Origin Of Life

Here’s the abstract: There is a huge variety of RNA- and DNA-containing entities that multiply within and propagate between cells across all kingdoms of life, having no cells of their own. Apart from cellular organisms these entities (viroids, plasmids, mobile elements and viruses among others) are the only ones with distinct genetic identities but which are not included in any traditional tree of life. We suggest to introduce or, rather, revive the distinct category of acellular organisms, Acytota, as an additional, undeservedly ignored full-fledged kingdom of life. Acytota are indispensable players in cellular life and its evolution. The six traditional kingdoms (Cytota) and Acytota together complete the classification of the biological world (Biota), leaving nothing beyond. But philosopher of biology Read More ›

Further to The toaster oven origin of life theory (But if it was this simple, why isn’t it happening all the time on Earth, favoured for such ventures? There is a taxpayer born every minute in some places): From New Scientist: Watery time capsule hints at how life got started on early Earth Barbara Sherwood Lollar at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, and her team discovered the water a few years ago oozing from rocky fractures 2 kilometres below the surface at the Kidd mine near Timmins in Ontario. The water, which is about 1.5 billion years old, appears to show no signs of life – an extremely rare find. … Her team has previously found a wealth Read More ›

From Nautilus: The Dawn of Life in a $5 Toaster Oven God might just as well have begun with a toaster oven. A few years ago at a yard sale, Nicholas Hud spotted a good candidate: A vintage General Electric model, chrome-plated with wood-grain panels, nestled in an old yellowed box, practically unused. The perfect appliance for cooking up the chemical precursors of life, he thought. He bought it for $5. Trivia: In Canada, he could have got it “As Is” for $2. At home in his basement, with the help of his college-age son, he cut a rectangular hole in the oven’s backside, through which an automated sliding table (recycled from an old document scanner) could move a tray Read More ›

 From Wood’s Hole: Ancient rocks harbored microbial life deep below the seafloor, reports a team of scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Virginia Tech, and the University of Bremen. This new evidence was contained in drilled rock samples of Earth’s mantle – thrust by tectonic forces to the seafloor during the Early Cretaceous period. The new study was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The discovery confirms a long-standing hypothesis that interactions between mantle rocks and seawater can create potential for life even in hard rocks deep below the ocean floor. The fossilized microbes are likely the same as those found at the active Lost City hydrothermal field, providing potentially important clues about Read More ›

Further to Origin of complex cells: Can energy create information? (Lane seems to think that energy can create or substitute for huge amounts of information. This seems wrong but it is apparently acceptable to The Scientist, Rob Sheldon, noting that reader’ thoughts were solicited, writes to say, In thermodynamics, we have the fundamental thermodynamic relation or defining equation dU = dQ + dW = TdS – PdV, where U=internal energy, Q=heat, W=work, T=temperature,S=entropy, P=pressure, V=volume, and “d” means “the change of”. In a closed system that is “reversible” , (no eddies, turbulence etc) and the volume doesn’t change much (incompressible like water), then we can eliminate the work and get the equation dQ = TdS, which is to say, the Read More ›

Origin of life researcher Nick Lane, author of The Vital Question asks at The Scientist: Did endosymbiosis-and the innovations in membrane bioenergetics it engendered-make it possible for eukaryotic life to evolve? There’s a black hole at the heart of biology. Why is it that complex eukaryotic cells share so many fundamental traits, from the nucleus to meiotic sex, which are essentially absent from prokaryotes? Most people would be hard pressed to distinguish a human cell from those of a mushroom, a plant, or a zoospore. Yet those cells diverged a billion years ago, and have utterly different ways of life. He argues at The Scientist for membrane bioenergetics: Genes point to an answer, but don’t explain the whole story. All Read More ›

nucleus of comet Churi/ESA By Rosetta’s Philae: From ScienceDaily: Organic molecules never previously observed in comets, a relatively varied structure on the surface but a fairly homogeneous interior, organic compounds forming agglomerates rather than being dispersed in the ice: these are just some of first results provided by Philae on the surface of comet Churi. These in situ findings, which contain a wealth of completely new information, reveal several differences in comparison with previous observations of comets and current models. … Twenty-five minutes after Philae’s initial contact with the cometary nucleus, COSAC (Cometary Sampling and Composition experiment) carried out a first chemical analysis in sniffing mode, that is, by examining particles that passively enter the instrument. These particles probably came Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: One question of the origin of life in particular remains problematic: what enabled the leap from a primordial soup of individual monomers to self-replicating polymer chains? A new model proposes a potential mechanism by which self-replication could have emerged. It posits that template-assisted ligation, the joining of two polymers by using a third, longer one as a template, could have enabled polymers to become self-replicating. More. Not again. Yawn. Isn’t this a point where we should be asking fundamentally different questions? For example: When Charles Darwin published his seminal On the Origin of the Species in 1859, he said little about the emergence of life itself, possibly because, at the time, there was no way to test such Read More ›

Further to NASA says new Earth-like planet found (which may or may not be actually Earth-like), the question was raised, “Is there an accepted hypothesis on the subject of whether Earth-like conditions are essential to life?” Physicist Rob Sheldon writes to say, Like most other things involving life, NASA is schizophrenic about the subject. Darwinists say that life ought to be springing up everywhere that conditions permit. But then when their initial exuberance is not rewarded, the excuse is that conditions are not permitting. But Darwinists can’t have it both ways. Either Origin-of-life (OOL) is tough and the Earth is miracle, or it is easy, really really easy and Earth is nothing special. If life sprang up on Earth between Read More ›

Small pre-Cambrian oxygen jump in atmosphere helped enable animals take first breaths Not big ones? Can someone just make a list of pop science media assumptions? Would save trouble. Maybe we could mechanize it. Here is one: We must always be looking for a “small” event that kickstarted life or some advance in life. ScienceDaily: If oxygen was a driver of the early evolution of animals, only a slight bump in oxygen levels facilitated it, according to a multi-institutional research team that includes a Virginia Tech geoscientist. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, calls into question the long held theory that a dramatic change in oxygen levels might have been responsible for the appearance of complicated life forms like Read More ›

Dunno. He was referring to this “hair bleach” claim: Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Professor John Brindley, from the University of Leeds, and his colleagues, said: ‘The story of the relationship between hydrogen peroxide and life is complex and dynamic, and fraught with certain natural tensions which have led to human misapprehensions. ‘In this work, we show that the association may be extremely ancient, that the story may have begun more than 3.7 billion years ago, the first chapter providing the periodic pH and thermal drive that enabled the RNA world to replicate, evolve and develop enzyme activity. ‘We affirm that concern over the alleged toxicity of hydrogen peroxide to life is largely misplaced in the current Read More ›

Physicist Sheldon kindly writes to discuss the latest attempt to make a dollar out of fifteen cents: That is, to address design in nature according to purely physical principles that leave out information. It’s a poorly written article, but the concepts are coming from “Category Theory”, which was highlighted in Jonathan Wells recent article on the sugar code. Richard Sternberg is also keen on it. Recapping what I said earlier on the topic, set theory was developed in the late 1800’s, and combined with Georg Cantor’s work, enabled the explosion of mathematical creativity of the early 20th. One book that deeply impressed me was “Naming Infinity–A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity.” The story relates how Cantor went crazy Read More ›

The constructor theory (Life without design), here. Okay, it’s Saturday in much of the world and you were out doing chores; not to worry: Given that life isn’t the output of an intentional design process, but evolved, how could living things have evolved given these design-free laws of physics? Darwin’s theory addresses this problem, explaining that variation and natural selection bring about the appearance of design. But this in itself doesn’t close the explanatory gap, as we can see especially clearly in the modern version of Darwin’s theory – neo-Darwinism. At its heart are the replicators, or genes – bits of DNA that are transmitted, by replication, to the next generation. Moreover, for replication to be as accurate as it Read More ›

Suzan Mazur interviews biologists who take the information nature of life seriously: I thought it might be time to ring up Kalevi Kull, a theoretical biologist in Estonia at the University of Tartu’s Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics to talk about developments. Kull is known for his contributions to the field of biosemiotics and currently serves as president of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies. His most recent book is Towards a Semiotic Biology: Life is the Action of Signs Suzan Mazur: Is biosemiotics an exact enough science at this point to be poking holes in the Modern Synthesis? Are the operational concepts developed enough? Kalevi Kull: I would say they are developed as much as linguistics can be called Read More ›

From Ars Technica: Sometimes, scientists announce things that are breathtakingly stupid. The Guardian, which generally has pretty good science coverage, has an article up reporting that some top scientists believe that the comet 67P may harbor lots and lots of life. The purported evidence for life is the presence of complex hydrocarbons on the comet’s crust. Of course, this article is just based on a press release, and the data won’t be available until it’s presented later today at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society. But The Guardian could at least have done some background reading on the person behind the claim, Chandra Wickramasinghe. It would have found that he has a long history of making claims about extraterrestrial Read More ›