4 ms·

How do you substantiate the analogy between origin of life and convection rolls formation?

• gilleain 10y ago
  I presume the idea is that of 'the other half' of evolution - that is, the spontaneous formation of order through simple physical processes coupled to symmetry breaking. Of course it can be easy to over-do the analogies between things like convection rolls and the emergence of lipid bilayers (or whatever). However, the origin of life necessarily came about through purely physical processes and only once that bootstrap phase was over did evolution come into play as biological systems took over acting upon themselves. As I understand it the idea is that a closed system that is driven far from equilibrium by a constant influx of energy can undergo 'symmetry breaking' where the symmetries of the system are changed. So the symmetric situation of the boiling pot is broken such that convection rolls are formed - which is new structure. Similarly, a uniform soup of primitive chemical compounds could have been broken into less-uniform patches by some energy gradient (black or white smokers, for example). This diversity of chemical conditions then helped to form the initial replicators that could then further exploit various temperature, chemical, or proton gradients to create primitive life.