Origin Of Life

For those who are unfamiliar with The Royal Society, it’s an academic organization whose membership includes many of the world’s most eminent scientists, and is “the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence”. In loose terms, they are a British forbearer to many of the various Academies of Science sprinkled throughout the nations of the world. From their mission statement: The Society’s fundamental purpose, reflected in its founding Charters of the 1660s, is to recognize, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity. This article isn’t necessarily about the Royal Society, except for the fact that it serves as the genesis of the story, and also a proper backdrop Read More ›

  The Origin of Life Circus e-book for $7.50. The Origin Of Life Circus: A How To Make Life Extravaganza investigates the politics of origin of life science and synthesizing of life. Suzan Mazur, whose coverage of science began decades ago at Hearst Magazines, takes you into the lab and in conversation with dozens of the world’s greatest thinkers on the subject of origin of life – among them: Jack Szostak, Freeman Dyson, Carl Woese, Dimitar Sasselov, Matthew Powner, James Simons, Harry Lonsdale, Stu Kauffman, Andrew Pohorille, Steve Benner, Dave Deamer, Nigel Goldenfeld, Pier Luigi Luisi, Lawrence Krauss, Lee Smolin, Nick Lane, Jaron Lanier, and more. Mazur has made a career out of interviewing mostly non-Darwinian biologists. That’s because there are Read More ›

We asked physicist Rob Sheldon: “Front-loading” is something I picture as an elaborate “Rube Goldberg” machine. Here’s a sampling of real-life front-loading by brilliant engineers with too much time on their hands. Okay, if engineers could do that, couldn’t God make the flagellum out of spare parts by a properly front-loaded machine? I think the answer here is “yes”. But of course that begs the question, “doesn’t the machine show much more design than the thing it makes?” Of course. But our goal wasn’t to minimize design effort, our goal was to create a “front-loaded” machine, which is what was asked. Now we have another problem. Isn’t the “front-loading machine” a lot more fragile than the thing it made, the Read More ›

From Detecting Design: Now, it is true that mitochondrial organelles are quite unique and very interesting. Unlike any other organelle, except for chloroplasts, mitochondria appear to originate only from other mitochondria. They contain some of their own DNA, which is usually, but not always, circular – like circular bacterial DNA (there are also many organisms that have linear mitochondrial chromosomes with eukaryotic-style telomeres). Mitochondria also have their own transcriptional and translational machinery to decode DNA and messenger RNA and produce proteins. Also, mitochondrial ribosomes and transfer RNA molecules are similar to those found in bacteria, as are some of the components of their membranes. In 1970, these and other similar observations led Dr. Lynn Margulis to propose an extracellular origin Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Up until now, a number of theories have sought to explain how cells came to acquire mitochondria [power plants]. Although there is consensus as to the “how” ?the first mitochondria must have been a bacterium that entered another, and remained there, becoming part of the cell? the “when” has so far been unclear. Some scientists advocated an early incorporation of mitochondria, and considered that step as the first necessary to begin advancing toward eukaryotic cells as they are known today. Other theories proposed a later inclusion of mitochondria, as a more complex host cell could favor the entry of another cell and that cell’s permanence within its interior. Now, predoctoral scientist Alexandros Pitis and ICREA research professor and Read More ›

Latest improbable scenario for the origin of life, from New Scientist: Did life begin in the freezer? Early Earth may not have been as hot and hellish as we thought. In fact, it may have become a snowball around the time life first emerged. This is according to a fresh analysis of rocks from South Africa that formed about 3.5 billion years ago, during the Archaean period. Previous research suggested that the ocean in which these rocks formed was warm – perhaps around 85̊C. But Maarten de Wit at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, now says the ocean temperature was similar to today’s – and that there is even evidence that ice was present. The Read More ›

“One of the world’s most important biological thinkers.” From Scientific American: Excerpted from A Brief History of Creation by Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves III. Copyright © 2016 by Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves III. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. The year is 3,500,000,000 BC. The place is a rocky outcropping that juts out into a shallow, wave-lapped inlet on a landmass that will one day be called Australia. … atmosphere is filled with toxic gases, and almost completely devoid of oxygen. That will come much later, the product of photosynthesis by tiny organisms that will one day churn away in the primitive oceans. But the ancestor of those Read More ›

Criminologist and former atheist Mike Adams summarizes the three foundational philosophical alternatives to the Cosmos:

First, we can say that it came into being spontaneously – in other words, that it came to be without a cause. Second, we can say that it has always been. Third, we can posit some cause outside the physical universe to explain its existence. The second option is no longer reasonable. Science has been leading inexorably to the conclusion that the universe is not infinite but instead had a beginning. . . . Reasonable people grasp intuitively that it makes far more sense to say that something came from something than to say that something came from nothing. Of course, admitting that the universe was caused by something rather than nothing comes with a price. Any cause predating the physical universe must therefore be non-physical in nature.

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Machine, argues Josh Bloom at American Council for Science and Health: I recently wrote that viruses do not come even close to meeting the standards that are generally accepted requirements in defining what “alive” means. But they do have a huge impact on living organisms, because they are miracles of evolution — microbes that exist solely to reproduce, and do so with perfect efficiency and no waste. … What this “bag of chemicals,” which is about 100-times smaller than a bacterium, does is nothing short of amazing. It is way “smarter” than the cell that it infects. Using nothing more than a very specifically-shaped protein spike to locate and attach itself to the host cell, its own genetic material, and Read More ›

From Quanta: One of the most influential hypotheses states that it all began with RNA, a molecule that can both record genetic blueprints and trigger chemical reactions. The “RNA world” hypothesis comes in many forms, but the most traditional holds that life started with the formation of an RNA molecule capable of replicating itself. Its descendants evolved the ability to perform an array of tasks, such as making new compounds and storing energy. In time, complex life followed. However, scientists have found it surprisingly challenging to create self-replicating RNA in the lab. Researchers have had some success, but the candidate molecules they have manufactured to date can only replicate certain sequences or a certain length of RNA. Moreover, these RNA Read More ›

From the blurb for Intelligent Evolution: An Alternate Theory of Evolution: Intelligent design is often depicted as science versus religion but this is not always the case. I have a Ph.D. in molecular biology, don’t follow any specific religion, and have come to the conclusion that the complexity of life suggests intelligent design. I believe microbes were designed by an intelligent entity and then released into the cold, vastness of space. Some haphazardly landed on our warm, wet planet and went on to evolve into everything we see here today, including us. This is ‘Intelligent Evolution’ because we evolved from intelligently designed microbes. Evidence of this and how these microbes took our planet from a barren, wet rock to a Read More ›

From the article: Biologists say they have solved the riddle of how a tiny bacterium senses light and moves towards it: the entire organism acts like an eyeball. … Despite being just three micrometres (0.003mm) in diameter, the bacteria in the study use the same physical principles as the eye of a camera or a human. This makes them “probably the world’s smallest and oldest example” of such a lens, the researchers write in the journal eLife. Cyanobacteria, including the Synechocystis species used in the study, are an ancient and abundant lifeform. They live in water and get their energy from photosynthesis – which explains their enthusiasm for bright light. … “Cyanobacteria are 2.7 billion years old, so it’s much Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Not only is the ‘Jupiter as shield’ concept, implying that the planet shields Earth from comet impacts, not true, but perhaps Jupiter’s most important role in fostering the development of life on Earth was just the opposite — delivering the volatile materials from the outer Solar System needed for life to form. This new simulation study, and the previously underestimated role that Saturn may have also played in the evolution of life on Earth. … In “Jupiter: Cosmic Jekyll and Hyde”), Kevin Grazier, PhD, at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, describes the study in which he simulated the evolution of tens of thousands of particles in the gaps between the jovian planets for up to 100 Read More ›

From Tim Requarth at Aeon, But within modern organisms there is another clue to life’s origins, one that is more obscure than DNA but just as universal – the way cells harvest energy by shuffling around electrically charged molecules. This process goes by the mouthful ‘chemiosmosis’, and was first proposed in 1961 by the eccentric British biochemist Peter Mitchell. Chemiosmosis lacks the coded rigour of DNA, but that primal messiness might be exactly what makes it so revealing. Energy, Russell thinks, must have preceded anything resembling DNA or RNA, so the origin of chemiosmosis could help to reveal how the first organisms arose. Chemiosmosis takes place deep in our body’s cells, most of which harbour hundreds or thousands of microscopic Read More ›

Please see the note and apology at the end of this post. —– Over on a recent thread Alicia Cartelli responded to my request that if she had “an idea how abiogenesis works” I would post it as a head post for discussion. I have not yet had time to parse through all this, other than to note that most of what Alicia discusses below was already granted for discussion purposes in my Abiogenesis Challenge. Thus, even if we were to grant the very questionable and optimistic claims, it still does not address the central issues needed for the origin of life, including the issue of information content. That said, I appreciate Alicia taking time to put together the below Read More ›