The larger catalogue for the whole series is on the parent page, the origin of life: the literature. This page lists only what this article uses or deliberately does not use.
Sources cited
| Source | What it is | Access | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frank 1953, BBA 11:459 | The mathematics of self-amplifying asymmetry. The theoretical root of the field. | Not opened; cited through Blackmond 2010 | undercuts |
| Joyce, Visser, van Boeckel, van Boom, Orgel & van Westrenen 1984, Nature 310:602 | Wrong-handed monomers act as chain terminators in template copying. The functional problem, from Orgel's laboratory. | Abstract verbatim from Europe PMC; body not read | supports |
| Cronin & Pizzarello 1997, Science 275:951 | The founding meteorite measurement: 7.0% and 9.1% L-excess in α-methyl amino acids; the α-hydrogen analogues racemic. | Abstract verbatim from PubMed | complicates |
| Bailey et al. 1998, Science 281:672 | Strong infrared circular polarisation in Orion. The measurement is infrared; the proposed mechanism is ultraviolet. | Abstract verbatim from PubMed | complicates |
| Pizzarello & Cronin 2000, GCA 64:329 | The same authors reporting that protein amino acid excesses are absent or contamination, and naming resistance to racemisation as the reason α-methyl acids differ. | Abstract verbatim from PubMed | complicates |
| Viedma 2005, PRL 94:065504 | Attrition-driven crystallisation drives a symmetric crystal population to complete purity. Substrate is sodium chlorate, achiral in solution. | Published abstract verified; the copy on disk is a preprint with different wording and a different title | complicates |
| Breslow & Levine 2006, PNAS 103:12979 | 1% excess of phenylalanine to 90% by two evaporations, in water. The body gives the masses: 500 mg at 1% left "a few mg" at 40%; the second step restarted from a fresh 500 mg at 40% and left about 100 mg at 90%. | Opened in full (PMC1559738) | undercuts the strong claim; supports the material-cost point |
| Klussmann et al. 2006, Nature 441:621 | Eutectic amplification from solid-liquid phase behaviour; works in aqueous systems. | Abstract verbatim from Europe PMC; the eutectic table is taken from Blackmond 2010 | undercuts |
| Weber & Pizzarello 2006, PNAS 103:12713 | L-dipeptides give D-erythrose at >80% excess, in water. The transfer step. Catalysts were purchased homochiral dipeptides at 25 mol%; yields averaged 21%; the authors expect prebiotic dipeptides to be "stochastic" in chirality and name racemisation as the reason the "biotic" view appeals. | Opened in full | undercuts; complicates on catalyst purity |
| Noorduin et al. 2008, JACS 130:1158 | Viedma ripening on a genuinely chiral molecule: 2-3% to a single chiral solid. Needs glass beads, a superbase and 1,250 rpm. | Opened in full (green OA) | complicates |
| Glavin & Dworkin 2009, PNAS 106:5487 | The largest meteorite excess reported, 18.5% isovaline in Murchison; none in the most primitive meteorites; attributed to parent-body aqueous alteration rather than starlight. | Abstract verbatim from PubMed | complicates |
| Blackmond 2010, CSH Perspect Biol 2:a002147 | The field's standard review. Soai's prebiotic irrelevance; the 10% conglomerate limit; the eutectic table; credit to Morowitz 1969. | Opened in full | complicates |
| Fukue et al. 2010, OLEB 40:335 | Circular polarisation +17% to −5% around BN/KL; none around the Trapezium; no significant integrated polarisation in 353 point sources. | Preprint opened in full | complicates |
| Hein, Tse & Blackmond 2011, Nat Chem 3:704 | 1% proline to >90% D-glyceraldehyde to enantiopure RNA-precursor crystals, out of a 14-amino-acid mixture. Also the 20%-ee-costs-99%-destruction figure for photoresolution. | Opened in full | undercuts |
| Chan, Watson & Sephton 2023, LPSC abstract 1474 | Winchcombe, collected within hours of falling: alanine D/L 1.13, isovaline 1.06. | Conference abstract opened; the 2024 journal version could not be opened | complicates |
| Parker et al. 2023, GCA 347:42 | Ryugu: non-protein amino acids racemic; serine excess read as contamination. | Opened in full (NASA repository PDF) | complicates |
| Ozturk, Liu, Sutherland & Sasselov 2023, Sci Adv 9:eadg8274 | Racemic RNA precursor to ~60% excess on magnetite, then 100%. The only route from fully racemic to fully pure. 200 nm films, 325 mT magnet; authors concede a stronger field than early Earth's and answer with natural-grain remanence; ee falls as crystal yield rises. | Opened in full (PMC10246896, CC BY) | undercuts; complicates on field and yield |
| Kenchel et al. 2024, Nat Commun 15:7980 | Fifteen D-ribozymes tested; a substantial fraction prefer D-products. No intrinsic D-RNA bias for L-amino acids. | Opened in full (CC BY) | complicates, against both camps |
| Glavin et al. 2025, Nat Astron 9:199 | Bennu: all chiral non-protein amino acids racemic; the predicted isovaline excess absent; "the source… remains a mystery." Extended Data Table 4 also shows Murchison isovaline racemic in the same run. | Opened in full including the rendered Extended Data table | complicates |
| Bocková et al. 2023, Nat Commun 14:3381 | Circularly polarised light on isovaline films: up to 2% excess, measured directly. | Abstract verbatim from Europe PMC | supports the modest claim |
| Baczynski et al. 2026, PNAS 123:e2517723123 | Bennu glutamic acid racemic in bulk but with an 87‰ nitrogen isotope difference between hands. Also states the racemisation problem. Post-cutoff. | Opened in full (CC BY) | complicates |
| Devienne et al. 2026, arXiv:2605.19387 | Geochemically plausible magnetite has vortex magnetic states unlike the fabricated films used in earlier work. Characterisation plus simulation, not a crystallisation experiment. Post-cutoff, not peer reviewed. | Opened in full | complicates |
| Brazil 2026, C&EN 104(7) | The field's own status report. On-the-record quotations from Blackmond, Sutherland, Fuchter, Powner and Ozturk. Post-cutoff. | Opened in full | trade press; quotations only |
| Ozturk et al. 2023, Nat Commun 14:6351 | Crystallising enantiopure RAO magnetises magnetite "akin to an avalanche"; coercivity about 20 times the modern field; natural sediments break the symmetry "on a hemisphere scale." | Opened in full (PMC10564924, CC BY) | undercuts the weak-field objection; complicates the direction question |
| Thaxton, Bradley & Olsen 1984, The Mystery of Life's Origin, ch. 8 | The design side's first book-length statement: their energy estimate left chirality out, and a soup is 50-50. | Chapter 8 read in full (author-authorised excerpt) | supports, as a statement of the problem |
| Meyer 2009, Signature in the Cell, pp. 206-207, 212 | (1/2)^150, about 1 in 10^45, for an all-L 150-mer from a racemic pool; multiplied into his protein-origin odds. | Read through archive.org search-inside (signatureincelld0000meye); leaf 219 = p. 207, anchored by the running heads "206" (leaf 218), "Ends and Odds 207" (leaf 219) and "210" (leaf 222); exponents recovered from the arithmetic because the OCR drops superscripts |
supports for a racemic pool; undercut by any enrichment |
| Sarfati 1998, updated 2024, "Origin of life: the chirality problem" | The strongest creationist statement: resolution needs a homochiral agent; amplifiers need unrealistic conditions; purity comes as material shrinks. | Opened in full (copy on disk) | supports; its strong rule is undercut by Ozturk 2023 |
| Tour 2019, "Time Out", Inference 4(4) | Templated high-purity prebiotic synthesis "never been realized." | Opened in full | supports; overtaken for RAO in 2023 |
| Truman 2022, "Racemization of amino acids under natural conditions", part 2, J. Creation 36(2):72-80 | Racemisation half-lives at 25 and 0 C relayed from Bada (Table 1, an image, stored with the source); his own claim of about a century for 10% in peptides. | Opened in full; Table 1 read from the image | supports, on storage and hot settings |
| Bada 1985, Annu Rev Earth Planet Sci 13:241, Table 1 p. 244 | Free amino acid half-lives at 100 C, pH 7-8: Asp 30 days, Ala 120 days, Ile 300 days; protein Asp 1-3 days. | Opened in full; table read from the page image (the OCR lost the numbers) | supports, on hot settings |
| Bada 2020, PNAS 117:22649 (letter) | Asp racemisation rises nearly tenfold between pH 8 and 10; Tagish Lake L-Asp excess 43-59%, isovaline 0-7%. | Opened in full (PMC7959620) | complicates |
| Larralde, Robertson & Miller 1995, PNAS 92:8158 | Ribose decomposes with a half-life of 73 min at 100 C and 44 years at 0 C, pH 7. | Opened in full | supports |
| de Marcellus et al. 2011, ApJL 727:L27 | Circularly polarised UV on achiral ice analogues at 80 K: alanine excess up to 1.34%. | Opened in full (free PDF) | supports the modest claim |
Considered and not used
- Soai et al. 1995, Nature 378:767. The famous autocatalytic amplification. Not opened; the Nature page returned a paraphrase rather than the abstract. The widely repeated 2% to 88% sequence is therefore not printed, and the article's treatment of Soai rests on Blackmond's assessment instead.
- Glavin et al. 2012, MAPS 47:1347, on Tagish Lake. Not opened; Wiley bot-blocks and it is not in PubMed. The ~60% figure for aspartic and glutamic acids reaches this article only through Glavin et al. 2025, and is labelled as such.
- Pizzarello & Weber 2004, Science 303:1151. The one-page Brevia on L-isovaline catalysing tetrose synthesis. Paywalled, no abstract in any database, not opened. The article uses Weber & Pizzarello 2006 instead, which was verified.
- Deng, Yu & Blackmond 2024, Nature 626:1019. Blackmond's own recent symmetry-breaking and ligation work. Paywalled; only its abstract was verified elsewhere in this project. Her spoken summary of it is quoted from the 2026 magazine feature and no number from the paper is printed.
- Modica et al. 2014, ApJ 788:79. The second ice-analogue result. Not opened; de Marcellus 2011, which was opened, carries the figure the article prints.
- Bada 1991, Phil Trans R Soc B 333:349, and Bada & Schroeder 1975, Naturwissenschaften 62:71. The primary sources of the 25 C racemisation half-lives. Closed (OpenAlex: closed; the Royal Society page sits behind a Cloudflare challenge). The figures reach the article through Truman 2022's Table 1, labelled as relayed and as extrapolations.
- White et al. 2020, PNAS 117:11217. Tagish Lake alkaline water and an aspartic acid racemisation time of about 176 days at 80 C and pH 9. Known only through Bada's 2020 letter; not opened, and no number from it is printed.
- Tour 2022, "Much ado about nothing" (
tour-2022). Its line that the "19 homochiral amino acids" have never been made in a prebiotically relevant synthesis was considered. The 2019 sentence was used instead because it names templates, which the magnetite result tests directly. - Sarfati's "splash of water" point (the crystals left behind carry the minor hand, and remixing undoes the enrichment). Considered; it is a fair remark about a pond but adds nothing to the mass-balance argument the article prints.
- A design-side reply to Ozturk 2023. One web search found none on creation.com or evolutionnews.org. If one exists it should be quoted in the design section.
- Yu et al. 2026, Chem Commun 62:198, chiral amplification on calcite. Abstract only. It adds to the amplification pile, which is already conceded, and nothing to symmetry breaking.
- Two further 2026 items, a review in Theoretical and Experimental Chemistry and a confinement-simulation preprint, surfaced in search and were not opened.
Open questions
- Whether any wet-lab crystallisation on natural magnetite, at natural field strengths, produces enantioenrichment. As of September 2026 none has been published.
- The chiral-induced spin selectivity mechanism is disputed at a fundamental level by people who work on it. If it fails, the strongest symmetry-breaking result goes with it.
- Whether the Murchison isovaline excess is real and heterogeneous, or an artefact of extraction. Two papers by overlapping author groups now disagree, and neither addresses the other.
- Nothing predicts the observed direction. That is the whole remaining problem, and both camps should say so plainly.