Criteria for winning

Major issues

Applicants must provide

A. a well-conceived, detailed hypothetical mechanism explaining how the rise of genetic instructions sufficient to give rise to life as defined in “Definitions” below might have occurred in Nature by natural processes, and an

B. empirical correlation to the real world of biochemistry and molecular biology – not just mathematical or computer models – of how the prescriptive information characteristic of all known living organisms might have arisen.

The mechanism must address four topics:

• The simplest known genome’s apparent anticipation and directing of future events toward biological ends, both metabolic and structural;
• The ability of the genome to convey instructions, deliver orders, and actually produce the needed biological end-products;
• The indirectness of recipe-like biological “linguistic” message code – the gap between genotypic prescriptive information (instruction) and phenotypic expression. How did the first genetic instruction arise in its coded format prior to phenotypic realization of progeny from which the environment could select? If a protobiont’s genetic code and phenotype were one and the same, how did such a simple system self-organize to meet the nine minimum conditions of “life” enumerated below under “Definitions”? How did stellar energy, the four known forces of physics (strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetic force, and gravity), and natural processes produce initialprescriptive information (instruction/recipe) using direct or indirect code?
• The bizarre concentration of singlehanded optical isomers (homochirality of enantiomers) in living things – how did a relatively pure population of left-handed amino acids or right-handed sugars arise out of a chemical environment wherein reactions ordinarily give rise to roughly equal numbers of both right- and left-handed optical isomers?