The implications for finding fossil remnants of life on Mars are addressed in the article. The researchers acknowledge that survival of microorganisms over geological timescales is “not fully understood.”
Origin Of Life
Novel RNA and peptide species thought to have sparked evolution of complex life
Researcher: According to the new theory, a decisive element at the beginning was the presence of RNA molecules that could adorn themselves with amino acids and peptides and so join them into larger peptide structures. “RNA developed slowly into a constantly improving amino acid linking catalyst,” says Carell. (He talks about the emergence of “information-coding properties” as if that would just happen.)
Claim: Complex cells started without oxygen
Yes, the ham sandwich was invented that way too. It started without any ham…
Physicist Eric Hedin was bullied by atheists but not squashed
Hedin: Life with its “radiant beauty” defies naturalistic explanations.
Claim: The blueprint for life generated in asteroids
NASA: The discovery, by an international team with NASA researchers, gives more evidence that chemical reactions in asteroids can make some of life’s ingredients, which could have been delivered to ancient Earth by meteorite impacts or perhaps the infall of dust.
Physicist David Snoke: Living systems must obey the same rules as Maxwell’s demons
Snoke: I argue that information and entropy are objective physical quantities, defined for systems as a whole, which allow general arguments in terms of physical law. In particular, I argue that living systems obey the same rules as Maxwell’s demons.
Why the Miller-Urey experiment was so important to many high school science teachers
Neil Thomas: Without an “abiogenetic moment” Darwin’s entire theory of evolution via natural selection falls flat.
Another big rewrite in the works about the history of life on Earth?
If this happened a lot in human history schools would just have to give up teaching history. Good story anyway.,
So life on Earth is even older than we thought?
At ScienceDaily: The researchers say that, while some of the structures could conceivably have been created through chance chemical reactions, the ‘tree-like’ stem with parallel branches was most likely biological in origin, as no structure created via chemistry alone has been found like it.
Neil Thomas comments on the difficulty of accommodating Darwinism to sudden origin of life
Here’s a thought: If your origin of life theory works, can we reverse engineer the conditions to produce life from non-life today? If we can’t, that doesn’t prove your theory false. After all, it is very difficult to demonstrate that something “couldn’t have” happened under any circumstances whatever. But you must now rejoin the queue in your previous place…
Could life have started in the depths of the Earth? It’s controversial.
Talk about an extremophile deep in the Earth! Trouble is we don’t know that life started out like audaxviator. It could just as easily be that one late-arriving microbe could inhabit that territory but nothing else could.
ID types are unfair to panspermia? Eric Anderson replies
Anderson: The primary question on the table with abiogenesis/OOL research for generations has always been “How did life arise?” The location is secondary, almost to the point of being a bit player in the discussion.
Rob Sheldon: ID types are unfair to panspermia (the hypothesis that life came from space)
Sheldon: The answer to critics of panspermia, is that it is not intended as an origin of life (OOL) theory; rather, it answers the question “Where did life on Earth come from?” So indeed, it is erroneous to accuse panspermia advocates of “kicking the can down the road.”
Steve Meyer on whether extraterrestrials created life, as opposed to an intelligence outside nature
“Yet those who propose panspermia have not explained, or even seriously grappled with, the problem of the origin of specified biological information.” – Meyer No, but they don’t need to, do they? Their seamless blend of science fiction and non-fiction would be rudely interrupted by needless complexities in the plot…
Origin of life: But how do cells come to have “borders” at all?
Inanimate objects don’t have “borders” because they need not defend themselves against anything. Boulders don’t care if they end up as sand. Having a membrane at all suggests that something is different about life that can’t be explained by the various “It all just happened” scenarios we often hear about how life got started. How did life forms decide they wanted to protect themselves?