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 Canada and wonders if the goals might be changing in origin of life research — but that’s not certain: The first conference, opening June 24 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, is being called “Science of Early Life.” Why the downgrade from origin(s) to early life? Does it signal that the caravan has already moved on? … What would Harry say about the Canadian Read More ›

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 make new and testable predictions about the observable universe, in some cases, the absence of a plausible alternative is sufficient. … Klymkowsky is certain that there was a single Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)* but before that? But what came before and the exact steps leading to LUCA are unknowable. Moreover, the billions of years that have elapsed since LUCA’s origin and the active nature Read More ›

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 rather arrogant claim that it reverses the burden of proof. Steele is referring to this paper by Richard Hoover (the reference to “Murchison” is to a meteorite, not a person). The paper was apparently rejected by legitimate peer-reviewed journals, and so was published in the Journal of Cosmology, which has a reputation for publishing low-quality speculation. Hoover also calls himself a doctor but his degree Read More ›

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 to the bunfight: — The reply by Karin Moelling, a German virologist, starts off positive toward the paper. She makes the highly dubious claim that “there are billions of habitable planets in our galaxy.” We just don’t know that. She also makes the strange, unbacked assertion that “Retroviruses caused the Cambrian explosion of all animal species.” She thus seems to endorse the original paper’s claim Read More ›

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. Such viruses are known to be plausibly associated with major evolutionary genomic processes. We believe this coincidence is not fortuitous but is consistent with a key prediction of H-W theory whereby major extinction-diversification evolutionary boundaries coincide with virus-bearing cometary-bolide bombardment events. A second focus is the remarkable evolution of intelligent complexity (Cephalopods) culminating in the emergence of the Octopus. A third focus concerns the micro-organism Read More ›

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 be common throughout the Multiverse, if it exists. The key to this, the researchers say, is dark energy, a mysterious “force” that is accelerating the expansion of the Universe. Scientists say that current theories of the origin of the Universe predict much more dark energy in our Universe than is observed. Adding larger amounts would cause such a rapid expansion that it would dilute matter Read More ›

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 good … we are still working on a plausible, reproducible process for the first step. A recent review paper provides a current summary… “The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of complexity that Read More ›

Recently, these stories popped over the desk (might as well address them all at once): From Dirk Schulze-Makuch at AirSpaceMag: Life May Have Begun in Ocean Sediments, According to New Theory During the Hadean time period, more than four billion years ago, the Earth was much more active than it is today, and hot water percolated through Earth’s crust in many places. The submarine crust, being covered by water, would have protected any primitive organisms from ultraviolet radiation. The porosity and chemical reactivity of the sediments between the crust and the seawater are critical in Westall’s model, as it is thought to have led to miniature “chemical reactors” that enhanced formation of the organic building blocks needed for life. While Read More ›

Pos-Darwinista writes to draw our attention to the following Abstract: Universal biology and the statistical mechanics of early life Nigel Goldenfeld, Tommaso Biancalani, Farshid Jafarpour Published 13 November 2017.DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2016.0341 All known life on the Earth exhibits at least two non-trivial common features: the canonical genetic code and biological homochirality, both of which emerged prior to the Last Universal Common Ancestor state. This article describes recent efforts to provide a narrative of this epoch using tools from statistical mechanics. During the emergence of self-replicating life far from equilibrium in a period of chemical evolution, minimal models of autocatalysis show that homochirality would have necessarily co-evolved along with the efficiency of early-life self-replicators. Dynamical system models of the evolution of the genetic Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at Oscillations: One of the stickiest origins projects Templeton has recently funded is “Cooperation and Interpretation in the Emergence of Life,” which looks to find purposeful RNA fragments that agree to cooperate. Six hundred thirty thousand dollars ($630,000) has been awarded for said project to the team of Christopher Southgate-–a British theologian/biochemist, and Portland State University chemistry professor Niles Lehman. … We have a wall between church and state in America, but in recent years we’ve seen attempts to destabilize that wall. The 2015-2017 $3M funding by NASA & Templeton to two dozen religious scholars was one of them. The Freedom From Religion Foundation took action filing a Freedom of Information Act request for documents regarding the Read More ›

From Deborah Byrd at Space: Living earthly microbes inhabit virtually every nook and cranny of our world, including extremely harsh environments like Yellowstone’s hot springs, deep ocean hydrothermal vents and the toxic sludge of polluted areas. Earthly bacteria have also been identified, alive, as high in our atmosphere as 25 miles (40 km) up. Neighboring Venus is a hostile world. Heat trapped by its dense atmosphere makes it hot enough on its surface to melt lead. But a series of space probes – launched between 1962 and 1978 – showed that temperatures and pressures at comparable heights in Venus’ atmosphere (25 miles or 40 km up) don’t preclude the possibility of microbial life. Now an international team of researchers has Read More ›

Well, they do not quite say it. But get this: From Charles Q. Choi at Astrobiology: Assuming that early life adapted to survive in a checkerboard of many different kinds of environments, “the complex ecological relationships between different species may have been a part of life on Earth since very near its beginning, and LUCA is only one example of the life that may have been extant at that time,” says Fournier. “Perhaps a rapid establishment of complex environmental and ecological relationships was even necessary for early life to persist,” adds Cantine. The picture painted by Cantine and Fournier of the early evolution of life on Earth is just one plausible scenario. “Our interpretation, like others, relies on a limited Read More ›

Here at UD, we often have commenters whose remarks are well worth headlining. Here, we have JAD in action, suggesting to GP: “Here is something you might consider as a seed for a future topic for a future OP.” Yup, and even as an embryonic thought, it is well worth posting — a first, rough draft on a big topic: >>The origin of life is like the origin of the universe. It appears to be a singular, non-repeating, highly improbable event which occurred very early in earth’s history. Furthermore, all the clues of how and why it occurred have been lost. But then added to that problem are other problems: how does chemistry create code? What is required to create Read More ›

Here’s a new word: dubiofossil From Sophia Rootsh at Aeon: Schopf’s Apex chert fossils stood in as exemplars of every dubiofossil collected by a geobiologist seeking life in the Archean Era. As Henry Gee later put it in the pages of Nature: ‘It is hard to tell the difference between a bacterium – especially a fossil bacterium – and a bubble.’ Richard Kerr posed a similar question in Science: are these the ‘earliest signs of life [or] just oddly shaped crud?’ Brasier diagnosed the problem as one of deduction: for many geobiologists studying early life, ‘If it looks like a cyanobacterium … then the most parsimonious explanation is that it is a cyanobacterium.’ Yet morphological similitude – or comparison of Read More ›

From Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta: All of viral evolution is murky: Different groups of viruses likely had very different origins. Some may have been degenerate “escapees” from cellular genomes, while others descended directly from the primordial soup. “Still others have recombined and exchanged genes so many times in the course of evolution that we will never know where they originally came from,” Fischer said. As examples of this diversity, giant viruses could help illuminate more about how viruses operate and evolve. But even their own origins and evolutionary path are unsettled. One side holds that the giant viruses evolved from smaller viruses over 2 billion years by adding genes, through processes such as horizontal gene transfer and gene duplication. The Read More ›