Excerpt

Scientific Setting

In 1982, when Freeman Dyson wrote “A Model for the Origin of Life,” all major molecular components responsible for Francis Crick’s (1970) “central dogma of molecular biology”—that information flows one way from DNA to RNA to proteins—were known and described. Stanley Miller’s (1953) synthesis of amino acids using a spark discharge was still the main watershed that had made the origin of life a tenable science problem, and it was generally interpreted within the frame of Alexander Oparin’s (1938 [1924]) and John Haldane’s (1929) “primordial soup” proposed decades earlier. Yet the interdependence of proteins and polynucleotides for each other’s reproduction in the molecular systems that carry out Crick’s central dogma seemed to impose an intractable chicken–egg paradox along any route from independent small molecules to catalyzed chemistry, and thus to life’s complexity. Dyson’s model aimed to pass directly from Miller’s chemistry to catalysis, obviating the interdependence of proteins and nucleic acids and leaving the complex molecular systems that connected them to arise later within catalytically functional contexts. It became the cornerstone for a “two-origins” scenario for life in Dyson’s 1985 book. These were Dyson’s only two technical works on the origins problem.

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