorganic Compounds in Aqueous Solution Induced by Contact Glow Discharge Electrolysis.- Characterization of Ionizable Groups in Thermally Prepared Polyamino Acids.- On Proteinoid Structure.- Pyrophosphate as a Possible Precursor of ATP.- Self-Organizing Molecular Systems.- Photocells.- A Comparison of Proteinoid and Aldocyanoin Microsystems as Models for the Primordial Protocell.- The Influence of Some Physico-chemical Factors on Self-Organization in Prebiotic Systems.- On Protocells, Preprokaryotes, and Early Prokaryotes.- Protoribosomes.- Protocell Action Potentials: A New Perspective of Bio-Excitation.- Physical Background of Excitability: Synthetic Membranes and Excitable Cells.- The Origin of the Genetic Code and Protein Synthesis.- The Genetic Anticode: The Role of Thermal Proteinoids in Development of an Hypothesis.- Relationship between Biological Information and Origin of Life.- The Stereochemical Approach to Studies of the Origin of the Genetic Code.- Realism and the Origin of the Genetic Code.- Evolution and Enzymes.- Phylogenic Status of Archaebacteria: Considerations Based on mRNA.- The Adaptationist Programme in Molecular Evolution: The Origins of Genetic Codes.- On the Problem of the Origin of Biological Information.- Theoretical Synthesis.- Deductive Biology.- Evolving Evolution.- Concepts of Prebiological Evolution: Their Implications on Natural Selection and Time Course of Evolution.- The Uroboros.- Relational Biology and the Origin of Life.- Protobiology: A Theoretical Synthesis.
