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Life May Have Evolved In Ice
Philip Bailey writes "An article in this month's Discover Magazine claims that some of the fundamental organic molecules required for the development of life could have spontaneously arisen within ice. Scientist Stanley Miller was responsible for seminal experiments in the 1950s in this area. He used sparks and a mixture of inorganic chemicals to test his theories, but turned to low temperature experiments in later years. He was able to create the constituents of RNA and proteins from a mixture of cyanide, ammonia and ice in trials lasting up to 25 years. A process known as eutectic freezing is thought to be the basis of these results: small pockets of liquid water, in which foreign molecules are concentrated enormously, increases the reaction rates, and more than compensates for temperature-related slowing."
Although I can certainly see how the physics of freezing would help concentrate biological precursors, I would expect an icy-origin to have left more evidence in the form of cryophilic biodiversity. With an icy origin, ice-tolerant organisms should have arisen quite early. Indeed they would have probably been the first life forms and ice-adapted life would have been quite common. Unless the Earth experienced a 100% ice-free period, descendants of those original cryophiles would be with us to this day. Moreover, many "normal" species would still arbor a shared genetic basis for evolving ice-tolerance or cryophilic lifestyles.
Instead, we seem to see limited scattering species that have independently evolved various forms of ice-tolerance. I could be wrong. If so, I'd love to hear if biologists have found evidence for a widely shared mechanism for ice-tolerance that speaks to a frozen beginning.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Closer to four billion years ago (at least 3.7 billion in any case). And the conclusion here is not that life evolved in ice, but that it may have. It's possible. That has less significance for history on Earth as it does on other worlds...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Hm, ice would evaporate quickly and never survive a trip through the atmosphere, and in space it would have been much too cold to form temporary pockets of water. Also, where would the lightning come from which generated the first more complex molecules which later formed RNA etc.?
Knowing where something came from allows more insight into where it is going...
Yes.
If we want to look for life on other planets then this research may help us, if it can be shown life is possible or even likely on frozen planets.
"We're here so let's make the most of it."
Yeah, let's not study ourselves, our origins, or science at all. Why bother with history? We're here, lets make the most of it.
Genius.
Yes, it does really matter. Knowing how life evolved gives us insights into how life works here and now. Answering these questions most certainly WILL change issues of today. And, even if they don't, who cares? It's knowledge. Humans have this insatiable urge to know everything they can, leading to today's technologically and medically advanced world. However, occasionally we get people who decry the process without understanding it.
I think they are saying that the molecular precursors to life on earth, can be created in ice. We see large chunks of flying ice in the universe. Our planet may have been implanted with the required precursors for life from ice flying into the planet.
I don't know so much that they are intending to say that the earliest life forms were created in ice.
But I don't know, I didn't read the article. Just taking a break from the superbowl.
Does it matter, yes it does. In fact, there is big big money in finding simple very primitive organisms. Primitive organisms are easy to engineer organisms, which means that it is easy to turn them into oil making machines, which means big bucks.
Was the earth even cold enough back then to have that much ice?
Possibly.
One of the ongoing problems in paleobiology is the "early quiet sun". Solar models, which we now know to be extremely accurate based on solar neutrino measurements, show that the sun was considerably dimmer in the distant past. So dim that by any reasonable standard we would expect the Earth to be substantially covered with... ice.
A mechanism that would cause life to form in an icy environment would give a lot of answers to open questions.
Google "standard solar model", "early quiet sun" and "Sudbury Neutrino Observatory" for some of the background on this.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
If we all had that sort of attitude, we would still be banging rocks together...
In Soviet Amerika the ballot boxes YOU!
I'd argue that a good hardware design (digital logic, verilog, gate construction, basic circuit design) course and an assembly language course would be invaluable to the modern computer science major.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
So will global warming stop evolution?
The government can't save you.
I have read Dr. Stanley Miller's work sine the 80s, He is a meticulous and persistant with his experiments. His conjectures run all over the map. I saw a lecture given by him in the early 90s, when he was progressing away from primordial soup. What is interesting is that He is moving towards the theories of Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe that life evolved on comets. Of all the 'science' and 'scientists' its after reading their work, and discussing it with post-docs from MIT, that I have a great respect for their work.
The problem about the origin of life, (which has a direct impact on the evaluation of Drake's equation) is how hard is it to make a molecule, by 'chance' that is selectively self-replicating. Molecular biology is a very young field.
Didn't the Oxygen Catastrophe create a "snowball earth" as it removed the vast majority of CO2 from the atmosphere and lowered global temperatures by something like 25 deg. C?
I would think that the Oxygen Catastrophe would have selected more towards the cryophiles, not away. This, also, is wild speculation.