The impact origin of genetic material.
It is proposed that high velocity asteroidal impacts with the Earth created polymeric nucleotide sequences out of monomeric nucleotides via direct compressive forces. The developed model describes the simultaneous formation of histone-equivalent proteins and RNA/DNA-equivalent template structures as a natural and expected consequence of bolide impactions with organic material accumulating on the crustal surface of the Earth approximately 3.8-3.5 billion years ago. It is shown that literally billions of different gene-equivalent nucleotide sequences, each one having a set of surface-complementary histone-equivalent proteins, might be created in such a manner. It is hypothesized that it is this process that gave rise to the chemical substrate upon which Darwinian selective forces have acted ever since.
Brown
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RD
Pelorus Research Laboratory, Kealakekua, Hawaii 96750.
D055580:Astronomical Phenomena; D001256:Astronomy; D005075:Biological Evolution; D055593:Geological Phenomena; D005844:Geology; D008957:Models, Genetic; D000069497:Origin of Life