<< In the Miller-Urey experiment, there was a big bunch of sticky tar, but
still some liquid circulating around, except the particular apparatus
had narrow tubes that tended to get clogged by the tar, blocking the
fluid from circulating, right? In the natural pre-biotic world, the
existance of vast beaches full of sticky tar, and many crevices clogged
by sticky tar, wouldn't prevent the rest of the ocean and crevices and
vents from continuing the experiment. And just as clay was proposed as
a place where prebiotic soup would wash over it and get catalyzed in
some way, perhaps the free ocean waters washing over the sticky-tar
beaches would yield a similar result.

TH
This from "The Spark of Life"  Wills and Bada
"Stanley Miller and his student Eduardo Borquez
found in the late 1990's that the brownish, oily tar
generated in prebiotic experiments slowly releases substantial amounts of
adenine when exposed to water.
Amino acids have also been found to be released slowly
from such tars. Thus, the primordial oil slick could
have been like a giant time-release capsule, continuously supplying adenine and
amino acids to the oceans of the early Earth.
The oily stuff could also have filled some other gaps in the prebiotic
chemistry story ...

Tom
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