If life did not arise out of a primordial soup, couldn t it have arisen out of the chemicals from oceanic steam vents?
This is a popular origin-of-life hypothesis. But it doesn t work on several levels. The steam vents exist only briefly, and the amount of stuff flowing out from them that could be used to form life is very small. These limitations cancel off whatever advantage would be gained from their neutralizing environment. While origin-of-life chemistry experiments under neutralizing conditions do yield more amino acids than do experiments performed under oxidizing conditions, the yield is far from anything that resembles life. A few amino acids drowned in a flask of tars is far from life. It s like a few random letters of the alphabet drowned in millions of random numbers becoming the complete works of Shakespeare. It ain t happening. Here are some more problems: 1) Steam vent life is animal life not plant life, and offers no explanation for the origin of plant life; 2) Because of the chemistry on which it is based, steam vent life is primitive and inefficient in its energy processing; 3) Natura
