Sulfur's Argumentative Essay: The Origin Of Life

The Origin of Life has long been debated about. In result to that there are many hypotheses that each claim that’s how life started. Some of them claim life came from space, others from clay and even hydrothermal vents. However, they’re only theories which is why many experiments and research going into proving them. Many great minds such as Alexander Oparin, Gunter Wachtershauser, Robert Vrijenhoek and Louis Pasteur are the brains behind the hypotheses which is what makes them even more interesting to test out. The hypotheses that I researched were the Primordial Soup Hypothesis, the Iron-Sulfur World Hypothesis, the Deep Sea Vent Hypothesis, the RNA World Hypothesis, the Community Clay Hypothesis and the Panspermia Hypothesis.

The Primordial Soup Hypothesis was proposed by biochemist Alexander Oparin in 1924. He claimed that life started in a warm body of water due to a combination of chemicals which led to form amino acids then to form proteins. The evidence that he used was that organic compounds may have endured a sequence of reactions that created more and more complex molecules. An experiment conducted to test this theory was the Miller-Urey Experiment done by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey.

He claimed that the biochemical cycle grew and created the first living cell, comparable to the chemosynthetic process as seen on the Galapagos. Evidence Wachtershauser presented was that energy transference cycles could appear using iron-sulfur clusters. The “Wächtershäuser systems” experiment had energy discharged from redox reactions of metal sulfides making the energy ready for organic molecule synthesis and for the formation of polymers and oligomers. Wachtershauser’s reasoning for this hypothesis was that Earth’s early bodies of water and immense volcanic activity were the perfect breeding ground for the beginning of life on