Category: Origin Of Life
Researcher: A “chemical brain” will solve the hard problem of consciousness
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Origin Of Life |
Because silicon can’t, says chemist: WHEN Lee Cronin was 9 he was given a Sinclair ZX81 computer and a chemistry set. Unlike most children, Cronin imagined how great it would be if the two things could be combined to make a programmable chemical computer. Now 45 and the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of […]
Researchers propose computer model of protein that may have existed when life began
| September 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
At Rutgers: How did life arise on Earth? Rutgers researchers have found among the first and perhaps only hard evidence that simple protein catalysts – essential for cells, the building blocks of life, to function – may have existed when life began. Their study of a primordial peptide, or short protein, is published in the […]
Gerald Joyce no longer uses the NASA “must show Darwinian evolution” definition of life
| August 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Natural selection, Origin Of Life |
Though he helped develop it. Recently, a problem has arisen round efforts to create a synthetic cell. Gerald Joyce, now of the Salk Institute, helped NASA come up with a very widely used definition of life, “Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.” But, as medicl historian Rebecca Wilbanks explains at Aeon, In 2009, […]
At Scientific American: Maybe aliens live too fast or too slow for us to recognize
| August 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Even on Earth. And that is why we don’t see them, astrophysicist suggests: For example, could the messy chemistry we see in fossil fuels on Earth – a smorgasbord of organic reactions, a seemingly tarry chaos – be simply a short-term view of a living system that functions across hundreds of millions of years? Or […]
“1st International Symposium on Building a Synthetic Cell,” Netherlands, August 28–29
| August 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Origin Of Life |
The world-class symposium features several controversies long the lines of 1) Should we build a synthetic cell and 2) Aren’t we really doing that under another name anyway? Suzan Mazur reports at her blog, Oscillations: The late Carl Woese, who was awarded the Leeuwenhoek Medal by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992), […]
New paper: Cambrian explosion driven by viruses from space
| August 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Origin Of Life |
Delivered by comets. Abstract: We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is multifactorial. One particular focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex retroviruses of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian […]
At Nature: New evolution book represents “radical” new perspective
| August 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Including things you didn’t know about Archaea discoverer, Carl Woese. From a review of The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen (Simon & Schuster, 2018): In The Tangled Tree, celebrated science writer David Quammen tells perhaps the grandest tale in biology: how scientists used gene sequencing to elucidate the evolutionary relationships […]
Rabbi: Anti-design physicist makes the best case for design of life
| July 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Rabbi Moshe Averick, author of author of The Confused World of Modern Atheism (Mosaica Press, 2016), at Times of Israel: Dr. Leonard Susskind is a renowned professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University and is credited as being one of the fathers of string theory. He was asked to comment at a NASA panel discussion […]
Virus expert highlights the conflict over whether viruses are alive
| July 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life, Viruses |
From science writer Suzan Mazur, at Oscillations, interviewing Bogdan Dragnea, who studies the physical structure of viruses via spectrosopy: Suzan Mazur: Do you consider viruses live organisms since viruses can recognize their targets, attach, and infect their hosts—most viruses using a tail spike and needle [see following Parent lab image]—and as you’ve noted, they can […]
The Scientist: Oldest evidence of terrestrial life is half a billion years older than thought
| July 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
They were microbial mats. From Anna Azvolinsky at The Scientist: According to the study authors, the previously oldest visible fossilized remains of microbes on land were about 2.7 billion years old, found in a different location from the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa and also in Australia … For the current study, Homann and […]
The minimal cell: How is research coming on a simple, self-replicating “artificial” cell?
| July 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Such acell might shed some light on the origin of life, researchers hope. From Suzan Mazur at Oscillations: Not to be outdone by Dutch, German and other Europeans now officially dabbling in synthetic cell research, America’s National Science Foundation has thrown its hat into the ring on funding synthetic cell development, per its April 18, […]
Researchers: Earth’s oxygen rose and fell several times before the Great Oxidation Event 2.2 bya
| July 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
According to the latest research, we learn from ScienceDaily: Earth’s oxygen levels rose and fell more than once hundreds of millions of years before the planetwide success of the Great Oxidation Event about 2.4 billion years ago, new research from the University of Washington shows. The evidence comes from a new study that indicates a […]
Origin of life: Wanting to move on but sticking with Darwinian mechanisms?
| June 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Also, who predicted in 2014 that life would be created in the lab in three years? In five years? Origin of life is thought to be a “low” or “very low” probability event, according to two recent articles (in Life and Nature).* Suzan Mazur reports at Oscillations on an upcoming conference at McMaster University in […]
Molecular biologist: Speculation re the last universal common ancestor is not helping science
| June 22, 2018 | Posted by Denyse OLeary under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life, Tree of life |
From molecular biologist Mike Klymkowsky at The Scientist There is a pernicious temptation in science to speak authoritatively about topics that are beyond scientific exploration and certainty. This has led some theoretical physicists to advocate for a “post-empirical” form of science. That is the idea that theories need not be judged on their ability to […]
Skeptic: Panspermia (life came from elsewhere than Earth) is “pseudoscience”
| June 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Steven Novella at Neurologica, replying to Ted Steele, the paper’s senior author: The claim is that examinations of meteorites have found microfossils representing single-celled life, either bacteria or even algae (eukaryotes). However, these claims are not generally accepted by the scientific community, and therefore cannot be used as a solid premise, let alone the […]
That panspermia paper at Progress in Biophysics & Molecular Biology generated some heat: Links and analysis
| May 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Readers may recall the paper advocating panspermia (life came from outer space) in the journal Progress in Biophysics & Molecular Biology. It has attracted paywalled replies from Keith Baverstock and Karin Moelling, Also a paywalled response from the authors. Because many of our readers can’t afford all that reading material, a friend kindly offers some notes […]
Panspermia (maybe life came from outer space) is back, in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
| May 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Cambrian explosion, Extraterrestrial life, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life, Viruses |
Abstract: We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is multifactorial. One particular focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex retroviruses of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian Explosion of ∼500 Ma. […]
Science at sunset: Dark energy might make a multiverse hospitable to life, IF it exists
| May 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Origin Of Life |
From ScienceDaily: Questions about whether other universes might exist as part of a larger Multiverse, and if they could harbour life, are burning issues in modern cosmology. Now new research led by Durham University, UK, and Australia’s University of Sydney, Western Sydney University and the University of Western Australia, has shown that life could potentially […]
Kirk Durston: What progress have we made over six decades in understanding the origin of life?
| May 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Origin Of Life |
From Kirk Durston at P2C-Change: So what progress has science made over the past 60 years? I just counted the number of papers and articles on the origin of life I have filed on my computer—54, and that is only a small sampling of what is out there. Reviewing this collection, the news is not […]
