Category: Origin Of Life
Researchers: Ribosome translational system dates back to earliest Earth
| November 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From ScienceDaily: So audacious was Marcus Bray’s experiment that even he feared it would fail. In the system inside cells that translates genetic code into life, he replaced about 1,000 essential linchpins with primitive substitutes to see if the translational system would survive and function. It seemed impossible, yet it worked swimmingly, and Bray had […]
New life form more different from others “than animals are from fungi”
| November 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Hemimastigotes: Like animals, plants, fungi and ameobas — but unlike bacteria — hemimastigotes have complex cells with mini-organs called organelles, making them part of the “domain” of organisms called eukaryotes rather than bacteria or archaea. About 10 species of hemimastigotes have been described over more than 100 years. But up until now, no one had […]
Moshe Averick: When does a “gap” point beyond conventional science?
| November 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life, theism, theistic evolution |
Rabbi Moshe Averick, author of The Confused World of Modern Atheism (Mosaica Press, 2016) addresses the “God of the Gaps” – the claim that the intersections between the material and the immaterial in nature are just “gaps” waiting to be filled in (with special reference to the origin of life): The first thing I would bring […]
Probability of a single protein forming by chance
| October 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Origin Of Life, Probability |
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham April 7, 2017
Landmark origin of life conference videos resurface
| October 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus and The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing ‘the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin’, links to some vintage films of origin of life conferences funded by chemist Harry Lonsdale (1932–2014): Before he died Harry Lonsdale sent me a package with his book on politics—Running: Politics, Power, and […]
Might Earth’s deep subsurface be “brimming with life”?
| October 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Geobiologist Alexis Templeton thinks it matters: We humans tend to see the world as a solid rock coated with a thin layer of life. But to scientists like Templeton, the planet looks more like a wheel of cheese, one whose thick, leathery rind is perpetually gnawed and fermented by the microbes that inhabit its innards. […]
Those most ancient Greenland “fossils” are not really life, new team says
| October 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Origin Of Life |
Getting it right is important for the search for life on Mars: Found in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks in Greenland, the mounds strongly resemble cone-shaped microbial mats called stromatolites, researchers reported in 2016. But a new analysis of the shape, internal layers and chemistry of the structures suggests that the mounds weren’t shaped by microbes but by […]
Oldest evidence for animals found at 635 mya
| October 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Instead of looking for fossil at that age, the researchers looked for biomarkers: Rather than searching for conventional body fossils, the researchers have been tracking molecular signs of animal life, called biomarkers, as far back as 660-635 million years ago during the Neoproterozoic Era. In ancient rocks and oils from Oman, Siberia, and India, they found a […]
Researchers: Life forms display an “optimal tradeoff between stability and instability”
| October 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From ScienceDaily: Biologists know a lot about how life works, but they are still figuring out the big questions of why life exists, why it takes various shapes and sizes, and how life is able to amazingly adapt to fill every nook and cranny on Earth. An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Arizona State University […]
Zircons are back, as a possible source of information re early Earth and origin of life
| October 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
We don’t really know what the very early Earth looked like because the landscape was always being recycled. Zircons, however, are hard enough that they may survive, containing clues about the previous environments. Using zircon oxygen isotopes, researchers previously discovered that liquid water covered parts of our planet some 4.3 billion years ago, suggesting the […]
“Compelling new evidence” claimed for comets generating phosphates for earliest life
| October 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From ScienceDaily: Little was known about a key element in the building blocks, phosphates, until now. University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers, in collaboration with colleagues in France and Taiwan, provide compelling new evidence that this component for life was found to be generated in outer space and delivered to Earth in its first one […]
Researcher asks, Is pre-Darwinian evolution plausible?
| September 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
At Biology Direct: Abstract: This essay highlights critical aspects of the plausibility of pre-Darwinian evolution. It is based on a critical review of some better-known open, far-from-equilibrium system-based scenarios supposed to explain processes that took place before Darwinian evolution had emerged and that resulted in the origin of the first systems capable of Darwinian evolution. […]
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 […]
