ReviewBiology direct2015
Emergence of life: Physical chemistry changes the paradigm.
Review in Biology direct, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Molecular Complexity Constrained Early Amino Acid Recruitment into the Genetic Code.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- The Origin of Life and Cellular Systems: A Continuum from Prebiotic Chemistry to Biodiversity.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Biological Polymers: Evolution, Function, and Significance.Accounts of chemical research · 2025Article
- Evolution at the Origins of Life?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Article
- Physicochemical homeostasis in bacteria.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2023Article
- Plausible Emergence and Self Assembly of a Primitive Phospholipid from Reduced Phosphorus on the Primordial Earth.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2021Review
- The Origin(s) of Cell(s): Pre-Darwinian Evolution from FUCAs to LUCA : To Carl Woese (1928-2012), for his Conceptual Breakthrough of Cellular Evolution.Journal of molecular evolution · 2021Article
- Protecting Enzymes from Stress-Induced Inactivation.Biochemistry · 2019Review
- Is pre-Darwinian evolution plausible?Biology direct · 2018Review
- Crowding in Cellular Environments at an Atomistic Level from Computer Simulations.The journal of physical chemistry. B · 2017Article
- Framing major prebiotic transitions as stages of protocell development: three challenges for origins-of-life research.Beilstein journal of organic chemistry · 2017Article
- Emergence of Life on Earth: A Physicochemical Jigsaw Puzzle.Journal of molecular evolution · 2017Review
- Mineralization and non-ideality: on nature's foundry.Biophysical reviews · 2016Review
- Molecular Effects of Concentrated Solutes on Protein Hydration, Dynamics, and Electrostatics.Biophysical journal · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Origin of life research has been slow to advance not only because of its complex evolutionary nature (Franklin Harold: In Search of Cell History, 2014) but also because of the lack of agreement on fundamental concepts, including the question of 'what is life?'. To re-energize the research and define a new experimental paradigm, we advance four premises to better understand the physicochemical complexities of life's emergence: (1) Chemical and Darwinian (biological) evolutions are distinct, but become continuous with the appearance of heredity. (2) Earth's chemical evolution is driven by energies of cycling (diurnal) disequilibria and by energies of hydrothermal vents. (3) Earth's overall chemical complexity must be high at the origin of life for a subset of (complex) chemicals to phase separate and evolve into living states. (4) Macromolecular crowding in aqueous electrolytes under confined conditions enables evolution of molecular recognition and cellular self-organization. We discuss these premises in relation to current 'constructive' (non-evolutionary) paradigm of origins research - the process of complexification of chemical matter 'from the simple to the complex'. This paradigm artificially avoids planetary chemical complexity and the natural tendency of molecular compositions toward maximum disorder embodied in the second law of thermodynamics. Our four premises suggest an empirical program of experiments involving complex chemical compositions under cycling gradients of temperature, water activity and electromagnetic radiation.
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Registered trials
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.