(Chemical evolution is the belief that simple chemicals became concentrated in a soup of organic molecules on the primordial Earth, which evolved into more complex chemicals from which life emerged. Proteins, the main constituents of living organisms, are made of amino acids. Stanley Miller's experiment in 1953 became famous because it showed howamino acids could be formed, abiotically, by passing an electrical spark (“lightning”) through an ‘atmosphere’ of ammonia, hydrogen and methane (the chemicals from which amino acids are made).
The first by-products were two peptides, alanine and glysine, which Miller wanted to combine to form a protein. So, naturally, in the poem, alanine and glysine become Alan and Gly, two lovers who stagger into a pub from a thunderstorm and find that it has a less than salubrious “beery atmosphere of ammonia, hydrogen and methane”! The third line in each stanza has a rhyme within it and the second of these is “peptides await ebb-tides”. Alan and Glynne had to be removed from the molecular soup at the moment of their amorous embrace, for it was just as likely to dissolve their union. Morover Alanine is a left-handed amino acid, Glysine right - and all 20 amino acids in nature are left-handed. Lucky, that! Fox remedied these defects by finding a left-handed Glysine, a warm, dry marriage bed (perhaps a chance raft floated by on the primordial soup) and added some Glutamic Acid. They reproduced, but, sadly, without fertilisation (‘agamic’): their offspring was a beady ‘proteinoid’ - not a protein.
Proteins need a hereditary mechanism to construct them. In the living cell, ribosomes make proteins from RNA templates (working copies of the information encoded on DNA). Importantly, a replicase enzyme acts as a proof-reader to reduce the error-rate in transcription from 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000,000. It even double-checks. No genome of any length can be safely reproduced - no “big family” can be planned for - without it. But how to make replicase? Gilbert postulated a primitive replicator, a protoype of RNA, able to self-catalyse, polymerise, mutate and recombine (which is like suggesting that an early prototype camera might not be a pinhole, but a digital!), and this “exon” stumbled on the myriad-base code for the enzyme. But being so long, won’t it need a proof-reader?)
Reductio 2
A chance collocation of organic molecular components
Spoke the language of origins to Miller
(Oratory in a laboratory, hot air in a flask, exponents
Of the Earth’s primordial distiller),
When Alan and Gly were seen to stagger in from the rain
To a beery atmosphere of ammonia, hydrogen and methane.