Well, so do scientists. And even though they haven’t got a concrete answer, they’ve unearthed (no pun intended) loads of other info on the quest to find out how. Offers “adorable animation” on chemical evolution. Dang. See also, if you are serious: Why origin of life is such a hard problem. Follow UD News at Twitter!
Here: Here on warm, watery Earth, the molecules DNA and RNA serve as the blueprints of life, containing creatures’ genetic instruction manuals. An immense family of proteins carries out these instructions. Yet in a hydrocarbon medium on Titan, these molecules could never perform their profound chemical duties. Other molecules must therefore step up to the plate if non-water-based, alien life is to operate and evolve in a Darwinian sense, with genetic changes leading to diversity and complexity. A new study proposes that molecules called ethers, not used in any genetic molecules on Earth, could fulfill the role of DNA and RNA on worlds with hydrocarbon oceans. These worlds must be a good deal toastier though than Titan, the study found, Read More ›
Veteran science writer, specializing in origin of life, Suzan Mazur interviewed Eugene Koonin, Senior Investigator at National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) recently at Huffington Post: Suzan Mazur: You’ve said you think faint signals remain in tracing early ancestry. Carl Woese told me that these things are simply being inferred, that there’s no way to know… Eugene Koonin: Indeed, if you want to be rigorous in a way, there is nothing we can know about the past. Everything we’re saying about the past is inference — yet, inference is not a derogatory term. We are very confident about much of this inference. We are confident that all animals had a common ancestor about 700 million years ago, a little less. Although, do Read More ›
At Huffington Post, Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus, interviews origin of life researcher Ricardo Flores, of the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Plant Biology, Valencia, Spain, who argues that a viroid-like entity is a prime candidate for the first replicon on Earth. Viroids are subviral world parasites, non-protein coding RNAs. Viroids. This from the interview: Ricardo Flores: We know now that there is a subviral world, which was not realized for the first 70 years of the 20th century. . . . Viroids represent the smallest organisms in terms of size on the biological scale. Compared to the genome of the tobacco mosaic virus, the viroid genome is 20 times smaller. . . . The simplest Read More ›
From Quanta Magazine: Life emerged so long ago that even the rock formations covering the planet at that time have been destroyed — and with them, most chemical and geological clues to early evolution. “There’s a huge chasm between the origins of life and the last common ancestor,” said Eric Gaucher, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The stretch of time between the origins of life and the last universal common ancestor saw a series of remarkable innovations — the origins of cells, metabolism and the genetic code. But scientists know little about when they happened or the order in which they occurred. Scientists do know that at some point in that time span, living creatures Read More ›
Here, Michael Le Page reviews biochemist Nick Lane’s new book, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is? Living cells are powered by a totally unexpected process. The energy from food is used to pump protons across a membrane to build up an electrochemical gradient. This gradient drives the machinery of life, like water from a dam driving a turbine. And Lane argues that life has been powered by proton gradients from the very beginning. Forget all those primordial soups or “warm ponds”: only the natural proton gradients found in undersea alkaline hydrothermal vents could have provided the continuous flux of carbon and energy that life requires. These vents may be common on rocky planets so, if this Read More ›
Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus, interviews Adrian Bejan, orignator of the constructal law at Huffington Post: I’ve quoted Adrian Bejan numerous times in books and articles about evolution, about academic mafias and peer review, but somehow we never got around to having a full conversation. So I called him recently at Duke University, where he is now J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering, to chat about both his constructal law of design in nature — which he considers one of the few laws of physics — as well as his formative years in the 50s and 60s in communist Romania. … Suzan Mazur: There continues to be some debate about which came first in origin Read More ›
From ScienceDaily: The new research, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that structures once thought to be Earth’s oldest microfossils do not compare with younger fossil candidates but have, instead, the character of peculiarly shaped minerals. In 1993, US scientist Bill Schopf described tiny carbon-rich filaments within the 3.46 billion-year-old Apex chert (fine-grained sedimentary rock) from the Pilbara region of Western Australia, which he likened to certain forms of bacteria, including cyanobacteria. The apparent find was controversial but the ensuing debate was hard to resolve until more advanced equipment became available, at which point: Now Dr David Wacey, a Marie Curie Fellow in Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, in collaboration with the late Professor Read More ›
So claims writer Mark Strauss at Slate: Ridiculing astrobiologists is a favorite sport at the Discovery Institute, which complains on its news site that “hardly a month goes by lately when the science media fail to breathlessly report the discovery of a new planet, in some star’s ‘habitable zone,’ that might hypothetically be capable of supporting life.” The institute attributes the coverage in part to hype purposefully generated by “organized science” to shake down the government for grant money. But the creationists also see a more sinister agenda than naked greed. They place astrobiologists among the ranks of the “Darwin Brigades” who have always been “eager to undermine human exceptionalism,” since “the alleged ordinariness of the human race was vital Read More ›
The importance of information: For life to have begun, something that could encode information and replicate itself was necessary. A molecule—or perhaps a group of molecules—would have done the trick. Once these substances could replicate themselves, it’s believed that natural selection would have stepped in to create new versions of the ‘Great Starter’. Then it just degenerates into the usual big media Darwinsludge: According to Lane, the environment that created life would need to be ‘continuously’ producing the building blocks of RNA in ‘large numbers’. ‘Any form of replication is doubling,’ says Lane. ‘So you need an environment that will feed you.’ ‘This is one of the problems with a soup,’ says Lane, referring to Darwin’s 1871 theory that life Read More ›
First, it isn’t about Nick Lane or his new book. It is more about the pop science culture in which this stuff originates: The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is? is a new book by Nick Lane that is due out on April 23rd. His question is not one for a static answer but rather one for a series of ever sharper explanations—explanations that apply at different resolutions to specific increments in the continuous chain of life, to the whole, and to generalizations of the process to other instances. For example, we might now boldly assert that an explanation for whether life evolved, or could have evolved, in the same way more than once on our own Read More ›
Here: One of the most fascinating sections of the book is “Circus Toy Models” where Mazur interviews those scientists involved with efforts to make life in the lab – from Jack Szostak and Matt Powner to Vincent Noireaux and Albert Libchaber to Steen Rasmussen and Norm Packard. Mazur also chats with James Simons (“Impresario Extraordinaire”) whose Simons Foundation is now seriously bankrolling origins research, including protocell development. In Rethinking the Circus, i.e., the origin and evolution of life, Mazur talks with the late Carl Woese, and also with Nigel Goldenfeld – who calls for a consensus on what life is. Pier Luigi Luisi, who thinks we need all new origin of life “mindstorms.” And astrophysicist Piet Hut, who suggests that Read More ›
Readers will recall that I (O’Leary for News) have been recommending Suzan Mazur’s recent book, The Origin of Life Circus, an indepth look at what is and isn’t working in origin of life research. Much recommended is her interview with Paul Davies’ collaborator at Arizona State University, physicist Sara Walker, who emphasizes the need to address the information aspect of life. Walker politely dismisses claim that maybe life and non-life aren’t much different, and says, Yes, I like to think about life in terms of information flows and how information is being processed. And because information is so widely distributed in biological systems, I think there’s merit to the idea of autocatalytic sets. Living systems are systems, and we really Read More ›
As Mazur tells it in The Origin of Life Circus, In a couple of e-mails to me in January 2013, Andrew Pohorille, the senior-most scientist at NASA working in the origin of life field, objected to my story, “The RNA World’s Last Hurrah?”, “The RNA World’s Last Hurrah?”, in which I interviewed Paul Davies’ collaborator at Arizona State University, physicist Sara Walker. … Pohorille seemed furious at story comments doubting the RNA world, although the Walker interview was a Q & A, and I’d quoted the “experts” and linked my interviews with them: biochemist Pier Luigi Luisi, wh characterized the RNA world as a baseless fantasy; theoretical biologist Stu Kaffman hadn’t worked; and Walker, who told me “most of the Read More ›
Which doesn’t mean there is no hope or no information. Read on. Further to Origin of life: Is the real story mainly the comments now?, physicist Rob Sheldon writes I had to write just to defend the poor chemist, John D. Sutherland. The problem of making ribose and proteins-a la Miller and Urey, is that the reaction removes a water molecule when making the bond between amino acids–so it only works in a dry environment–on the other hand, the other reactions for making glycine or amino acids need a wet environment. If I recall correctly, the same dichotomy applies to synthesis of RNA, DNA and nucleotides, in which some bonds are broken by water, some are made in water. In Read More ›