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Item Details
| Title:
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ASTRONOMICAL ORIGINS OF LIFE
STEPS TOWARDS PANSPERMIA |
| By: |
Sir Fred Hoyle, N.C. Wickramasinghe |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| List price:
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£179.99 |
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We believe that this item is permanently unavailable, and so we cannot source
it.
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| ISBN 10: |
0792360818 |
| ISBN 13: |
9780792360810 |
| Publisher: |
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS |
| Edition: |
Reprinted from ASTROPHYSICS AND SPACE SCIENCE, 268:1-3 |
| Pages: |
389 |
| Description: |
Shows the logical progression of a thought to lead up to the accepted viewpoint that at least the biochemical building blocks of life must have derived from comets. This book argues that not just the chemicals of life, but fully-fledged microbial cells have an origin that is external to the Earth. |
| Synopsis: |
Living material contains about twenty different sorts of atom combined into a set of relatively simple molecules. Astrobiologists tend to believe that abiotic mater- ial will give rise to life in any place where these molecules exist in appreciable abundances and where physical conditions approximate to those occurring here on Earth. We think this popular view is wrong, for it is not the existence of the building blocks of life that is crucial but the exceedingly complicated structures in which they are arranged in living forms. The probability of arriving at biologically significant arrangements is so very small that only by calling on the resources of the whole universe does there seem to be any possibility of life originating, a conclusion that requires life on the Earth to be a minute component of a universal system. Some think that the hugely improbable transition from non-living to living mat- ter can be achieved by dividing the transition into many small steps, calling on a so-called 'evolutionary' process to bridge the small steps one by one.This claim turns on semantic arguments which seek to replace the probability for the whole chain by the sum of the individual probabilities of the many steps, instead of by their product. This is an error well known to those bookies who are accustomed to taking bets on the stacking of horse races. But we did not begin our investigation from this point of view. |
| Illustrations: |
biography |
| Publication: |
US |
| Imprint: |
Kluwer Academic Publishers |
| Returns: |
Returnable |
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