Chemical Evolution: Physics of the Origin and Evolution of Life Proceedings of the Fourth Trieste Conference on Chemical Evolution, Trieste, Italy, 4-8 September 1995

About this book

|In 35 chapters many aspects of the origin of life are discussed by 90 authors, with particular emphasis on the early paleontological record: physical, chemical, biological, and informational aspects of life's origin, instrumentation in exobiology and system exploration; the search for habitable planets and extraterrestrial intelligent radio signals.

Contents

Section 1: General Overview. Cosmic Evolution, Life and Man; J. Oro. Experimental Retracement of Terrestrial Origin of an Excitable Cell: Was it Predictable? S.W. Fox, et al. Section 2: Origins. Cosmology: The Universe in Evolution; G. Coyne, S.J. From Cosmic Formation of Chiral Bioorganics in Interstellar Dust to Comet Seeds of Life's Origins: Are 1025 Chances Enough? J.M. Greenberg, A. Li. Strategies for the Search of Life in the Universe; J. Schneider. Section 3: From Geophysics to Prebiotic Chemistry. Age of the Isua Supracrustal Sequence of West Greenland: A Possible Repository for Early Life; S. Moorbath, M.J. Whitehouse. Clays as Prebiotic Catalyzers; A. Negron-Mendoza, et al. Role of Transient and Stable Molecules in Chemical Evolution; M. Chadha. Lightning Associated to Archean Volcanic Ash-Gas Clouds; R. Navarro-Gonzalez, et al. Section 4: Physicochemical Aspects. Evolutionary, Kinetic and Thermodynamic Aspects on the Bioenergetics of Inorganic Pyrophosphate (PPi) and Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP); H. Baltscheffsky, M. Baltscheffsky. Mineral Metal Sulphur Clusters as a Testbed for Studies of Evolutionary Continuity; M.S. Kritsky, et al. Thermal Peptides as the Initial Genetic System; A. Pappelis, S.W. Fox. The Origin of Nucleic Acids; B. Prieur. The Origin of Fatty Acids; B. Prieur. Section 5: Biophysical Aspects: General Problems. Oxygen and the Rapid Evolution of Life on Mars; C.P. McKay. First Steps in Eukaryogenesis: Physical Phenomena in the Origin and Evolution of Chromosome Structure; J. Chela-Flores. Biological Aspects of the Origin of Life: Open Questions in Eukaryogenesis; J. Seckbach. Some Putative Living Fossils of the RNA World Might be of Recent Appearance; M. Rizzotti. The Ideas of Cyril Ponnamperuma and Thermodynamics of Biological Evolution; G.P. Gladyshev.. Boltzmann Dynamics on the Primitive Earth About 3.9 Billion Years Ago; K. Matsuno. Kinetics and Thermodynamics of Open Systems; L.N. Moiseeva. Section 6: Biophysical Aspects: Biomolecular Chirality. Determining the Physical Origin of Homochirality in Life; D. Cline. Possible Role of Phosphoryl Group Excitation in Chemical Evolution; J. Wu, et al. Amino Acid Chirality Breaking by N-Phosphorylation; Y.-F. Zhao, P.-S. Cao. Ab Initio Calculation of Molecular Energies Including Parity Violating Interactions; A. Bakasov, et al. Section 7: Evolutionary Aspects. Chemical Evolution and the Darwinian Revolution; F.R. Eirich. La Grande Galerie de l'Evolution: The Only Museum in the World Entirely Devoted to Biological Evolution; F. Raulin- Cerceau. Section 8: Information Theory. New Approaches in Mathematical Biology: Information Theory and Molecular Machines; T.D. Schneider. Information- Processing Genes: Molecular Biology in the Computational Paradigm; K.T. Shah. Section 9: Communication. Progress in Searches for Extraterrestrial Intelligent Radio Signals; F. Drake. SETI from the Moon. A Case for a XXIst Century SETI-Dedicated Lunar Farside Crater; J. He.

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