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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.
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Sure, this makes sense but how do these microenvironments start to self-replicate with a genetic code? I guess that's the leap to figure out.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
Wow, that would answer the chicken-egg problem.
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No, it reduces the Q to "what was first : the fish or the egg ?"
It does offcourse open endless possibilities
Why did the fish cross the road ??????
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
...new IIS security hole.
Your question is irrelavent. It doesn't answer the basic question: Where did life start. It only adds another layer. Even if life on Earth fell from the sky you still have to answer the question of where did that life start. Otherwise you are avoiding the fundimental question.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Of couse, because what we all know happened is there was this big explosion in this place called "space", and for no reason this Earth came about, and it was the perfect place for a bunch of water to swirl around, and Hydrogen and Oxygen and Carbon and some other stuff just randomly mixed together in a life form, for no apparant reason and with the greatest of luck, there was this living single-celled creature. Then the one-celled creature became a two-celled creature, again, for no apparant reason, and then three cells, and four, and then, finally, billions. And then all these genetic defects turned out to be really good things for all these creatures... And so humans "evolved" out of nothing and for no reason... but here we are. HO HUM!
[FromTheMorning]
If I am wrong, please correct me.
Amazing that all those accidents of nature worked out just perfectly, isn't it? I think that is even more unbelievable than Creation.
A while back I heard a joke about how God and a bunch of Evolutionists were discussing the origins of life. The Evolutionists said they could show how to create life. God said to go ahead and show Him. They said "let's take some dirt and water and ..."
God interrupted and said "Wait a minute. That is My dirt and water. Go create your own."
I offer my son as proof that life originates underwater... undoubtedly due to that bit of sex in the hot tub with the wife-to-be one cold August night.
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.
Easiest way to to determine if these organisms and more well-known organisms share a common ancestery is through DNA. Do these deep-sea bacteria have similar DNA structures? Don't all lifeforms studied so far use the same 4 genetic molecules (A, C, G, T ??)?
As long as they have chromosomes, and use the same 4 genetic molecules, there is almost no possibility that they are not related to the rest of life on Earth. What are the scientific chances of two lifeforms forming and evolving, with identical genetic processes?
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.
it's the first time a story of mine got its way to the front page!
Hey, if you're really lucky, your story will get on the front page again in about 3 days!
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Just because a bit of information doesn't answer ONE particular question doesn't mean it's irrelevant. If life came to earth from a meteor hit, that would have many relevant repercussions, including:
1 - We would know it's a waste of time to try to figure out how life began in the universe in general by looking at the evidence available here on Earth.
2 - We would know life on other worlds must exist, or at the very least, must have existed in the past.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
...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?
"God wasn't the creator" is not a presupposition. It's the default hypothesis until evidence sways us otherwise. NOT believing a theory yet is the default, and in the case for God, the ones who say "yes, god exists" are the ones that have taken on 100% of the burden of proof.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
With all due respect, the question of origins is ultimately a philosophical question and not a scientific one. Since we cannot observe and repeat the universal creation process, we cannot subject it to the scientific method.
What we can do is collect evidence and conjecture theories about what caused the evidence.
Ultimately that is what atheistic cosmologists and Christian cosmologists do - collect data, and have a theory about what caused the data.
You may argue that Christian cosmologists have a bias. I would submit to you that scientists with an a priori commitment to materialism have a bias as well.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Despite the fact that intuitively thermophiles seem like weird kooks, in many molecular phylogenetic analyses, thermophiles occupy the deepest branches, suggesting that life adapted to low temperature from high temperature rather than the inverse. This is also supported by the fact that the origin of life is constantly being forced backwards in time due to new evidence. As the early earth was very hot, this also supports a thermophilic origin of life.
That being said, not all phylogenetic analyses support the thermophile-early hypothesis. That's because different genes may have different histories due to horizontal transfer. Further work on whole genome phylogeny will be useful for clarifying the issue.
The first says that life formed in shallow pools, which would help shield harmful UV radiation.
The second is that it was carried to Earth from an extraterrestrial collision with something like a comet; this theory was supported but not proven by the pass-by of comet Hale-Bopp, i believe, due to the fact that spectrometry revealed that it had some organic substances (IIRC, our book has no mention of it).
The final theory (before the advent of this theory) is that life originated from volcanism at eep-sea vents. This would be supported by the life at deep-sea vents like tube worms and the like.
This is NOT to be confused with the 1953 experiment by Stanley Miller where he syntheized amino acids using lightning-like electricity and a proto-Earth atmosphere of methane, hydrogen, ammonia, and other gases. Amino acids are NOT life forms!
I think the title is a little misleading. This theory of life really means that life originated in porous underwater rocks, which is either an extension of the first theory or a completely new theory depending on how you view it.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Science stops being science when it gets past what can be tested and proven
Small correction from a practicing scientist: science stops being science when it gets past what can be tested and disproven. You can't prove a theory in a strictly scientific sense; you can only show that theories are not supported by the data (are disproven) or are currently (this being the key word) not ruled out.
Of course, you may have meant proven in the colloquial sense, in which case I don't necessarily disagree.
Even if ... evolution is the answer, it doesn't answer other profound questions. It doesn't answer what was there before space, what is outside of space, and what is outside of time.
The theory of evolution -- that is, the theory of environmental conditions exerting a cumulative, non-random pressure on life-forms to adapt -- does not have anything to do with what was around before the universe or what is outside of space and time. The only question it seeks to answer is: given that life exists on this planet, how did that life come to exist in the present form in which we know it? "Evolution" as a pejorative used by those who argue for intelligent design may seek to answer the aforementioned questions (with, one assumes, an antagonistic assault on the god of the Bible), but that's a theoretical straw man used by those who are constantly sharpening lances and watching for windmills.
Even if you don't believe in the God of Abraham (I happen to), I fail to see how everything can be explained with no high power involved.
If you're looking for a good book to explain very clearly how a series of random events can over time add up to a non-random outcome, I'd recommend Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker (ISBN 0-393-31570-3). Although there are some portions of the book which are a bit heavy-handed (I thought Dawkins was a bit harsh on Stephen Jay Gould and other punctuationists, and that he made positive feedback loops sound much more difficult to understand than they are), it is all in all a cogent, literate, and witty (in a very British way) treatise on natural selection.
I honestly don't understand what atheists believe in this area. Nobody has ever been able to tell me what is outside of space and time.
Again, there's a straw man present here. "Atheists" are a diverse bunch, just as diverse a group as "religious believers." If I were to say, "Religious believers believe that a god named Yahweh or Elohim exists omnipotently, omnisciently, and omnipresently beyond all physical restrictions, and that this god came to earth in the incarnation of a man named Yeshua," I'd be doing every group but Christians a disservice. There's really no way to know what any given atheist thinks exists beyond the boundaries of reality (or even if there is anything beyond them) without asking him.
On further reflection, it seems to me that your original premise is a bit tautological. You believe in a god as described in the Bible or the Torah, so you can not explain existence without using Yahweh as a reference point. The very statements "before space," "outside of space," and "outside of time" beg the question: is there anything there? You assume that there is (an eternal, mystical being), but there's a problem there:
To answer your final question, this particular atheist believes that nothing's out there beyond the borders, as it were. Even if there were, it's irrelevant because there's no way to observe or prove its existence.
They that would sacrifice their
Actually you didn't answer his statement about you stating that you were somehow being "forced" to believe in God.
I had a nagging feeling 'force' would be misconstrued and you would jump over my words instead of ideas.
I consider myself being forced if i'm sitting in the subway or walking down the street minding my own business and some fellow decides to start shouting for me to repent to Jusus or Allah. Or when I find myself ripping a 'believe in Jesus before it's too late' flyer off my car. Maybe not 'force' but I am annoyed with the people who believe in some religion or superstition but can't just be content with feeling better about it without having to tell everyone they meet how great it is and how wrong they are and why they themselves are right.
Well keep in mind that at one point the general scientific community thought the earth was flat
This was an assumption, NOT something that was thought fact because the so-called "scientific community" had proven it throught some sort of experiments or research.
You know eveolution in entirely a plausable outcome (except perhaps the 'original spark' (who knows maybe that was God?!)), but what is more plausable: that beings slowly evolved through minor natural selection and genetic mutations and punctuated evolution (due to local/global cataclysms) OR is it more plausable that and invisible, omnipotent, super-intelligent has existed since the beginning of time and created the trillions of galaxies each with hundreds of millions to trillions of stars,planets,etc and only one of those planets he magically created what we call life and intelligent life? (Occams Razor??)
Now I ask you, honeslty: Which is more plausable?
why run from Vincenzo?
The theory that (a) God exists is just as sound as the theory that existance is older than the sum of human memory & created through random chance.
Nope. A theory must explain the evidence, make testable predictions, and be falsifiable. "God exists" fails on the last two. Therefore, it is not a theory.
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.
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
I simply include "God Exists" as a basic proposition needing no proof, because it's as obvious to me as the nose on anyone's face, it's natural reasoning.
The nose on anyone's face (well, apart from Michael Jackson) can be rather easily demonstrated to the satisfaction of most anyone. How can you do the same for the existence of a 'god'?
Of course, 'nose' itself has a pretty common accepted definition. I can ask several different people to define 'god' and I will likely receive several different (and sometimes contradictory) answers, so you'd better start with a concrete definition of what you mean by 'god'.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
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
---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.