"Robert Karl Stonjek"  wrote in message 
news:ckhf86$8v2$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> Did volcanoes help create life?
> Michael Hopkin
>
> Volcanic gas has chemical credentials to spawn basic proteins.
>
> Gas belched out from prehistoric volcanoes could have helped the first 
> life
> to flourish, say chemists. They have worked out that carbonyl sulphide 
> (COS)
> may have been instrumental in stringing together the first molecular
> building blocks of biology.
>
> The discovery potentially answers one of the most vexing questions
> surrounding the origins of life: just how did the first complex biological
> molecules appear, given that there were no organisms around to produce 
> them?
>
> Volcanic gas may have been responsible for creating the first rudimentary
> proteins, suggest Reza Ghadiri, of the Scripps Research Institute in La
> Jolla, California, and his colleagues. In the lab, COS can link amino 
> acids
> into strings called peptides, the strands from which proteins are woven.
>
> Ghadiri's team exposed amino acids to COS at room temperature. The
> researchers report in this week's Science1 that peptide chains were 
> produced
> in a matter of hours or even minutes. What's more, chains could be created
> through several different chemical processes, such as oxidation, 
> alkylation
> and metal catalysis.
>
> Full Text at Nature
> http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041004/full/041004-16.html
> Posted by
> Robert Karl Stonjek
>

Another plausible mechanism for incipient formation of life.  Added to the 
others, and probably a few we haven't conceived, it is certainly likely that 
life was formed by some natural process.  It doesn't matter anyway, the 
alternative, "un-natural" explanations have no basis whatsoever,
except that 
they are easier to swallow.

We don't need to "prove" some physical mechanism to carry the belief that 
life originated naturally. There is simply no other rational alternative.
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