If you tire of the insanity in our world, want to be a better and healthier person, feel despair, suspect that there is more to this drama called life than the mere interaction of atoms, are confused by notions of creation, evolution, religion, atheism, and immortality, and would like rational answers that accord with reality and satisfy your intellect and intuition—WELCOME!

Sound like quackery. What’s more important than the interaction of atoms at a Chemistry Blog?

The first-one-to-self-replicate theory is a good one. It assumes a singular point origin of chirality. If there were two ‘first molecules’ that began replicating at opposite ends of the Earth, they’d have to have been the same chirality to begin with. I’ve heard several other theories as to the origin of chirality. The spiral nature of our galaxy perhaps imparted some preference for one over the other… Circular polarized light affected the early reactions to be enantioselective…

The authors of the above paper don’t really go into it, but if their carbohydrate world theory holds true, maybe the early sugars were the template upon which homochiral amino acids/nucleic acids were formed, as I talked about above? If glucose was synthesized preferentially through thermodynamic preference for the equatorial position of the hydroxyl groups, maybe that enantioselectivity was the basis for the enantioselectivity of future amino acids or nucleic acids?

Some references I found just now by Googling…
http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~cowen/HistoryofLife/chirality.html
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~meech/bioast/program/OTHER.7.41.pdf
http://courses.washington.edu/bangblue/L4a5FA08_2.pdf
http://www.zoology.ufl.edu/Evolution/Lecture%20Notes/Lecture%2017%20-%20Origin%20of%20Life%20on%20Earth.pdf

Imagine a scenario like this: By pure chance, some homochiral nucleic acids form a structure that starts to self-replicate. All the replica structures would then be of the same chirality as the original one. If this initial self-replicating structure is formed only once, all nucleic acids generated in this way would be homochiral, and the symmetry would be broken!