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Did Life Originate Underwater?
TuringTest writes "Sciencedaily reports a highly controversial new theory about the origins of life from Professor William Martin of the University of Dusseldorf and Dr Michael Russell of the Scottish Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow. The theory briefly states that inorganic cells where first, then living systems evolved inside these incubators which allowed an enough rich micro-environment. The small compartments would have been formed in iron sulphide rocks near hot, hydrothermal vents on the sea floor, not in the atmosphere. Wow, that would answer the chicken-egg problem."
When you quote someone from spoken words, it is up to the author to spell everything correctly.
/. submissions are no different in this sense.
When you quote someone from the written word, it is up to the author to keep the original spelling intact.
You may, however, point out typos and spelling errors with a (sic), but it's not necessary. The important thing is that you convey the message as the original author wrote it.
If you quote Shakespeare in an essay, you don't update is grammar and spelling. Goofy
Thus, the slashdot editors are right in just cut and pasting the submissions, with no spelling checks.
Spelling and grammar nazis make asses of themselves whenever they point one out. They think they're being clever and +5 insightful, but they're really showing their lack of skill with the written language.
If the editor adds a comment, complete with a spelling faux pas, then you can bitch at 'em.
In short, fuck you and your 4rth grade spelling bee bullshit.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Underwater, UV was blocked, but longer wavelengths could penetrate to permit photosynthesis. Once photosynthesis liberated enough molecular oxygen to produce an ozone layer, life was able to move onto dry land.
What's novel about the theory in the article is that it proposes that living cells were preceded by nonliving inorganic cells.
Earth had large amounts of liquid water at least 3.85 billion years, possibly 4.3 billion years ago. Zircon samples have been found dating back that far that could only have crystallized in an aqueous medium.
bacteria don't have chromosomes... they have a circular strand of DNA
Scientists have proven (nope, I don't got a link. It was on space.com somewhere a few months back) that life can spontaneously start, given the right conditions. The reason nobody takes that as an acceptable answer to the queation of "How did life start on Earth" is because the conditions on Earth at the time Life is theorized to have started were quite different from the conditions required for life to spontaneously begin. So, while it is possible, it wasn't possible for it to happen on Earth.
Moving the origin to somewhere other than Eath could answer the question of where did life start. We know what conditions are needed, and if we could find a place that had such conditions we would know that life might very well have started there. So, no, moving the origin to a place other than Earth is not avoiding the fundimental question.
"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit." --Oscar Wilde
Logic would assume that if birds evolved from reptiles, then the genetic coding for the body parts that they share in common would be located in the same place, and be relatively similar.
No logic doesn't. Especially not once understands how DNA binding actually works and takes a glimpse into all the things that can change that process. Did anyone at your debate mention HSPs? Virus mutations that get auto-corrected? Those that don't? How the location of a string isn't nearly as important as the coding sequence? How much damage a sequence can take and still be effective?
You are creating a logical fallicy and then using that to argue your points. I realize that you are probably trolling but really, please go out and read up on DNA some and not just the often purposefully incorrect information on it passed around by "creation scientists".
--- I do not moderate.
The "first organisms" did not produce significant amounts of oxygen, and the atmosphere was a reducing atmosphere and environment (free hydrogen gas, hydrogen sulfide, etc). Even when the first oxygenic organisms arrived on the scene, it is believed to have taken a significant amount of time (I've never seen an estimate lower than millions of year) to produce enough oxygen to change the entire planet's atmosphere from reducing to something resembling today's conditions (nitrogen, oxygen, argon, a little carbon dioxide).
Therefore, the evolution of life almost certainly does NOT preculde another event occuring on primordial earth at all. Please get your science theories straight before posting off-the-hip.
-Microbiology Grad Student
I think a lot of your questions about how evolution, cosmology, and the rest of science attempt to explain all sorts of phenomena (without resorting to a default "because of God") can be answered by visiting the Talk.Origins Archive.
If they can't be answered, there are some very helpful admins who answer most of the mail they receive with not only answers, but links to the source of the answers.
It's better than wading through the
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Technically, when we procreate we don't give one entire copy of each of our chromosomes. There are a few processes involved that jumble the chromosomes that are given to our offspring. So it would be better to think of each parent randomly giving a copy of each gene within each chromosome, which would greatly increase the number of combinations involved. Since there's something on the order of millions of genes to create a human, then there are millions^2 possible genomes for a human.
The flip side to this is there are a bunch of genes that don't vary at all between people, as long as they're not mutated. For example, most of the genes that control embryonic development are identical in everyone. This reduces the number of combinations involved.
But the result is there's many, many, many possible combinations without considering mutation.
The old story:
A bit after the beginning, there were some self-replicating molecules. Some of them might have been proteins, and some of them might have been nucleic acids, and I suppose some of the might have been something we haven't thought of. The molecules that were really good at self-replication did it quite a bit, and there got to be more of them, especially when they had access to the necessary raw materials.
One day, or more likely on a large number of different days, a bunch of these self-replicating molecules all found themselves trapped together inside a sphere made of phospholipids floating in a puddle and started interacting in a synergistic kind of way.
The new story:
A somewhat shorter bit after the beginning, some basic molecules got spewed out of an ocean vent and all found themselves trapped together inside a sphere of rock at the bottom of the ocean. These basic molecules interacted a bit (thanks to their proximity) and formed some self-replicating molecules, which were of course trapped, too. The molecules that were really good at self-replication did it quite a bit, and there got to be more of them, which was easy because they had access to the raw materials they needed to self replicate (because said materials were, as we have said, trapped).
One day, or more likely on a large number of different days, a bunch of these self-replicating molecules all found themselves trapped together inside the same sphere of rock and started interacting in a synergistic kind of way. At some point they must have made their collective way into a phospholipid sphere, I suppose, or else our cell membranes would be made out of rock.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
http://www.syslab.ceu.hu/corliss/0-TitlePrefContAc k.html
http://www.syslab.ceu.hu/corliss/Nature.html
here's the link at nature.com: http://www.nature.com/nsu/021202/021202-3.html
It's called the second law of thermodynamics which states that anything that happens, happens spontaneously (since all spontaneous processes increase entropy and entropy always increases).
Sorry, but I think you completely misunderstand the second law of thermodynamics. It doesn't apply to anything at all - it says that in a closed system, entropy increases. First of all, the Earth isn't a closed system... On top of that, entropy isn't some catch-all for any disorder, it applies specifically to Thermodynamics, which deals with chemical processes... if I meteorite strikes the earth carrying life, it's not a purely thermodynamic process. I hate it when people mis-use Entropy!
---Even some scientists who don't believe in a literal Adam and Eve have posited the existence of a single mother to all currently living humans, through the tracing of mitochondrial DNA (which inherit genetic infomation only through the mother.)---
I think you're a little confused as to what they mean by this. "Mitochondrial Eve" was not, in her lifetime, significant in any way. She's only so in retrospect: in the hindsight that all other lineages from her generation eventually happened to die out. As other lines perhaps die out, a new "Mitochondrial Eve" could be, conceptually, crowned. That there must be such an individual at any given time is a mathematical certainty (you can reason it strickly from logic alone), but its not always the same individual, and it isn't the case that this individual's children only bred with each other. Not at all! It's simply that only lineages that include this particular female in them at some point, survive. The exact same thing is true for a "Y chromosome Adam." But again, you're thinking about it the wrong way if you think that he has anything to do with "Mitochondrial Eve," especially timewise. And, like ME, the designation could change to a different, more recent individual if certain lineages happen to die out.