Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 383
THE ESSENTIAL ROLE OF CLAY. AND PHOTOSYNTHESIS IN EVOLUTION more advanced irreversible organic compounds. Moreover the formation of proteins and nucleic acids from the elementary amino acids, inevitably requires the elimination of a molecule of water from every couple of amino acid molecules and nucleotides. This is called polymerisation. . But the problem is that despite the fact that it occurred in sea water, the presence of water should certainly have reversed this reaction. Hence all this polymerisation would be depolymerised. . It means that in the primitive solution each molecule had to be dehydrated within water, an extremely complicated and difficult, if not impossible, task. Most condensation reactions in the laboratory invariably give better results when the mixture is allowed to dry. This suggests that the evaporation of primitive solutions must have taken place after it was splashed on rocks, mud and beaches. This may well have been an essential stage between the rudimentary compounds created in water and the more highly evolved ones which would no longer remain reversible to their elementary forms. . O. F ALL THE THEORIES tackling this problem, the most interesting and probable are those which present the scenario of surface catalysts, like silica and clay, to have played their part in this process. This was first pointed out by John Bernal in 1951. He writes in his book The. Physical Basis of Life: 372 “. . . the adsorption of clays, muds and inorganic crystals are powerful means to concentrate and polymerize organic molecules. . . ” 6. The idea has not lost its appeal ever since. . Sidney, W. Fox showed that amino acids were capable of polymerizing fairly easily to yeild polypeptides under various conditions simulating