Origin Of Life

In recent exchanges  in and around UD on origins and the tree of life, Theobald’s 29 evidences claims (and by implication the sort of summary presented by Wikipedia in its articles on Abiogenesis and Evolution) have come up. [NB: to carry forward discussions, I suggest here on. I intend to do a for reference in support of discussion here in this FTR post.] That leads me to point out the case of the UD pro-darwinism essay challenge and the strange absence of and reluctance to provide a guest essay here at UD over the course of a full year, Sept/Oct 2012 – Sept/Oct 2013. The big issue seemed to be that in my challenge as explained, I required tackling the Read More ›

Here: However, a new piece of research offers an intriguing (albeit equally unproven) alternative. Zhang Wang and Martin Wu of the University of Virginia make an argument that instead of a chancy cellular merger, or engulfment of one prokaryote by another, the mitochondrial machinery actually comes from a parasite. What started out as a bacterium stealing chemical energy eventually became an organism providing chemical energy – in return for an evolutionary advantage. This proposal comes from a deep look at the genetic relationships between modern mitochondria and 18 closely related free-ranging bacteria. The researchers in effect attempt a reconstruction of the likely metabolic processes of the earliest mitochondria and their immediate precursors. They find that these critters were more likely Read More ›