This post is going to anthropomorphisize prebiotic life and
life. It helps me visualize the origin.
Imagine its a teenager living in its parents house. Why in
the world would it go out and get a job if all it needs was
supplied by its parents.
Now imagine the parents are our sun, and the teenager is
prebiotic life.
As it is, the sun does the following for our prebiotic teen:
1. it produces the monomers that make up life
2. it's cycle of temperature keeps water in liquid form.
3. it helps polymerize in a dry/hot,wet/cool cycle
4. it does the metabolism for it by supplying energy on a
cyclical and dependable basis
5. its uv is a major force of selection, and it may also
help form RNA
6. forces a primitive environmental replication by forcing
nucleotide base paired strands to denature in high heat
and anneal with other hybrids in low (sort of like the
mixing in PCR)
7. it forces selection on the h-bonds - favoring GC over AU
in some cases, favoring WC pairs over non WC pairs in
cases, etc.
Why would any teen leave this set up - he has
metabolism replication - all his wants met - all given
to him on a plate.
But then the father tosses him out so to speak. The sun and
earth begin to cool. No longer is there the energy to force
life to exist and force selection on prebiotic variants. The
teen must sink or swim
THEN and only then is chemical evolution forced on prebiotic
soup. If prebiotic life doesn't come up with some substitute
for the sun and all he gave - no existence. Thus it
substitutes a vast and complicated chemical system to rival
what the sun did in the beginning.
Life then is the 2nd best option - the hot sun being first.
Or life is formed in high heat, then is forced to sin or
swim on its own in low heat.
Comment (and please don't take the analogy too seriously)
Tom