It's difficult to look far enough back into Earth's history to try to answer the question, how did life originally evolve? But it's a very important question to answer because it allows us to think about the probability of life occurring elsewhere in the universe. There are four general approaches that scientists use to try to study the origin of life, and this video talks about all four but especially metabolism-first theories of life.
Two recent papers from 2020 and 2022 (linked below) provide the theoretical underpinnings for how self-sustaining chemical reactions could lead to the basic building blocks of life itself. These breakthroughs indicate that life might be more common in the universe than we thought.
For an alternative dive into these topics, check out Sabine Hossenfelder's video below as well.
Life might be more common in the universe than we thought [Sabine Hossenfelder]
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Small-molecule autocatalytic networks are universal metabolic fossils [2022 paper]
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Autocatalytic chemical networks at the origin of metabolism [2020 paper]
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Origin of life on Earth: How it happened | Nick Lane and Lex Fridman
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#originoflife #evolution
0:00 Intro
0:19 Contents
0:25 Part 1: What is life?
0:54 Steps of evolution of life
1:34 Component undergoing evolution
2:02 Part 2: Theories on the origin of life
2:15 Environment of ancient Earth
2:34 Four general scientific approaches
3:03 Approach 1: Bottom-up
4:18 Approach 2: Top-down (Last Universal Common Ancestor)
5:06 Approach 3: Fundamental building blocks (RNA)
6:27 Part 3: Metabolism-first theories
7:12 Autocatalytic sets
7:58 First paper (2020): Identifying an autocatalytic set that would be sufficient for life
8:52 Second paper (2022): Showing many autocatalytic sets are viable
10:21 Summary of the two papers
11:02 Life might be common in the universe
11:29 Conclusion
12:28 Outro
