American Scientist

May-June 2009

Volume: 97 Number: 3

In her five-painting series Emergence, Julie Newdoll relates the five worlds of the Diné (Navajo) creation story to current scientific thinking on the origin of life. The cover painting, The First World Was Red, depicts a Hadean world in which primordial molecules are represented as Air Spirit People. Following (above) are worlds of blue, yellow, black-and-white, and Island World, eras linked by the artist to sugar, polymers, RNA, and finally, the emergence of the living cell. In "The Origin of Life," James Trefil, Harold Morowitz and Eric Smith present a new approach to the origin of life called Metabolism First: An ancient cycle of reactions still to be found in the core of modern metabolism reproduced its own constituents via  reaction network that could then be acted upon by chemical selection, leading to increased complexity and finally life. Cover art courtesy of Julie Newdoll, http://brushwithscience.com/Summer2006/DineOrigins.html.