“The widely accepted idea that animal life evolved in the oceans before moving onto land is being challenged by a geologist who says the oceans were too salty and hot for that to have happened. [...] The combination of salinity and high temperature would have kept oxygen levels too low to support marine animals, [Paul] Knauth [of Arizona State University in Tempe] says. He points out that the warmer and more saline water is the less oxygen dissolves in it.”

“‘No one in their right mind would use hot seawater [1.5 to 2 times as salty as the oceans are today] for laboratory studies of early cellular evolution,’ says biochemist David Deamer of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is reporting the work with [Charles] Apel. ‘Yet for years we have all accepted without question that life began in a marine environment.’”

Matt Kaplan concluded his article with …

“The finding wouldn’t have surprised Darwin. Over a century ago he speculated in his personal letters that the origin of life was ‘in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphorus salts, light, heat, electricity, etc. present.’”

“… clays can act as scaffolds for the building blocks of RNA, the molecule in living organisms that translates genetic instructions into proteins.”

“Researchers now think biological evolution began in layers of clay, rather than in the primordial sea. Interestingly, clay is itself a porous network of atoms arranged geodesically within octahedral and tetrahedral forms. But because these octahedra and tetrahedra are not closely packed, they retain the ability to move and slide relative to one another. This flexibility apparently allows clay to catalyze many chemical reactions, including ones that may have produced the first molecular building blocks of organic life.”

“The building blocks of life were present in the primeval oceans. Yet life could not have originated there. Amino acids and other chemicals were only present in relatively small quantities. As a result, the chemical reactions which would have created more complex molecules could not have taken place often. In such a dilute mixture, the basic components of life would rarely encounter each other. Furthermore, water tends to break linked amino acids apart. If any of the long chains of amino acids that we call proteins had been created, they would have disintegrated almost immediately. However, there did exist environments where the chemical reactions that led to the creation of the first living organism would have taken place more often. If the sun’s heat caused the water in a tide pool to evaporate, the solution of organic chemicals would have become more concentrated, and reactions would have taken place more frequently. Another currently popular theory pictures the chemical evolution that led to life as taking place on clay substrates. The idea is that if chemicals adhere to a two-dimensional clay surface, they will ‘meet up’ with one another more often than they will in a three-dimensional pool. It is not hard to see why this should be the case. It is a lot easier to bump into someone on a two-dimensional sidewalk than it is to collide with a bird while skydiving.”