New forms of life found on Earth, none elsewhere?

_{Denyse O'Leary

July 29, 2015

Cell biology, Intelligent Design, News}

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Really small bacteria.

At Tiny Scales, a Giant Burst on Tree of Life

DNA sequencing is at the heart of this current study, though the researchers’ success also owes a debt to more basic technology. The team gathered water samples from a research site on the Colorado River near the town of Rifle, Colo. Before doing any sequencing, they passed the water through a pair of increasingly fine filters — with pores 0.2 and 0.1 microns wide — and then analyzed the cells captured by the filters. At this point they already had undiscovered life on their hands, for the simple reason that scientists had not thought to look on such a tiny scale before.

“Most people assumed that bacteria were bigger, and most bacteria are bigger,” Rubin said. “[Banfield] has shown that there are whole populations that are very small.”

The researchers extracted the DNA from the cellular material and sent it to the Joint Genome Institute for sequencing. What they got back was a mess. Imagine being handed a box of pieces from thousands of different jigsaw puzzles and having to assemble them without knowing what any of the final images look like. That’s the challenge researchers face when performing metagenomic analysis — sequencing scrambled genetic material from many organisms at once.

…

“Looking at things from a different angle may offer that possibility of a fourth domain,” he said — an equal partner to bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes. “There will always be novel stuff that will teach us foundational info about how life operates.” More.

Could this guy be right? No life on Mars? So much life on Earth? Too bad. But why?

Also: The Tree of Life is just a circle now. Mathematical, not organic concept. Does that not make a conceptual difference?

Comments

Don't forget "synthetica", ie artificially designed life, DaveS. Need that on the diagram too; http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2010/may/artificial-life-can-we-redesign-nature68921.html http://content.science20.com/files/images/tsk_treeoflife_csynbi3.gifppolish_{July 29, 2015
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To bring the preceding findings into context, and to show just how problematic these findings are for Darwinian explanations, here is this article from Kirk Durston, which just came out yesterday, that puts this insurmountable problem for Darwinists into proper focus:
Computing the "Best Case" Probability of Proteins from Actual Data, and Falsifying a Prediction of Darwinism - Kirk Durston - July 28, 2015 Excerpt: What are the implications of these results, obtained from actual data, for the fundamental prediction of neo-Darwinian theory mentioned above? If we assume 10^30 life forms with a fast replication rate of 30 minutes and a huge genome with a very high mutation rate over a period of 10 billion years, an extreme upper limit for the total number of mutations for all of life's history would be around 10^43. Unfortunately, a protein domain such as Ribosomal S7 would require a minimum average of 10^100 trials, about 10^57 trials more than the entire theoretical history of life could provide -- and this is only for one domain. Forget about "finding" an average sized protein, not to mention thousands. As we all know from probabilities, you can get lucky once, but not thousands of times. This definitively falsifies the fundamental prediction of Darwinian theory that evolutionary processes can "find" functional protein families. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/07/computing_the_b098101.html
bornagain77_{July 29, 2015
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This study originally came out last month:
Newfound groups of bacteria are mixing up the tree of life - June, 15, 2015 Excerpt: University of California, Berkeley, scientists have identified more than 35 new groups of bacteria, The new groups make up more than 15 percent of all known groups or phyla of bacteria, the scientists say, and include the smallest life forms on Earth, microbes a mere 400 nanometers across. The number of new bacterial phyla is equal to all the known animal phyla on Earth.,,, the accepted tree of life - a division into the three domains of eukaryotes, which includes animals and plants, bacteria and Archaea - needs to be revised.,,, About half of all the genes in these 35-plus phyla are new and unlike other known genes. The recognizable genes suggest that most of the bacteria use a simple process of fermentation to make the energy they need, instead of using aerobic or anaerobic respiration like many other bacteria. They also have unusual ribosomes, the multi-protein machines that translate genetic instructions into proteins. In fact, routine genomic scans would not detect them because of their distinctive 16S ribosomal RNA genes.,,, http://phys.org/news/2015-06-newfound-groups-bacteria-tree-life.html
No matter how Darwinists might try to spin this finding, 35-plus new phyla IS NOT what is expected under the Darwinian hypothesis! Of related interest to findings that are severely incongruent with Darwinian expectations: The 'anomaly' of unique ORFan genes is found in every new genome sequenced:
,,,”Typical bacterial species. The smallest part of the pie are the genes that all bacteria share. 8% roughly. This second and largest slice (of the pie, 64%) are the genes that are specialized to some particular environment. They call them character genes. By far the biggest number of genes are the ones that are unique. This big green ball here (on the right of the illustration). These are genes found only in one species or its near relatives. Those are the ORFans (i.e. Genes with no ancestry). They said, on the basis of our analysis the genetic diversity of bacteria is of infinite size.” Paul Nelson – quoted from 103:48 minute mark of the following video Widespread ORFan Genes Challenge Common Descent – Paul Nelson – video https://youtu.be/9UTrZX47e00?t=3820
You can see the pie chart that Dr. Nelson used in his talk here on page 108 (figure 2) of this following article:
Estimating the size of the bacterial pan-genome Excerpt Figure 2 pg. 108: At the genomic level, a typical bacterial genome is composed of _8% of core genes, 64% of character genes and 28% of accessory genes,,, http://www.paulyu.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Estimating-the-size-of-the-bacterial-pan-genome.pdf Estimating the size of the bacterial pan-genome - Pascal Lapierre and J. Peter Gogarten - 2008 Excerpt: We have found greater than 139 000 rare (ORFan) gene families scattered throughout the bacterial genomes included in this study. The finding that the fitted exponential function approaches a plateau indicates an open pan-genome (i.e. the bacterial protein universe is of infinite size); a finding supported through extrapolation using a Kezdy-Swinbourne plot (Figure S3). This does not exclude the possibility that, with many more sampled genomes, the number of novel genes per additional genome might ultimately decline; however, our analyses and those presented in Ref. [11] do not provide any indication for such a decline and confirm earlier observations that many new protein families with few members remain to be discovered. http://www.paulyu.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Estimating-the-size-of-the-bacterial-pan-genome.pdf
At the 12:40 minute mark of the following 'The Dictionary of Life' video, Dr. Nelson describes the breaking point for Darwinian scenarios from the genetic evidence for ORFan genes:
The Dictionary of Life | Origins with Dr. Paul A. Nelson - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zJaetK9gvCo#t=760s
A few more notes:
The essential genome of a bacterium - 2011 Figure (C): Venn diagram of overlap between Caulobacter and E. coli ORFs (outer circles) as well as their subsets of essential ORFs (inner circles). Less than 38% of essential Caulobacter ORFs are conserved and essential in E. coli. Only essential Caulobacter ORFs present in the STING database were considered, leading to a small disparity in the total number of essential Caulobacter ORFs. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3202797/pdf/msb201158.pdf Orphan Genes (And the peer reviewed 'non-answer' from Darwinists) - lifepsy video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zz6vio_LhY
bornagain77_{July 29, 2015
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A possible new domain? Very interesting. Regarding:
The Tree of Life is just a circle now. Mathematical, not organic concept. Does that not make a conceptual difference?
that's just a radial visualization, as opposed to the triangular format which looks more like a physical tree. They each convey exactly the same information. Here's a page showing these two visualizations of the same tree, with a procedure for drawing the radial version.daveS_{July 29, 2015
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