Allegro Agitato: The Origin of Life
You can lead a dead horse to water, but you cannot make him
drink.
-Alan Austin Lamport, mayor of Toronto
This book is not primarily about the origin of life, but the
origin is an essential gateway to the RNA world. How-
ever, life’s origin is necessarily the most distant and least
known step in the rational description of earthly life. put an-
other way, the conceptual gap between geochemicals and
things of this story. Should nonrastional explanation ever play
a role, the smart money would bet (as it often has) on its tak-
ing a role in origins.
Neverthless, this is not for the most part an account of life’s
orgins, becasue the RNA world cannot occur at the origin, as
property of the first living things. RNA is a complex, fragile
molecule (see Chapter 10) that can only exist after descent
from a world in whioch there has been considerbale prior evo-
lutionary progress. In particular, RNA is relatively unstable
and requires a metabolism that creates it, replicates it, and
possibly repairs it in case of chemiucal diffculties. Thus the RNA worlkd and its biological inventions can only be plausi-