Frozen Evolution. Or, that’s not the way it is, Mr. Darwin. A Farewell to Selfish Gene.

The microsphere hypothesis attempts to resolve the aspect of formation of molecules with enzymatic activity and thus the evolution of primitive metabolism.Heating a mixture of aminoacids in anhydrous medium leads to their condensation into an irregular polymer, a proteinoid, which has random sequence and only reflects the contents of the individual aminoacids in the original mixture.Following dissolution in water, these proteinoids form tiny, spherical, sometimes hollow species, microspheres (Muller-Herold & Nickel 1994)(Fig. X.3).Microspheresdo not exhibit properties such as growth and reproduction and are not separated from the environment by a membrane.However, it has been demonstrated that they exhibit a number of kinds of catalytic activity (Fig. X.4).The formation of proteinoids is an approximation to a

Fig. X.4. Catalytic activity of proteinoids. The graph shows the course of decarboxylation of pyruvate in the presence of proteinoids (black points), in the presence of unpolymerized aminoacids (grey points) and without any catalyst (empty points). According to Fox and Dose (1972).

possible mechanism of the formation of the first enzymes and thus the first building blocks of future metabolism; however, it tells us very little about the mechanism of formation of systems capable of biological evolution.