RUSSIAN JOURNAL OF EARTH SCIENCES VOL. 10, ES1006, doi:10.2205/2007ES000252, 2008
[2] Modern science reveals that the non-equilibrium, the flow of the matter or energy, can be the source of the dynamically ordered structures [Galimov, 2001; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984]. The universal physical aspect of life related to energy transfer such as proton pumps and electron transport chains let us develop the bottom-up approach in respect of the origin of life. In the contrary to the traditional top-down (biochemical) approach focused on the origin of building blocks of the living cell (such as proteins, DNA, RNA, lipids etc.) it is worthwhile to consider the physical aspect of the problem that is the initiation of energy flow common for all living organisms [Hengeveld, 2007; Morowitz, 1992]. Such universal mechanism of the cell life activity as the electron and proton transport, as the accumulation, storage and release of the energy seemed to be formed during the earliest, probably, pre-organic, stages of the biogenesis [Hengeveld and Fedonkin, 2007a] and persisted through the billons of years in spite of the radical and irreversible change of the environment. The whole biological evolution can be interpreted in terms of protection and upgrade of the mechanisms of the energy metabolism in the factor space of the shifting physical and chemical parameters of biosphere. The origin of immense diversity and complexity of the living systems, improbable for the most of the Universe, not only was possible but apparently inevitable in the changing conditions of early Earth. The bottom-up (physical) approach does not create the impassable threshold between the non-life and life, quite the contrary it provides the possibility to use the same language for description of the pre-biotic and biotic phenomena. This approach gives a deeper causal-historical understanding of the life's history as interplay of the macrocosm of the environmental factors and microcosm of the metabolic pathways in the cell.
Citation: (2008), Ancient biosphere: The origin, trends and events, Russ. J. Earth Sci., 10, ES1006, doi:10.2205/2007ES000252.
Copyright 2008 by the Russian Journal of Earth Sciences.
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