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."

Comments

That's not important

[Quasar1999]

The real question is, was life seeded from an object from space carrying single celled life? Has this been disproven/proven yet?

Re:That's not important

[karlandtanya]

There are bacteria in deep-sea hydrothermal vents at the mid-ocean ridge.

These bacteria operate on a wholly different metabolic process from the bacteria we see at the surface.

How different are they? Must the share a common origin with you and me?

Could they have evolved around these vents?

Does their evolving around these vents preclude other organisms having evolved at the surface?

Was there enough water?

[kakos]

The Earth is widely regarded as 4.6 billion years old and life is 3.9 billion years old. Now, I'm not sure (me not being a geologist), but I didn't think Earth had oceans at 700 million years. If we didn't have oceans, it seems somewhat unlikely that life would have developed in one.

If I am wrong, please correct me.

Re:Creation of Life

[mcg1969]

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.

I'm a...

[mmol_6453]

...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.