Related papers: Origin of Life
The widespread presence of ribonucleic acid (RNA) catalysts and cofactors in Earth's biosphere today suggests that RNA was the first biopolymer to support Darwinian evolution. However, most "path-hypotheses" to generate building blocks for…
A variation of Hawking's idea about Euclidean origin of a nonsingular birth of the Universe is considered. It is assumed that near to zero moment $t = 0$ fluctuations of a metric signature are possible.
Chemical evolution is essential in understanding the origins of life. We present a theory for the evolution of molecule masses and show that small molecules grow by random diffusion and large molecules by a preferential attachment process…
Spectroscopic observations of distant cosmological sources continue to exhibit a surprising result; that the chemical abundance of the universe seems to be approximately solar for the observed sources at redshifts of 5, 6, and even 7, even…
In a previous paper we addressed the question "Does the Rapid Appearance of Life on Earth Suggest that Life is Common in the Universe?" The non-observability of recent biogenesis is a self-selection effect that needs to be considered if…
The understanding of the physical processes that lead to the origin of matter in the early Universe, creating both an excess of matter over anti-matter that survived until the present and a dark matter component, is one of the most…
Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We address this question by calculating the relative formation probability per unit time of habitable Earth-like planets within a fixed comoving volume of…
The origin of life on Earth involves the early appearance of an information-containing molecule such as RNA. The basic building blocks of RNA could have been delivered by carbon-rich meteorites, or produced in situ by processes beginning…
The simplest possible beginning of abiogenesis has been a riddle from the last century, which is most successfully solved by the Lipid World hypothesis. However, origin of the next stages of evolution starting form lipids is still in dark.…
Speculation about the existence of advanced forms of life in the Universe and in our galaxy, has been since ever a subject of fascination and discussion in fiction, as well as in astrophysics, biology and philosophy. The well-known Fermi's…
In this paper we review and extend our earlier recent work on thermostated systems. A description of nano-biological systems by Markov chains in coordinate space in the strongly overdamped limit is presented. Characterization of the most…
The investigation of the emergence of life is a major endeavour of science. Astronomy is contributing to it in three fundamental manners: (1) by measuring the chemical enrichment of the Universe, (2) by investigating planet formation and…
This paper presents the proportional evolutionary time hypothesis, which posits that the mean time required for the evolution of complex life is a function of stellar mass. The "biological available window" is defined as the region of a…
It is often stated that there are no laws in biology, where everything is contingent and could have been otherwise, being solely the result of historical accidents. Furthermore, the customary introduction of fundamental biological entities…
The forwards approach to galaxy formation and evolution is extremely powerful but leaves several questions unanswered. Foremost among these is the origin of disks. A backwards approach is able to provide a more realistic treatment of star…
We present what we know on nucleosynthesis in the Universe and hypotheses that have been made in this regard. A brief description of the Universe's evolution during its different stages is offered, indicating which are the periods and…
The genetic code is nearly universal, and the arrangement of the codons in the standard codon table is highly non-random. The three main concepts on origin and evolution of the code are the stereochemical theory; the coevolution theory; and…
After 45 years since the discovery of quantum-gravitational birth of the cosmological density perturbations we can try to answer the main question of cosmology what is the origin of the Universe. This has become possible because the…
We review the thermal history of the Universe. We obtain a new estimate for the thermal history of the Earth over the past four billion years using a biological thermometer based on (1) a rough estimate of the absolute time calibration of…
I shall present three arguments for the proposition that intelligent life is very rare in the universe. First, I shall summarize the consensus opinion of the founders of the Modern Synthesis (Simpson, Dobzhanski, and Mayr) that the…