Origin Of Life

Former Templeton Fellow John Fellow asserts: Why Teleology Isn’t Dead

Conway Morris argues that in the grand scheme, evolution will not be reduced to chance: constraints built into life at the most fundamental level guarantee that life is going to follow the same evolutionary pathways to achieve limbs, respiration, vision, balance, an immune system, indeed all the remarkable features we associate with living things across the great spectrum of life.

Morris begs the question by assuming a stochastic origin of these “constraints built into life”. Read More ›

From Kathryn Gempf at Chemistry World: They crawl. They eat. They excrete. So you’d be forgiven for thinking these globules created by a team Japan were alive – but they’re not. … Together, DDAB, oleate and calcium, form globules, called vesicles, with intriguing life-like movement. The vesicles crawl around on a glass slide by reacting with iodide ions, ingest smaller vesicles to maintain their size and energy, and leave behind waste; just like a living system. More. Hot phone: Coming to life? Origin of life? Um… However, Pier Luigi Luisi, a specialist in synthetic biology at Roma Tre University, warns that phenomena like this mechanical motion are generally ‘due to a very particular context of environmental conditions.’ Therefore, changing any Read More ›

(Note: A previous version of this story was just rejected by Facebook for allegedly dangerous material. It is reposted here and went through at Facebook this time. Apologies for any inconvenience.  – News) Naturalism, like many religions, features an apocalypse. One prophecy is for wastage by a comet. From New Scientist: “Some say the deep microbial biosphere couldn’t survive because if you wipe out the surface ecosystem, sooner or later the nutrients they need will disappear,” says Ward. So if life here were extinguished, could it start again? “You could argue that it happened once, so it would likely happen again,” says David Kring at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. “But it’s difficult to say because strictly speaking, we Read More ›

From Phys.org: An important amino acid called glycine has been detected in a comet for the first time, supporting the theory that these cosmic bodies delivered the ingredients for life on Earth, researchers said Friday. Glycine, an organic compound contained in proteins, was found in the cloud around Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by the European Space Agency’s probe, Rosetta, said the study in the journal Science Advances. That said, Previous data from Rosetta has shown that water on Comet 67P/C-G is significantly different from water on Earth, suggesting that comets did not play as big a role in delivering water as once thought.More. Our favourite physicist Rob Sheldon thinks comets played a role, and that sounds reasonable. The big problem is that Read More ›

Unless you believe New Scientist: Giant flare-ups from the young sun might have kept early Earth warm – and any life nicely fertilised. By splitting inert nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere, charged particles from the sun could have sparked chemical reactions that heated the planet and could be the precursor for life. This suggestion is the latest attempt to solve a famous paradox known as the “faint young sun” problem. About 4 billion years ago, the sun was only 70 per cent as bright as it is today, which should have made the Earth a frozen snowball. But geological evidence shows that ancient Earth was warm enough for liquid water. The same holds true for Mars. Now, Vladimir Airapetian of NASA’s Read More ›

If early Earth even had much oxygen. From Rice University: Based on a new model that draws from research in diverse fields including petrology, geodynamics, volcanology and geochemistry, the team’s findings were published online this week in Nature Geoscience. They suggest that the rise of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere was an inevitable consequence of the formation of continents in the presence of life and plate tectonics. “It’s really a very simple idea, but fully understanding it requires a good bit of background about how the Earth works,” said study lead author Cin-Ty Lee, professor of Earth science at Rice. “The analogy I most often use is the leaky bathtub. The level of water in a bathtub is controlled by the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: How did life originate on Earth and what were its chemical building-blocks? One possible source of answers to these questions can be found in outer space. On the surface of comets planetary scientists have detected simple organic molecules that could also have been available on the young Earth — either because they were present in the material from which our planet was formed or were subsequently delivered by comets or meteorites. LMU chemist Thomas Carell and members of his research group have now shown that, under the conditions that prevailed on the young Earth, these simple molecules could indeed have served as precursors for the synthesis of one class of molecules that is an integral part of all Read More ›

Further to Will the shooting stars please rise? Rob Sheldon writes to say Just to set the record straight. The meteorite they showed in the article, was not a piece of iron, it was a “framboid” from an extinct comet made up of Fe3O4 “magnetite”. The reason it looks all lumpy, is that it is a ball made up of ball bearings, each one small enough to be spontaneously magnetized. These ball bearings are not random crystallization of iron, rather they are biominerals, made by living organisms, and far from equilibrium. The closest analog is a Fe3S4 mineral “goethite” found in deep gold mines in South Africa. We don’t know much about the organisms that make them–they look to be Read More ›

From Jeff Hecht at New Scientist: Yet the scorched remains of 60 micrometeorites have survived 2.7 billion years in the limestone Tumbiana Formation of Western Australia. They are the oldest space rocks ever discovered on Earth. What’s more, the fact that the meteorites contain oxides of iron show that the upper part of the atmosphere back then must have contained oxygen. … The survival of iron oxides is particularly unusual – and it may only have happened because of unusually fortuitous circumstances. The lake into which the micrometeorites fell was highly alkaline, with its deepest layers totally anoxic. This is probably what prevented the minerals from dissolving. “Such conditions are rarely encountered in the geological record, which means that the Read More ›

Randomly. We kid you not: The origins of life likely required the cooperation among a set of molecular species interacting in a network. If so, then the earliest modes of evolutionary change would have been governed by the manners and mechanisms by which networks change their compositions over time. For molecular events, especially those in a pre-biological setting, these mechanisms have rarely been considered. We are only recently learning to apply the results of mathematical analyses of network dynamics to prebiotic events. Here, we attempt to forge connections between such analyses and the current state of knowledge in prebiotic chemistry. Of the many possible influences that could direct primordial network, six parameters emerge as the most influential when one considers Read More ›

Yes, yet another “throw enough theories at the origin of life and one of them will stick. This just in from ScienceDaily: In a paper just published in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, the team proposes that large meteorite and comet impacts into the sea created structures that provided conditions favourable for life. Water then interacted with impact-heated rock to enable synthesis of complex organic molecules, and the enclosed crater itself was a microhabitat within which life could flourish. It has long been suggested that the meteoritic and cometary material that bombarded the early Earth delivered the raw materials — complex organic molecules, such as glycine, ß-alanine, ?-amino-n-butyric acid, and water — and the energy that was required for synthesis. The Read More ›

A friend sends this gem from the literature;, it sounds totally oblivious of the information requirement for life: It is now generally accepted that the emergence of increasingly complex eukaryotic life forms was accompanied by a corresponding increase in genome complexity, entailing both an expansion in gene number and more elaborate gene regulation.(22–24) Only DNA recombination in the form of gene or segmental duplications, exon shuffling, insertions, deletions, and chromosomal rearrangements can adequately account for this massive increase in gene number and the complexity of their regulation.(22–24). – Oliver, Keith R. & Wayne K. Greene (2009) Transposable elements: powerful facilitators of evolution BioEssays 31:703–714. Kirk Durston, picking on the theme, offers a translation from the Darwinspeak: The authors are blowing Read More ›

Closing our religion coverage for the week (a bit late again), from Biosemiosis at Discourse at BioLogos: It is well known that Biologos has objections to the concept of design in biology (aka ID). I post the following short article as a conversation piece for those who agree with that assessment, or those who question it: … What JCVI has done, and is doing, is experimentally quantifying those requirements in terms of discrete function and numbers of base pairs. And this leads me to a couple of questions for those who profess (against massive physical evidence to the contrary) that this all came into being by naught (or whatever word you’d like to use). Considering the list of functions that Read More ›

From Sarah Emerson at Motherboard: A team of geneticists from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine and the Centre for Genomic Regulation discovered that several billion years ago, the genetic code reached a point of self-preservation. Namely, it could continue evolving and risk mutating the building blocks of life it was responsible for creating, or it could remain limited, albeit functional. That was a really big decision an the genetic code must have been really mature to make it. Explorations into both primordial history and our genetically altered future can open the door for exciting innovations in the field of genetics. Evolution’s successes and failures can tell us more about our tenure as a species than any science-fiction manifesto. But Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The crucibles that bore out building blocks of life may have been, in many cases, not fiery cataclysms, but modest puddles. Researchers working with that hypothesis have achieved a significant advancement toward understanding the evolutionary mystery of how components of RNA and DNA formed from chemicals present on early Earth before life existed. In surprisingly simple reactions they have produced good candidates for their precursors that even spontaneously joined up to look like RNA. Paper. (public access) – Brian J. Cafferty, David M. Fialho, Jaheda Khanam, Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, Nicholas V. Hud. Spontaneous formation and base pairing of plausible prebiotic nucleotides in water. Nature Communications, 2016; 7: 11328 DOI: 10.1038/NCOMMS11328 More. The wheels come off later, one suspects. Otherwise, Read More ›