ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2013
The inevitable journey to being.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 52 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
52 citing papers in PubMed.
- Carbon Reduction Powered by Natural Electrochemical Gradients under Submarine Hydrothermal Vent Conditions.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
- Beyond the Second Law: Darwinian Evolution as a Tendency for Entropy Production to Increase.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Nanometric and Hydrophobic Green Rust Minerals upon Exposure to Amino Acids and Nickel as Prerequisites for a Primitive Chemiosmosis.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Nrf1 acts as a highly-conserved determinon for maintaining robust redox homeostasis in the eco-evo-devo process of life histories.Cell stress · 2025Review
- Osmotic energy conversion in serpentinite-hosted deep-sea hydrothermal vents.Nature communications · 2024Article
- RETRACTED ARTICLE: Generation of long-chain fatty acids by hydrogen-driven bicarbonate reduction in ancient alkaline hydrothermal vents.Communications earth & environment · 2024Article
- On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Methanol on the rocks: green rust transformation promotes the oxidation of methane.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Electron transport chains as a window into the earliest stages of evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- New Insights on the Origin of Life: The Role of Silico-Carbonates of Ba (II) to Preserve DNA against Highly Intense UV Radiation.ACS omega · 2023Article
- A self-sustaining serpentinization mega-engine feeds the fougerite nanoengines implicated in the emergence of guided metabolism.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- Second and Outer Coordination Sphere Effects in Nitrogenase, Hydrogenase, Formate Dehydrogenase, and CO Dehydrogenase.Chemical reviews · 2022Review
- Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Hydrothermal synthesis of long-chain hydrocarbons up to CProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Simple Ion-Gas Mixtures as a Source of Key Molecules Relevant to Prebiotic Chemistry.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Thermodynamics of Potential CHO Metabolites in a Reducing Environment.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- A Drive towards Thermodynamic Efficiency for Dissipative Structures in Chemical Reaction Networks.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Experimental Approaches for Testing the Hypothesis of the Emergence of Life at Submarine Alkaline Vents.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- The "Water Problem"(Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Pyrophosphate and Irreversibility in Evolution, or why PPFrontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Life is evolutionarily the most complex of the emergent symmetry-breaking, macroscopically organized dynamic structures in the Universe. Members of this cascading series of disequilibria-converting systems, or engines in Cottrell's terminology, become ever more complicated-more chemical and less physical-as each engine extracts, exploits and generates ever lower grades of energy and resources in the service of entropy generation. Each one of these engines emerges spontaneously from order created by a particular mother engine or engines, as the disequilibrated potential daughter is driven beyond a critical point. Exothermic serpentinization of ocean crust is life's mother engine. It drives alkaline hydrothermal convection and thereby the spontaneous production of precipitated submarine hydrothermal mounds. Here, the two chemical disequilibria directly causative in the emergence of life spontaneously arose across the mineral precipitate membranes separating the acidulous, nitrate-bearing CO2-rich, Hadean sea from the alkaline and CH4/H2-rich serpentinization-generated effluents. Essential redox gradients-involving hydrothermal CH4 and H2 as electron donors, CO2 and nitrate, nitrite, and ferric iron from the ambient ocean as acceptors-were imposed which functioned as the original 'carbon-fixing engine'. At the same time, a post-critical-point (milli)voltage pH potential (proton concentration gradient) drove the condensation of orthophosphate to produce a high energy currency: 'the pyrophosphatase engine'.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.