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Printable Handouts
Navigable Slide Index
- Introduction
- Perspectives on life's origin
- How is life on this planet actually constructed?
- How did life begin?
- Spontaneous generation
- Age of the microscope
- Biogenesis
- Primordial soup
- Organic molecules
- Autocatalysis
- Chirality
- Cells are necessary for life
- Electric spark to life and cells
- Community clay
- Environmental activation
- Metabolism first
- Genetics/lively molecules first
- Virus world
- Molecular origin
- Features of life
- When did life begin?
- Extraterrestrial life
- Fermi paradox – alien life
- What is life?
- How might we define life?
- Reciprocating environments
- Final implications
Topics Covered
- The Origin of Life
- Physics entrained
- Multiple theories over the ages
- Character and origination of organic molecules linking to self organization
- Necessity of cells
- Theoretical pathways to the origination of life
- Exploration of what actually constitutes life
- Emphasizes the paramount aspects of cognition, communication, and cellular collaboration towards problem solving in evolution
Talk Citation
Miller Jr., W.B. (2016, February 29). On the origins of life [Video file]. In The Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection, Henry Stewart Talks. Retrieved October 11, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.69645/BIWQ5371.Export Citation (RIS)
Publication History
Financial Disclosures
- Dr. William B. Miller Jr. has not informed HSTalks of any commercial/financial relationship that it is appropriate to disclose.
Other Talks in the Series: Evolutionary Physiology
Transcript
Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
My name is Dr. Bill Miller,
and we're going to talk today
about the origins of life.
I had been a physician by training
and practiced in academic medicine
and private practice
for many decades,
became deeply interested in
evolution, which led to my book,
"The Microcosm Within - Evolution
and Extinction in the Hologenome".
0:25
All of you are undoubtedly familiar
with the contentious arguments
about Darwinism versus
creationism and evolution.
This debate has been present
within our larger society,
and even within academia
and outside of it.
And this difference of opinion
spills over into the concepts
of the origin of life, too.
The perspective that I'll offer
in our discussion about the origin
of life on this planet is that
it can be considered the result
of natural physical processes.
No supernatural agency needs
to be implicated, certainly.
That can remain true even if we
do not fully apprehend exactly
how life occurred on this planet.
This doesn't completely
discount the possibility
of an intelligent, creative
entity of one form or another.
But our approach to the topic will
be from the perspective and some
might say, from the bias that there
are intrinsic organic processes
that can be actualized on the
planet and can propel life on Earth
with all its variety of
forms and its abundances.
That is, if only we can
discern those forces.
Having said that, the mystery
of it all can by no means
be entirely discounted.
1:39
And there can be no doubt
that the exact origins of life
have been a mystery
for a very long time.
For example, here's what
Paul Davies, a brilliant physicist
who's championed concepts
of self-organization,
has to say about it.
"Many investigators feel uneasy
stating in public that the origin
of life is a mystery, even
though behind closed doors
they admit that they're baffled."
Beyond leaving physicists
stumped, biologists
have an equal sense of wonderment
about life and its probabilities.
Francis Crick, of Watson and
Crick and the DNA helix, says this:
"An honest man, armed with all
the knowledge available to us now,
could only state that in
some sense, the origin of life
appears at the moment
to be almost a miracle,
so many are the conditions
which would have had
to have been satisfied
to get it going."
Now, we may not be at a point in
which we could definitively defend
an answer to the question
of those exact elements
that separate life from non-life,
but that doesn't mean we
haven't made progress
towards reaching an answer.
One advantage is that
we now have better
answers to one part of the puzzle.
The question has been this:
How is complex life on this planet
actually constructed?
What we now know is
that macroorganisms
have to be appraised in
a fundamentally different manner
than we had before.
And by doing that, we're learning
that we need to concentrate
on their cellular
properties as opposed
to their macroorganic appearances.
We're seduced by
the variety, and wonder,
and the apparent complexity of life.
However, by appraising
life as it evolves,
improved answers can be
offered to its origin, too.
The key is to fully and completely
appreciate the cellular nature
of life on Earth and
its eternal partnership
with the microbial realm.
Lewis Thomas was a great
scientist and essayist.
And like myself,
he trained as a physician.
Here's a perspective that I'll quote
from his admirable "Lives of a Cell".
'The uniformity of Earth's life,
more astounding than its diversity,
is accountable by
the high probability
that we derived originally from
a single cell, fertilized in a bolt
of lightning as the Earth cooled.
It is from the progeny of this
parent cell that we take our looks.
We still share genes around,
and the resemblance
of the enzymes of grasses to those
of whales is a family resemblance.'
Now, whether or not we're
formed by a bolt of lightning
is not the point.
What is relevant is his observation
of our unicellular origins
and that despite
the impressive variety
of our external
phenotypic appearances,
and even the vast majority
of the metabolic systems,
we're all descended from
the unicell and continue
to resemble it in remarkable ways.
It's this connection that
can afford some insights
into the origin of life on Earth.
So buckle up.
We're going to move briskly.
There's a lot to cover.