The formation of polymers, long-chain molecules made of repeating units of monomers (the essential building blocks mentioned above), is a far more difficult experimental problem than the formation of monomers. Polymerization reactions tend to be dehydrations. A molecule of water is lost in the formation of a peptide from two amino acids or of a disaccharide sugar from two monomers. Dehydrating agents are used to initiate polymerization. The polymerization of amino acids to form long proteinlike molecules (“proteinoids”) was accomplished through dry heating by American biochemist Sidney Fox and his colleagues. The polyamino acids that he formed are not random molecules unrelated to life. They have distinct catalytic activities. Long polymers of amino acids were also produced from hydrogen cyanide and anhydrous liquid ammonia by American chemist Clifford Matthews in simulations of the early upper atmosphere. Some evidence exists that ultraviolet irradiation induces combinations of nucleotide bases and sugars in the presence of phosphates or cyanides. Some condensing agents such as cyanamide are efficiently made under simulated primitive conditions. Despite the breakdown by water of molecular intermediates, condensing agents may quite effectively induce polymerization, and polymers of amino acids, sugars, and nucleotides have all been made this way.

That adsorption of relevant small carbon compounds on clays or other minerals may have concentrated these intermediates was suggested by the British scientist John Desmond Bernal. Concentration of some kind is required to offset the tendency for water to break down polymers of biological significance. Phosphorus, which with deoxyribose sugar forms the “backbone” of DNA and is integrally involved in cell energy transformation and membrane formation, is preferentially incorporated into prebiological organic molecules. It is hard to explain how such a preference could have happened without the concentration of organic molecules.

The early ocean and lakes themselves may have been a dilute solution of organic molecules. If all the surface carbon on Earth were present as organic molecules, or if many known ultraviolet synthetic reactions that produce organic molecules were permitted to continue for a billion years with their products dissolved in the oceans, a 1 percent solution of organic molecules would result. Haldane suggested that the origin of life occurred in a “hot dilute soup.” Concentration through either evaporation or freezing of pools, adsorption on clay interfaces, or the generation of colloidal enclosures called coacervates may have served to bring the organic molecules in question in contact with each other.

The essential building blocks for life (the monomers) were probably produced in relatively abundant concentrations, given conditions on the early Earth. Although relevant, this is more akin to the origin of food than to the origin of life. If life is defined as a self-maintaining, self-producing, and mutable molecular system that derives energy and supplies from the environment, then food is certainly required for life. Polynucleotides (polymers of RNA and DNA) can be produced in laboratory experiments from nucleotide phosphates in the presence of enzymes of biological origin (polymerases) and a preexisting “primer” nucleic acid molecule. If the primer is absent, polynucleotides are still formed, but they lack specific genetic information. Once such a polynucleotide forms, it can act as a primer for subsequent syntheses.

Even if such a molecular population could replicate polynucleotides, it would not be considered alive. The polynucleotides tend to hydrolyze (break down) in water. In the early 1980s American biochemist Thomas Cech and Canadian American molecular biologist Sidney Altman discovered that certain RNA molecules have catalytic properties. They catalyze their own splicing, which suggests an early role for RNA in life or even in life’s origins. Only the partnership of the two kinds of molecules (proteins and nucleic acids) segregated from the rest of the world by an oily membrane makes the growth process of life on Earth possible. The molecular apparatus ancillary to the operation of the genetic code—the rules that determine the linear order of amino acids in proteins from nucleotide base pairs in nucleic acids (i.e., the activating enzymes, transfer RNAs, messenger RNAs, ribosomes, and so on)—may be the product of a long evolutionary history among natural, thermodynamically favoured, gradient-reducing complex systems. These rules are produced according to instructions contained within the code. American biophysicist Harold J. Morowitz argued cogently that the origin of the genetic system, the code with its elaborate molecular apparatus, occurred inside cells only after the origin of life as a cyclic metabolic system. American theoretical biologist Jeffrey Wicken pointed out that replicating molecules, if they appeared first, would have had no impetus to develop a complex cellular package or associated protein machinery and that life thus probably arose as a metabolic system that was stabilized by the genetic code, which allowed life’s second law-favoured process to continue ad infinitum.

Many separate and rather diverse instances of the origin of living cells may have occurred in the Archean Earth, but obviously only one prevailed. Interactions eventually eliminated all but our lineage. From the common composition, metabolism, chemical behaviour, and other properties of life, it seems clear that every organism on Earth today is a member of the same lineage.

The earliest living systems

Most organic molecules made by living systems inside cells display the same optical activity: when exposed to a beam of plane-polarized light, they rotate the plane of the beam. Amino acids rotate light to the left, whereas sugars, called dextrorotatory, rotate it to the right. Organic molecules produced artificially lack optical activity because both “left-handed” and “right-handed” molecules are present in equal quantity. Molecules of the same optical activity can be assembled in complementary ways like the stacking of right-handed gloves. The same monomers can be used to produce longer chain molecules that are three-dimensional mirror images of each other; mixtures of monomers of different handedness cannot. Cumulative symmetry is responsible for optical activity. At the time of the origin of life, organic molecules, corresponding both to left- and right-handed forms, were no doubt formed as they are in laboratory simulation experiments today: both types were produced. But the first living systems must have employed one type of component, for the same reason that carpenters cannot use random mixtures of screws with left- and right-handed threads in the same project with the same tools. Whether left- or right-handed activity was adopted was probably a matter of chance, but, once a particular asymmetry was established, it maintained itself. Optical activity accordingly is likely to be a feature of life on any planet. The chances may be equal of finding a given organic molecule or its mirror image in extraterrestrial life-forms if, as Morowitz suspects, the incorporation of nitrogen into the first living system involved glutamine, the simplest of the required amino acid precursors with optical activity.

The first living cells probably resided in a molecular Garden of Eden, where the prebiological origin of food had guaranteed monomers that were available. The cells, the first single-celled organisms, would have increased rapidly. But such an increase was eventually limited by the supply of molecular building blocks. Those organisms with an ability to synthesize scarce monomers, say A, from more abundant ones, say B, would have persisted. The secondary source of supply, B, would in time also become depleted. Those organisms that could produce B from a third monomer, C, would have preferentially persisted. The American biochemist Norman H. Horowitz has proposed that the multienzyme catalyzed reaction chains of contemporary cells originally evolved in this way.