Category: Origin Of Life
Doubts surface about 4 billion-year-old life claims
| October 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Origin Of Life |
Re “Evidence of life 3.95 billion years ago found in Canada,” Michael Marshall notes at New Scientist: His [spokesman Komiya’s] only evidence for the existence of life is the unusual ratio of carbon isotopes, and this may not be definitive. “There are many ways in which abiotic processes can produce such an imbalance, so to […]
Tim Standish: Cyanobacteria wouldn’t really work as first life
| October 2, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Earlier this evening, physicist Rob Sheldon responded to Geoscience Research Institute senior scientist Tim Standish’s view that no life form would likely thrive in the lava bath of very early Earth. The discussion concerns recent fossil finds thought to be about four billion years old. Standish replies, Yes, cyanobacteria are a good candidate, but I still believe they […]
Rob Sheldon responds to “no life on molten Earth”
| October 2, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Earlier today Senior Scientist at the Geoscience Research Institute Tim Standish responded to my question regarding a recent claim that life from 3.95 billion years ago was spotted in Newfoundland. I wrote to ask, On a practical basis, how did these earliest organisms even stay alive? Rob Sheldon writes to defend the idea, at least in […]
But could there really be life at Earth’s molten rock stage?
| October 2, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
In regard to a recent claim that life from 3.95 billion years ago was spotted in Newfoundland, I wrote Senior Scientist at the Geoscience Research Institute Tim Standish to ask, On a practical basis, how did these earliest organisms even stay alive? He got back to me to say, Exactly. The bottom line is that life couldn’t […]
Is a sense of purpose (agency) what makes life special?
| October 1, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Origin Of Life |
From J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It,Life’s distinctive is agency. In a nutshell, this is where the crisis of biology looms, because our prevailing modes of thinking about life—the triumphant confluence of mechanism, materialism, and atomism that has made the twentieth century a […]
Astrobiology: Water can be corrosive to life forms so what about alternatives?
| October 1, 2017 | Posted by News under Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Astrobiology: Life on early Earth seems to have begun with a paradox: while life needs water as a solvent, the essential chemical backbones of early life-forming molecules fall apart in water. Our universal solvent, it turns out, can be extremely corrosive. … In recent years the solvent often put forward as the eligible alternative […]
Researchers: Evidence of life 3.95 billion years ago
| September 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Phys.org: Rudimentary life may have existed on Earth 3.95 billion years ago, a time when our infant planet was being bombarded by comets and had hardly any oxygen, researchers said Wednesday. … A team presented what they say is the oldest-known fossil evidence for life on the Blue Planet—grains of graphite, a form of […]
Archaea vs. bacteria: Convergent evolution of molecular propeller
| September 26, 2017 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Origin Of Life |
Abstract: The archaellum is the macromolecular machinery that Archaea use for propulsion or surface adhesion, enabling them to proliferate and invade new territories. The molecular composition of the archaellum and of the motor that drives it appears to be entirely distinct from that of the functionally equivalent bacterial flagellum and flagellar motor. Yet, the structure […]
The key difference between Darwinism and spontaneous generation
| September 18, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Recently, I (O’Leary for News) wrote, Darwinism is somewhat like the traditional notion of the spontaneous generation of life. It is never actually demonstrated, only propounded. In the case of Darwinian evolution by widely publicized piffling examples like Darwin’s finches, which, after all the science media hoopla, remain just finches, with varying adaptations from one […]
Carl Woese on the “conceptual failings of the modern evolutionary synthesis”
| September 18, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
In response to our recent reprise of “Are viruses alive?”, a friend writes to draw our attention to a passage from Carl Woese (1928-2012), who first identified the archaea as a separate kingdom of life: in a paper: During the past few years, an even more astonishing example has come to light, prompted in part […]
Is origin of life research undergoing a renaissance?
| September 15, 2017 | Posted by News under Biophysics, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost, an interview with German biophysicist Dieter Braun, Redford-style good looks have not been enough to divert Dieter Braun from his research interest in nonequilibrium conditions on the microscale, and what is now a central role in the investigation into the origins of life. Braun—-a professor of systems biophysics at Ludwig […]
Why viruses are not considered to be alive
| September 15, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
At Cosmos, science writer Jake Port offers reasons, including In order to replicate, viruses must first hijack the reproductive equipment of a host cell, redirecting it to ‘photocopy’ the genetic code of the virus and seal it inside a newly formed container, known as the capsid. Without a host cell, the virus simply can’t replicate. […]
Earlier than thought: Worm burrows at rock layers over 600 million years ago
| September 13, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life, stasis |
From ScienceDaily: The fossils were discovered in sediment in the Corumbá region of western Brazil, near the border with Bolivia. The burrows measure from under 50 to 600 micrometres or microns (?m) in diameter, meaning the creatures that made them were similar in size to a human hair which can range from 40 to 300 […]
Earliest pre-life depended on horizontal gene transfer?
| September 11, 2017 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta: Nigel Goldenfeld applies the physics of condensed matter to understand why evolution was blazingly fast for the earliest life — and then slowed down. Cepelewicz So how can collective effects in physics inform our understanding of evolution? Goldenfeld: When you think about evolution, you typically tend to think about population […]
Netherlands sponsors major origin of life research project
| August 31, 2017 | Posted by News under Information, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost: The Dutch Origins Center, a virtual project, has been led by Nobel laureate Ben Feringa (2016, Chemistry)—-keynote speaker of this week’s two-day conference. The project is a Dutch national initiative involving 17 of the country’s universities and institutes. … Curiously, Steve Benner’s $5.4M Templeton-funded Origins project isn’t represented, but inorganic […]
Can we test for information, as the basis of the universe, as opposed to matter or energy?
| August 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Information, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life, Physics |
From science writer Philip Perry at BigThink: If the nature of reality is in fact reducible to information itself, that implies a conscious mind on the receiving end, to interpret and comprehend it. Wheeler himself believed in a participatory universe, where consciousness holds a central role. Some scientists argue that the cosmos seems to have […]
Is origin of life a fluke, physics… or just not a science question at present?
| August 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Information, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Ian O’Neill at LiveScience: Understanding the origin of life is arguably one of the most compelling quests for humanity. This quest has inevitably moved beyond the puzzle of life on Earth to whether there’s life elsewhere in the universe. Is life on Earth a fluke? Or is life as natural as the universal laws […]
How much evolution can symbiosis account for?
| August 24, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Could two early life forms unite and pool information (endosymbiosis)? Lynn Margulis championed the idea but recently some have raised doubts. From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost: Kurland and Harish lay out their case in the current Journal of Theoretical Biology in a paper titled, “Mitochondria are not captive bacteria.” In it they note that “97% […]
Did algae trigger complex cells before 650 million years ago?
| August 17, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From ScienceDaily: Dr Brocks said the rise of algae triggered one of the most profound ecological revolutions in Earth’s history, without which humans and other animals would not exist. “Before all of this happened, there was a dramatic event 50 million years earlier called Snowball Earth,” he said. “The Earth was frozen over for 50 […]
Rob Sheldon: Sara Walker is criticizing Jeremy England for the wrong reasons
| August 16, 2017 | Posted by News under Information, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Earlier today, we were looking at Sara Walker’s recent paper on origin of life and information (public access). Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts: Sarah Walker has worked in OOL research for almost a decade, getting her experience under Paul Davies at ASU. Davies is a theoretical physicist who also manages to […]
