Magnetism, FeS colloids, and Origins of Life

TL;DR

This paper explores how magnetic mineral interactions, especially involving greigite, could have contributed to the origin of life by enabling ordered colloid assembly, quantum effects, and primitive memory in early Earth's environments.

Contribution

It proposes a novel perspective that magnetic interactions and mineral magnetism played a crucial role in life's emergence, expanding beyond traditional chemistry-focused theories.

Findings

Magnetic colloids could have formed structured phases in early Earth's oceans.

Magnetic effects may have enabled quantum phenomena and primitive memory mechanisms.

Scale-free mineral structures suggest a magnetic basis for early biological organization.

Abstract

A number of features of living systems: reversible interactions and weak bonds underlying motor-dynamics; gel-sol transitions; cellular connected fractal organization; asymmetry in interactions and organization; quantum coherent phenomena; to name some, can have a natural accounting via $physical$ interactions, which we therefore seek to incorporate by expanding the horizons of `chemistry-only' approaches to the origins of life. It is suggested that the magnetic 'face' of the minerals from the inorganic world, recognized to have played a pivotal role in initiating Life, may throw light on some of these issues. A magnetic environment in the form of rocks in the Hadean Ocean could have enabled the accretion and therefore an ordered confinement of super-paramagnetic colloids within a structured phase. A moderate H-field can help magnetic nano-particles to not only overcome thermal fluctuations but also harness them. Such controlled dynamics brings in the possibility of accessing quantum effects, which together with frustrations in magnetic ordering and hysteresis (a natural mechanism for a primitive memory) could throw light on the birth of biological information which, as Abel argues, requires a combination of order and complexity. This scenario gains strength from observations of scale-free framboidal forms of the greigite mineral, with a magnetic basis of assembly. And greigite's metabolic potential plays a key role in the mound scenario of Russell and coworkers-an expansion of which is suggested for including magnetism.