Place: 4274 Chamberlin (refreshments will be served)
Speaker: Periannan Senapathy, Genome International Corporation
Abstract: Origin of life is an unsolved phenomenon. Charles Darwin’s mechanism assumes a universal ancestor, and elaborates the natural selection model to show how this ancestor could have evolved into all other organisms on earth, thus leaving the question open. While it has been known that natural selection mechanisms are able to clearly explain the “micro-evolution" of an organism into its varieties (for example, a crab into many different crab varieties), natural selection is unable to explain how an organism, such as a worm, could evolve into an entirely distinct organism such as a crab (termed "macro-evolution"). In this context, a theory formulated by Senapathy, that complex organisms could arise directly in prebiotic chemistry based on the easy origin of split genes in prebiotic random DNA, offers an explanation for macroevolution. This model shows that the genomes of complex organisms based on split genes are easy to arise from prebiotic chemistry, whereas the genomes of the apparently "simple" bacterial organisms could not. The implications of this model contrasting the conventional model will be discussed.