Crystals and life

The record of life's emergence on Earth has been thoroughly obliterated by the remelting and turnover of the crust, soggy and pliable from the water, retained by the planet's gravitational field. Provided that life existed on a smaller body such as Mars with an arrested crustal evolution, a protected sedimentary record there may give clues to the decisive events in the first 500 million years in the history of our solar system. Until such records become available, we have in our guesswork to rely on laboratory constructions that need to satisfy the demands both of chemical feasibility and environmental boundary conditions. The combination leaves few survivors among competing hypotheses. As life entails a decrease in entropy and creation of order, the origin and propagation of crystalline order has become a guiding theoretical concept. Recognizing Jack Dunitz's fundamental contribution to this field of knowledge, I wish to dedicate my modest discourse to this great scientist upon his scoring of the fourth significant time mark on the staff of life.