Summary/Analysis of Alexander Oparin's Paper "The Origin of Life"

http://www.valencia.edu/~orilife/textos/The%20Origin%20of%20Life.pdf

Here are a few points. I will continue to summarize more and add my own thoughts as I develop this post more.

In Oparin's paper "The Origin of Life" he goes over a few points:

1. Reactions in chemistry can be spontaneous, thus life is a spontaneous occurance. There is a rule in chemistry which overviews whether a reaction is spontaneous or not, but more on that later.

2. As science was progressing (mind you this paper was published in 1924) accurate observations and experiments were used more and more versus argument and philosophizing alone. (Both are needed, one without the other is an exercise in futility.)

3. Mr. Oparin approaches life as occurring as a result of much hotter conditions on Earth.

4. The idea of life not spontaneously generating was further pushed into the scientific community with Pasteur showing that it is not the putrescent liquids which give rise to microbes, but that the mircobes falling from the air which cause the putrefaction of the liquids. Pasteur's experiments showed that it was not the spontaneous generation of microbes, but that the microbes were already there, but settled into the liquid.

5. Pasteur was the individual who thus lead to the idea of "Panspermia", which meant that microbes were already in outer space and settled into the Earth, to begin the formation of life. (This is philosophically unsound as Earth is in outer space already, there is no such thing as outer, outer space.) "Carus Sterne writes: If this hypothesis merely pushes the beginning of life backwards to the time of the first appearance in the world of celestial space, then, from the philosophical point of view it is a completely useless labour because whatever could have happened in the first world was also possible in the second and third and would be the act of creation or spontaneous generation."

6. It is only necessary to explain how the simplest organism formed to be able to understand the origin of all plants and animals. (I personally think the simplest organism is not an organism itself, but a molecule which self organizes and is present in all living material, water. Unfortunately the definition of "organic compound" states that "carbon" forms the basis of all living material, I differ in this interpretation.)

7. Proteins and their derivatives are only found in living material. (I differ in this regard, that is only because people do have methane buildups, and methane is present in all evolved stars, regardless if we even see living material.)

8. The most important and essential characteristic of organisms their organization. Their form or structure determines what they do. A folded protein would function different than a twisted protein. Just stating what elements they are, where they are located and in what chemical formula they are in is not the complete story. How they are shaped is incredibly important, this of course leads into Oparin stressing the similarities between crystal growth inside of patterned structure and the beginnings of life inside of patterned compounds. The structure holds the secret to life. Destroy the structure and there you have it, a lifeless mixture of organic compounds. As in magnets, its properties depends on its structure. Ground up a magnet in steel mortar, and it loses its magnetism, yet nothing about the magnet's chemical composition or mass has changed.

9. Enzymes catalyze organic compounds in the same way platinum catalyzes hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen. (These types of reactions are mostly exothermic, or heat releasing). Platinum decomposing hydrogen peroxide is the simplest of metabolic reactions. (This could mean that the first "living" things on the Earth were not living at all, but just took a molecule and broke it down, over and over, and other enzymes kept on building up molecules, taking the broken pieces and putting them back together again. I must wonder what the very simplest, most common "breaking down" molecule there is, and oxygen comes to mind as it is highly oxidizing.)

10. The Earth is extremely old, to determine the conditions when it was young would be to determine the conditions for the beginning of life itself. Good thing we know what those conditions are now, they are on and inside of evolving stars.

11. Mr. Oparin admits that early astronomers were telling each other that Earth had existed as an enormous cloud of incandescent gas. Who? On page 15, it doesn't say. Funny how the most important statement is not immediately elaborated. Which astronomer told us Earth was a Sun-like star? Is that not what the Sun is? It is an enormous cloud of incandescent gas (plasma)? My guess is that the other Soviet astronomers were talking amongst themselves to come to this conclusion, and Mr. Oparin being a biologist was conversing amongst them. This means that Oparin was not the originator of this understanding either, but that he is the first person who I am aware of wrote such things, besides Nicholas de Cusa, who before Copernicus wrote, "The earth is a star like other stars". My guess is that the world-view with which he was elaborating on was not fully conceived by him or understood. It means that the vast majority of objects which are viewed in telescopes, the bright and shining ones, every single one of them is a new Earth.

12. D.I. Mendeleev wrote that the nucleus of the Earth would be iron, and then surrounded by the alkali and the alkaline earth metals (which have lower vapor densities).

13. This is the most important, but only written here, I do not understand why this statement is completely glossed over by establishment physicists:

Page 17:

"The different heavenly bodies are now, therefore, at different stages of development...Finally, the stars which have cooled most and are already going out shine with a red light. A further stages of cooling is represented by the planets which can no longer shine with their own light. Our Earth is one of these. Thus, a study of the different heavenly bodies gives us an idea of the different stages of cooling of our own planet (star)."

This clarifies the idea quite easily. I was not the first to think up this theory. I am an originator separated by 80+ years and coming to this conclusion mutually exclusive of any knowledge of Mr. Oparin. I unfortunately will probably not recieve credit for being an originator (regardless if I am an originator) because someone else thought up this idea before me, but I do have the reponsibility of working on this theory, because current dogma is absolutely clueless.

14. Mr. Oparin takes the stance that the center of the Sun is a red hot liquid nucleus on page 18, and this is where him and I differ greatly. The Sun as it stands is hollow. It is too young to have formed a core, as core development happens as the star evolves. The surface of young stars like the Sun signal the material is much too hot to even be liquid, but exists in its ionized state and becomes gaseous as it cools and the gas condenses into the central regions of the star forming the core. This inward falling material would case the star to shrink and cool, and if there were an already present core, there would be no need to shrink! (This is how my readers can know that I am an originator of the theory and I did not "steal" it from someone else. Core development is an end result of a star's evolution, young stars do not have cores.)

15. If the Sun had a heavy metal core as it stands right now, then why in spectroscopic studies are they present in the surface? The Sun clearly has not had enough time to differentiate itself, this means it is relatively young as compared to the Earth and other vastly older stars.

16. The first compounds on the Earth must have been extremely stable. (This is reasonable, but he mentions iron carbide (steel I guess) as being it. I do not think so, I think its iron/nickel alloy, the same alloy in turbine blades). Besides, we have never found steel meteorites, they are mostly iron/nickel alloys. These meteroites were the cores of ancient broken up stars vastly older than the Earth. This means that when they enter the atmosphere of the Earth, they really are "shooting stars (star guts)". They are pieces of the cores of ancient dead stars.

17. The crust of the Earth has increased in thickness many times over since the time of the formation of the first envelope (of gas). (yes, the crust has thickened, but we are forgetting that the crust is relatively unimportant in the evolution of a star, because without a core first forming there can be nothing to keep the material to layer itself upon and to keep the next stages of stellar evolution stable. Think about a house, if you are to build a house do you start with the struts to hold up the roof first? No. You start by smoothing the ground, and then pouring a foundation. The core is the foundation which facilitates the evolution of the star. core formation happens in intermediate stages of evolution, not when the star is young such as blue star/yellow star stages.)

18. In intermediate stages of evolution the star had a reducing atmosphere, not oxidizing. This would facilitate the production of hydrocarbons. Atmospheres of red stars contain hydrocarbons. (This further clarifies the fact of nature in which stars are not thermonuclear events, they are electrochemical/thermochemical. The energy produced for the most part is just phase transitioning, chemical combination reactions which are exothermic, and electrical heating from ionized material moving place to place.)

19. Mr. Oparin stresses that hydrocarbons are produced as the star cools, and not via decomposing organic matter. All they need to do is avoid oxidation, this means during intermediate stages of stellar evolution when hydrocarbons were being formed, they were not in contact with oxygen. Abiotic oil is what its called I think. Oil produced naturally as a direct result of star evolution could be called abiotic oil. We have found methane in large quantities on Jupiter, Saturn, Titan, Uranus and Neptune. Clearly life is not required to produce hydrocarbons, why would it? All that's needed is hydrogen and carbon neutralizing each other in the plasmatic atmosphere of a dying star, forming long chains. It is simple really. The hydrocarbons simply rain down into the interior of the star and get buried as the star forms a crust in its interior.

20. Pfluger's theory has the fundamental proposition that "life arose from fire". This is acceptable to me and is in accordance with stellar metamorphosis and the conclusions of modern alternative astronomy as well as the Soviet-era biologist Oparin.

21.... to be continued...