What say you about this?ddd1/1236008170-geuu_03_img0530.jpg

“I happen to know exactly how life arose, it’s brand-new news, at least to the average layman like yourself. Clay. Clay is the answer. Crystal formation in fine clays provided the template, the scaffolding, for the organic compounds and the primitive forms of life. All life did, you see, was take over the phenotype that crystalline clays had evolved on their own.” John Updike, Roger’s Version.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

18 replies on “To Golob”

  3. before we go calling people dumbasses, what is a golom made of? and might it be relevant to the prose? there might be your answer

  5. Uh, clay exists, in large part, because of organic matter. Maybe there are non organic clays? I’m not exactly a clay expert, alas.

  7. @5 clay is mostly mineral. there may be organic matter in it, but it is not desirable for making ceramics. it is decomposed rock.

  12. Clay to form life’s beginning? Sounds like a celestial sculptor. Whether a work of art by nature or a work of art by man, clays the thing. Funny.

  14. Geh, there was plenty of time for organic molecules to evolve without some sort of catalyst like this. Also if clay were an essential catalyst of some organic compounds, then it seems unlikely that given the ubiquity of clay there would have been too much progress on evolving non-clay substrates for synthesis of these compounds. The theory would make sense on a world where life was closely bound to clay, but that’s not this world.

  16. I’ve read this hypothesis before, from real scientists. I’ve never heard of any direct evidence, but it’s plausible. The idea is that all that has to exist for life to evolve is some form of self-replicating molecule. That could be crystalline, without requiring any kind of what we think of as organic matter.

    All living things are is the arrangement of molecules most likely to produce copies of themselves – organisms are DNA’s way of making more DNA. It’s possible to imagine a molecule, that, due to its structure, facilitates the creation of similar molecules, just by bouncing around with the raw materials in its environment. Copies would be prone to variation, which gives natural selection something to chew on, leading to more and more likely self-replicating compounds such as DNA.

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