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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."
...new IIS security hole.
Q. Why did the fish cross the road ??????
A. It was stapled to the chicken.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
This one is really, really hard to prove unless you can find the original life-bearing world from which the first cell originated.
Even if you manage that, you're still stuck back with the question of how life started on that world instead of this one. You might as well work on mechanisms for the origin of life on earth, since it remains the only world on which we are sure life has ever existed.
~Idarubicin
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]
Why did the fish cross the road ??????
to get to the other tide?
So, which came first, the chicken or the egg.
(answer) hydrothermal vents. Ok, but a bit evasive.
Actually, I just wanted to say in general that if you believe in evolution, clearly the egg came first, as it was present in the chickens ancestors before the chicken evolved.
Actually, I think that's true even if you don't believe in evolution, since not believing in evolution doesn't make it less true.
-pyrrho
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.