Soru

Passage A
For decades, astrobiologists have treated the origin of life as a singular, highly improbable cosmic fluke. However, emerging research in non-equilibrium thermodynamics suggests that prebiotic chemistry is not a series of random accidents, but a deterministic response to planetary energy gradients. When a young planet possesses abundant chemical energy—such as the thermal and chemical gradients found at submarine hydrothermal vents—the emergence of self-organizing macromolecular systems is thermodynamically favored. These prebiotic systems act as dissipative structures, accelerating the dispersal of heat and chemical energy. In this view, metabolic pathways like the reverse Krebs cycle did not evolve by blind chance; they are the most efficient pathways for energy dissipation under early Earth conditions. Consequently, wherever similar physical parameters and thermodynamic gradients exist in the cosmos, we should expect prebiotic chemistry to reliably generate metabolic systems. Life is not a lucky roll of the molecular dice, but a thermodynamic necessity.

Passage B
While prebiotic molecules such as amino acids and nucleotides are undoubtedly widespread throughout the interstellar medium, the leap from chemistry to true biology remains a profound conceptual chasm. Proponents of thermodynamic determinism often overlook the sheer improbability of the translation apparatus—the mechanism by which nucleic acids code for proteins. Even if prebiotic reactions reliably produce metabolic cycles or lipid vesicles, these structures lack the capacity for heredity and open-ended evolution. Hereditary transmission requires a highly specific, complex symbolic code. The probability of randomly assembling a functional ribosome, or even a primitive self-replicating RNA system capable of directing protein synthesis, is vanishingly small. Without this genetic replication mechanism, any localized metabolic pathways are evolutionary dead ends, doomed to dissolve when their immediate energy source fluctuates. The origin of life is not a predictable thermodynamic output, but a highly contingent, stochastic event of near-infinite improbability.

Which of the following statements best describes the primary point of disagreement between the authors of Passage A and Passage B regarding the origin of life?