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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."
The real question is, was life seeded from an object from space carrying single celled life? Has this been disproven/proven yet?
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
it's the first time a story of mine got its way to the front page! Enjoy it, slashdotters. I forgot to add a link to the Google News coverage of this news.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
No, it doesn't answer the chicken and the egg problem at all. What came before these things? did they get created out of thin air?
magnanomous.
If I am wrong, please correct me.
The guy is an idiot. More diversity in pools above on shores. Also ULTRAVIOLET energy from sunlight is very helpful, and originally oxygen (damaging) was low. Also by having evaporation of tidal pools and rainwater pools, various concentrations can be explored.
many protein-rich soups create single walled "bacterium-like" objects of uniform size, but without two walls, there is no way to protect a lifeform object.
Extremophiles are kooks. Its FAR MORE LIKELY that unfavorable living conditions were populated by life LAST not first. Expecially because sunlight is so far away from these environments, and OCCAMS razor indicates that extreme conditions were probably populated last not first.
prions and virii are not life by many peoples definitions, but I wonder how many prion-like entities would form in goddamned ocean water by chance.... not likely... you need tiday pools and amonia and ultraviolet light and electricity.
He just want big-budget funding money because studying deep sea life is expensive and easy to syphon off tons of money.
If I was a biologist I would do the same to justify a huge budget for research. Even NASA is doing it (extreme life studies).
I'd suggest that using Adam and Eve as the sole basis for the entire human gene pool is factually, provably impossible.
I'm not so sure that you can say this. 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.)
From a numerical standpoint, though, it is entirely possible. Let's just say for the sake of argument that the human race began from two genetically distinct humans, one male and one female.
Each parent contributes a single chromosome from each of 23 pairs; they each therefore can produce 2^23 distinct gametes. Therefore such a couple is capable of producing 2^46---or over 70 trillion---genetically distinct offspring.
Assuming no genetic mutations, subsequent generations of offspring would recombine the chromosomes in ways not possible for the first generation. With 23 pairs of chromosomes to select, and 4 choices to choose from in each pair, there is the potential for (4!/2!2!)^23 = 6^23---or almost 800 quadrillion---genetically distinct individuals.
That is of course assuming no mutation occurs; with mutation, these numbers can only increase. These numbers might decrease if the first man and woman were not fully genetically distinct, but I think we have some headroom to spare.
...Christian, but I believe in evolution and all the rest of methodical science.
Confusing?
"In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth."
Ok...So we had the Big Bang, everything cooled down a bit, stars were born, and this little dustball of a planet was compacted by gravity into a nice ball of molten rock. Thanks to the parallel axis theorem, the spin of all the dust in the solar system gave us angular momentum, so we now have a day and a night.
At some point, God created life in his image. OK, so now we have biological functions.
Unless you can read Hebrew, all you have to go on is other peoples' interpretations of the original text into a different langauge.
Even the concept Man was created first depends on the translation of that specific word. And did you know Hebrew wasn't spoken natively (again) until the 1900s? Plenty of time for humanity to lose touch with the language.
What's this Submit thingy do?
What are the scientific chances of two lifeforms forming and evolving, with identical genetic processes?
Not exactly the same, but there are definately examples of two species developing to the same body and muscle structure with no contact between the two species. Take for instance the Tasmanian Tiger, a marsupial that evolved to the essentially the same form as the northern hemispheres wolf.
I have my doubts that the origin of life originated from only one source, there appear to be as many possibilities about the initial starting blocks required as there are theories about it. The fact that they should evolve to essentially the same DNA structure, without nessecarily having completely distinct DNA , whilst coming from different starting points, for me seems as likely as our extinct tiger.
Just to defend myself here, I am college educated, and while my degree is in Computer Science, I took many Biology, Chemistry, and Science classes along the way. The more I learned about evolution the less I believed it. You would say I need to learn more so that I put my Bible down. The reason I picked the Bible up is BECAUSE of what I learned and what science was telling me. Don't assume Christians are stupid people- some of the smartest people I know are atheists, and some of the smartest people I know are Christians. Religion transcends intelligence and knowledge. If it just took more knowlege to refute the Christian Bible, there would be no Doctors at Church. Funny, there are many Docs at my Church.
[FromTheMorning]
You are putting words in my mouth... I have nothing against science. Christians, most of them, anyway, are not "anti-science."
[FromTheMorning]
First off, this gave me a chuckle: "One of the implications of Martin and Russell's theory is that life on our planet, even on other planets or some large moons in our own solar system, might be much more likely than previously assumed."
I'd already been sold on the idea of life on our planet.
Anyway, a fascinating passage in the book "LIFE AT THE LIMITS: Organisms in extreme environments." (Cambridge University Press, 2002), describes the role tides might have played in the origin of life. This is certainly old news for some list members, but I know it will interest others.
Author David A. Wharton, a zoologist, recounts one famous experiment that sets the stage with the MIller experiment relayed in another thread. In 1953, Harvard grad student Stanley Miller and chemist Harold Urey, demonstrated in a bottle that gaseous mix of ammonia, methane, water vapor, and hydrogen gas forms complex organic molecules, including amino acids, when exposed to electricity. That's a young Earth's atmosphere,
with lightning. Subsequently, ultraviolet light was also found to work. This much a lot of us have seen in high school biology films and textbooks.
The problem was that many of the raw materials dusting down to earth from meteorites would have been in a weak solution in the ancient oceans -- a very thin primordial soup. Those basic compounds need to be bunched together to
form the complex molecules that are a step away from life. Miller argues that the most likely place that vital concentration would have occurred is on the clay and sand of shorelines, deposited by the tides. The effect would
have been even more dramatic a couple of billion years back: it seems a nearer moon made the tides 30 times more powerful than they are today.
Of course, the implication is that each year our tides are weakening. The moon slips about 1.6" away from us each year (go ahead -- calculate how much further away from you it is now than when you were born). If we're not swallowed up by
our star turning into a red giant by then, that means eventually the moon will be a far enough away that it will match the Earth's rotation (also slowing) so that both a day and a month will come in at 47 days. In that case there
will be no tidal friction, according to physicists.
Anyway, I was just stirred by that vision of tides acting as midwife to life. There are certainly other theories out there that don't rely on the tides (some call for a hotter Earth, others deep ocean thermal vent chemistry, and
even the lattice structure of ice to concentrate compounds), but I wanted to share this one given our intimacy with this elemental force.
Erik