The larger catalogue for the whole series is on the parent page, the origin of life: the literature.
Sources cited
| Source | What it is | Access | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wächtershäuser 1988, Microbiol Rev 52:452 | The founding surface-metabolism paper, with the pyrite-pulling thermodynamics. | Opened in full; OCR poor in places and checked against the scan | complicates |
| Huber & Wächtershäuser 1997, Science 276:245 | Activated thioester and acetic acid from carbon monoxide and methanethiol on nickel-iron sulfide. | Abstract verbatim from PubMed | undercuts |
| Huber & Wächtershäuser 1998, Science 281:670 | Peptide bonds from supplied amino acids on the same minerals. | Abstract verbatim from PubMed | undercuts |
| Martin & Russell 2003, Phil Trans R Soc B 358:59 | The framing paper for alkaline vents, and the chicken-soup argument. | Opened in full | complicates |
| Orgel 2008, PLoS Biol 6:e18 | The specificity objection, finished weeks before his death. Also the "if pigs could fly" line and the concession to hydrothermal chemistry. | Opened in full (CC BY) | supports |
| Vasas, Szathmáry & Santos 2010, PNAS 107:1470 | Compositional replication "lacks evolvability." A hostile result from theoretical biology. | Abstract verbatim | supports |
| Herschy et al. 2014, J Mol Evol 79:213 | The first vent reactor. Formaldehyde ~100 nM, "variable and inconsistent between runs." | Opened in full (CC BY) | supports |
| Jackson 2016, J Mol Evol 83:1 | The physics objection: 0.004 pH units across a micrometre barrier, worth 24 J/mol. | Opened in full (CC BY) | supports |
| Jackson 2017, Life 7:36 | The escape objection: organisms using a natural gradient would be "imprisoned in the vents." | Opened in full (CC BY) | supports |
| Lane 2017, BioEssays 39:1600217 | The reply. The machines were always in lipid membranes; the rock conducts electrons; the log-scale correction; and the complaint about how Jackson is being cited. | Accepted manuscript opened in full | undercuts |
| Muchowska, Varma & Moran 2019, Nature 569:104 | Iron in water gives nine of eleven Krebs intermediates and four amino acids. | Author manuscript opened in full | undercuts |
| Jordan et al. 2019, Nat Ecol Evol 3:1705 | Vesicles at seawater ionic strength, 50 mM magnesium and 70 °C. Answers Deamer's membrane objection. | Opened | undercuts |
| Hudson et al. 2020, PNAS 117:22873 | Microfluidic reactor: formate 1.5 µM, with a clean dose-response on vent-side pH and four controls that each kill the product. | Opened in full | complicates |
| Preiner et al. 2020, Nat Ecol Evol 4:534 | Formate to 200 mM, acetate to 100 µM, pyruvate to 10 µM, over minerals with no gradient. | Abstract verbatim from Europe PMC; body not opened | undercuts, and complicates the vent theory |
| Xavier et al. 2020, Proc R Soc B 287:20192377 | Autocatalytic networks in modern metabolism. Catalysts, not monomers, are the bottleneck. | Opened in full (CC BY) | complicates |
| Damer & Deamer 2020, Astrobiology 20:429 | The hot-spring alternative, and the same energy objection Jackson makes, from the rival camp. | Opened in full | supports |
| Deamer 2017 | "Self-assembly of membranes… has not been demonstrated in hydrothermal vents." | Opened in full (CC BY) | supports |
| Russell 2021, Life 11:429 | The counter-objection: no dry land, an ocean never less than 4 km deep, no Icelands or Hawaiis. | Opened in full (CC BY) | supports, against the other camp |
| Mulkidjanian et al. 2012, PNAS 109:E821 | The third camp. Cells need potassium, phosphate and transition metals that no marine setting supplies. | Opened | supports, against both |
| Kloprogge & Hartman 2022, Life 12:259 | The clay story told first-hand by a participant, including the irreproducible 1981 result. | Opened in full (CC BY) | supports |
Considered and not used
- Preiner et al. 2020 body. Paywalled, abstract only. The article prints its three yield figures, which are in the abstract, and no others.
- Vasas, Szathmáry & Santos 2010 body. Abstract only. The article prints one sentence from it and no numbers.
- Kauffman's original autocatalytic-set proofs (1986 onward). Not opened. Orgel's characterisation of them is quoted instead, and it is labelled as his.
- Weiss 1981, Angewandte Chemie. The irreproducible clay-replication claim. Not opened; the story is taken from Kloprogge and Hartman's first-hand review, and Hartman was one of the people who tried to reproduce it.
- Ferris's montmorillonite oligomerisation papers. Named in passing as the surviving clay result; handled properly in the parent article rather than here.
- Morowitz et al. 2000 and Smith & Morowitz 2004, the reverse-citric-acid-cycle proposals Orgel attacks by name. Not opened. The article describes the family rather than quoting them.
- Gogarten & Deamer 2016, credited by Damer and Deamer for the thick-membrane energy argument. Not opened; the argument is quoted from the 2020 paper that cites it.
Open questions
- Nobody appears to have answered Jackson's escape objection in print. A search found no reply. If one exists it should be added, because the objection is about selection rather than chemistry and is the harder of his two.
- Whether the highest yields really do come from experiments without a pH gradient. The article states this as what the papers report. Confirming it as a general pattern means comparing methods sections across several groups, which was not done.
- No reactor of this kind has been reported forming a carbon-carbon bond. That negative should be re-checked before publication; it is the kind of claim a single new paper would overturn.
- Mulkidjanian's ionic-composition objection has no published answer this research could find, and it is the least-discussed of the three camps' arguments.