paul@phs.UUCP (Paul C. Dolber) (04/05/85)
A N.Y. Times News Service story running in Wednesday's "Durham Morning Herald" -- on the front page -- proclaimed that "New Find Backs Theory That Life Began in Clay." Apparently taking off from a theory originating with Dr. Graham Carins-Smith in the 1960s, Dr. Lelia Coyne and her associates at NASA's Ames Research Center found that "ordinary clay contains two basic properties essential to life: the capacities to store and transfer energy. With such energy, coming from radioactive decay and other sources, the early clays could have acted as `chemical factories' for processing inorganic raw materials into the more complex molecules from which the first life arose some four billion years ago." There was more, though not a lot more, in the article about what they found; many netters are familiar with the clay idea anyway. (I, back in the days when this discussion was carried out in net.misc, and others here in net.origins, have pointed out that the clay hypothesis can take care of the levorotatory problem). Anyway, a cute paragraph in the article ran as follows: "The theory is also evocative of the biblical account of the Creation. In Genesis, it is written: `And the Lord God formed man of dust of the ground,' and in common usage this primordial dust is called clay." La plus ca change... Regards, Paul Dolber (...duke!phs!paul).