Molecular Evolution and Protobiology

In recent years, an ever-increasing amount of research has been conducted on the physico-chemical basis of the origin and evolution of life, or protobiology. Many questions are raised in this endeavor: What research methodology should be employed? What sort of dependable facts are available as a firm frame of reference upon which the physico-chemical origin of life or protolife could be examined? Is the origin due exclusively to chance events? If not, what is then responsible for the origin? What physical reality underlies the evolutionarily selective process leading to the origin? What role does variation assume and how is it generated in the course of evolution? Many research workers have pursued various avenues toward answering the stated questions. Among them, we believe Sidney W. Fox has been playing a very unique and pivotal role over the past quarter of a century, presiding over 240 man-years or more of labo- ratory work. His laboratory syntheses of thermal proteins called proteinoids and proteinoid micro spheres have emphasized the prin- ciple of the self-sequencing of amino acids as a key concept of protobiological synthesis. The significance of his contribution is seen in presenting the experimental evidence that the origin of life is largely due to nonrandom events. This discovery marks a new epoch in the conceptual development of studying the origin of life by focusing on the molecular processes that underlied the emergence and evolution of protobiological information.