Page 1 of 16 Version August 2018 © 2018 - Ateneo de Manila University. All rights reserved. This is solely for the use of students of Sci10 (Science and Society) SY 2018-2019 and is the property of the Ateneo de Manila University and may not be reproduced or sold without the written permission of the University. Born in the Universe: Approaching the Origin of Life By Nina Rosario L. Rojas, PhD Department of Chemistry, Ateneo de Manila University Have you ever gone out and watched wild dolphins cavort at Bais Bay in Negros Oriental? Have you ever snorkeled among the great whale sharks (butanding) at Donsol? Have you ever met a tarsier in Bohol, or watched a Philippine Eagle spread its wings in Davao? Have you ever dived with the fish at Tubbataha Reef? Have you ever breathed the sweet scent of sampaguita, watched orchids in full bloom, been healed from cough by lagundi, or heard of pain medication from snail venom? Nature has provided our country with so much beauty and riches, and yet the rest of the world too, is blest with its bounty. Where did all these wonderful creatures come from? Where did we all come from? This is one of the most fundamental questions of human existence, a question pondered through the ages through creation stories of every culture. Science, too, has a creation story, a story that is still being told as we piece together evidence from many directions. In this article, we’ll start by rewinding the tape of evolution, and try to simplify the question of life by looking at the evidence from different directions. We then ask the question, if life came to be on earth, could it also flourish elsewhere in the universe. Finally, we reflect on what this journey of life might mean for how we live our lives today. Where did biodiversity come from? Our modern understanding of the diversity of life is founded on the ideas of Charles Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers. His landmark book “On the Origin of Species” is as old as the Ateneo de Manila University, born in 1859. In this book, Darwin outlines the idea of evolution as the basis for the generati on of diversity of living organisms. While Darwin’s original idea has been expanded and modified in the years since then, its essence still rests on the existence of variation among individual organisms, and how their interaction with their environment has consequences on their ability to survive, have offspring, and ensure the survival of their offspring. Evolution leads us to a kind of family tree, where our modern day relatives, from close cousins such as chimps and fellow mammals, to plants and to microbes, all fit, as well as the other creatures that lived and died before, such as the dinosaurs. If one keeps going back down the family tree, evolutionary history points to the idea of a Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), or at the very least, a small common ancestral community of cells that led to all of us. But how did these first life forms come about? From the time of Louis Pasteur, we have known that living organisms come only from other living organisms and not from spontaneous generation. Yet at the very beginning, non-living material must have started taking on some of the characteristics of life, in a kind of spontaneous generation event. It might have happened once, or it might have needed several tries before it took hold and led to life eventually as we know it today. How do we characterize life? !hat do we consider as “living” versus inanimate material? How do we define life? How would we recognize life if we came across it? After all, in the early days, life forms probably did not look a lot like dolphins or flowers or human beings, or even like modern day microbes, which have also been evolving from their beginnings to today. Microbes may have appeared early in the history