It’s just a conventional story in favor of hydrothermal vents for the origin of life. Some of us can remember back to when most such stories would begin by announcing that they had proven Darwin right. Funny how the rhetoric is changing.
Origin Of Life
Real science vs pseudoscience—according to pop science
Davis goes on to identify exploded science theories, for example, spontaneous generation of life. But stop, wait! The very doctrine of the natural origin of life from inanimate materials teaches precisely this. Is Davis saying that the one true doctrine of naturalism on the subject is wrong?
Rob Sheldon on the renewal of 3.5 billion-year-old life claims
Sheldon: My best guess is that he has found something organically simple such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), if only because 3.5 billion years is a long time for organics to survive, and PAHs are the sort of keratonized (turned into keragen) that is stable.
Stromatolites from 3.5 bya really ARE microbial life, say researchers
This doesn’t leave a lot of time for Darwinian evolution (natural selection acting on random mutation). Not nearly enough, in fact.
James Tour: 1 hr lecture on OoL
on the mystery of the origin of life: From the blurb: Dr. Tour is one of the world’s top synthetic organic chemists. He has authored 680 scientific publications and holds more than 120 patents (here is a partial list). In 2014, Thomson Reuters named him one of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds,” and in […]
Live Event: On Life in the Universe
At Youtube, here: Note, the assumption that the cosmos is a closed system, which is philosophically loaded. Let us monitor — note, several hours from the beginning. END
Maybe messiness somehow jiggered life into existence?
It’s not so clear that simple complexity can produce anything. What is the organizing principle? If there is a goal, how does it come to exist?
Origin of life clue is seen in chemical droplets that divide
OOL researcher David Deamer disputes the new claim. “The mechanism is a far cry, he noted, from the complicated, multistep process by which modern cells divide.” But so? It’s the Narrative, right?
Microbes found in some of Earth’s oldest known uncontaminated water
How they got there is apt to be a cause of speculation.
If you can reproduce how life got started, $10 million is yours
Financial Times: Wealthy investors are offering a $10m prize to the first scientific team that can create a genetic code from simple chemicals.
Even viruses have complex origins now
Well, this is interesting, for sure: “The findings show that this broad class of single-stranded DNA viruses, which infect all three cellular domains of life, have acquired their genetic components through complex evolutionary processes not traceable to a single ancestral event.” Maybe there wasn’t a “single ancestral event” for cells either. Also: The hope is to “resolve the question of how cell-based life came to co-exist with the planet’s staggering array of viruses (dubbed the virome).” One commonly heard hypothesis is that viruses are degraded cells. It will be interesting to hear alternative theses.
Yes! Oparin’s coacervates… again!
The theory has been resurrected in a paper in PNAS, of which Rob Sheldon says, “None of these steps is remotely likely. Not one.”
Would bypassing the Moon, going to Mars first, help with origin of life?
If there apparently isn’t and never has been life on Mars, why should we assume it exists elsewhere? If there is/has been life on Mars and it looks like it came from Earth, well, that’s a game-changer in itself. If it doesn’t look like it came from Earth, that opens up whole new, *non-speculative* vistas.
Chemist James Tour calls time out on implausible origin of life theories
He writes, “It is time for a temporary time out. Why not admit what we cannot yet explain: the mass transfer of starting materials to the molecules needed for life; the origin of life’s code; the combinatorial complexities present in any living system; and the precise non-regular assembly of cellular components?”
Origin of life has not been explained
World famous chemist James Tour explains.