THE CRITICAL COMPLEX THEORY OF BIOGENESIS' 



Henry Eyring and Frank H. Johnson, University of Utah, Salt Lake 

 City, Utah, and Princeton University , Princeton, New Jersey 



M, 



.utation followed by survival of the fittest accounts for most types 

 of adaptation of organisms. However, the living world with its optical ac- 

 tivity would possess precisely the same fitness for survival if it could all 

 be reflected through a mirror. Such a reflection would transform all 

 molecules into their mirror images and instead of the configurationally 

 related i-amino acids as we now find them, we would have their d-amino 

 counterparts. The resulting world would be exactly as efficient as the one 

 we now have with no change in its chemistry, and hence no change in 

 the relative fitness for survival of the various organisms. How optical 

 activity arose in the living world in the first place is a perennially interest- 

 ing question. It is interesting that in excellent discussions of biogenesis 

 the significance of the universality of the Z-amino acid is generally not 

 stressed (1-5). 



To understand the origin of optical activity in living things we require 

 explanations within the framework of known physical and chemical prin- 

 ciples of at least three facts: a) the fact that the molecular systems making 

 up living things are optically active rather than racemic, as all uncatalyzed 

 chemical preparations are; also b) that the different amino acids within 

 an organism are configurationally related; and c) that the different amino 

 acids from different species are likewise alike, i.e. all of the ^-configuration. 

 All of these points are answered if we assume that since all optically active 

 molecules are made by the mediation of optically active templates, then 

 these templates, which at present select configurationally related amino 

 acids, must have originated in the remote past from a single optically ac- 

 tive parent template. To explain how one template got the ascendancy over 

 its optical isomer, we must assume that the first template to be success- 

 fully formed effectively excluded its rival from being formed and in addi- 

 tion flooded the world with replicas of itself. We now consider the whole 

 matter from a somewhat broader perspective. 



TIME and change 



It is usually supposed that around five billion years ago our universe 

 assumed something like its present form. Associated with the emergence of 



^ Aided in part by a contract with the Office of Naval Research. 



1 



