Letter: What clay?

From Graham Hodgson

You say that scientists attending the recent Royal Society meeting in London concluded that, because DNA and amino acids that form in warm volcanic puddles bind to clay particles and become unavailable for further reaction, Darwin’s suggestion that life originated in a warm prebiotic soup may be wrong (18 February, p 7).

However, if they had read the previous week’s New Scientist, they would have learned that “before life spread on land, physical weathering broke down rocks, but the particles were not fine enough to form clay” (11 February, p 15).

From Boyd Williamson

You write that Darwin’s idea, that life emerged in the primordial soup in warm volcanic puddles, has been scuppered by recent experiments showing that any reactive molecules were immediately bound to clay particles in the puddles. But clay particles are formed by bacterial action, so how did clay arrive in prebiotic puddles?

North Queensferry, Fife, UK

Tunbridge Wells, Kent, UK