Slashdot Mirror
Sludge In Flask Gives Clues To Origin of Life
sciencehabit writes "In the 1950s, scientist Stanley Miller conducted a series of experiments in which he zapped gas-filled flasks with electricity. The most famous of these, published in 1952, showed that such a process could give rise to amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. But a later experiment, conducted in 1958, sat on the shelf--never analyzed by Miller. Now, scientists have gone back and analyzed the sludge at the bottom of this flask and found even more amino acids than before--and better evidence that lightning and volcanic gasses may have helped create life on Earth."
I was going to say "How do they know there was no contamination?", but TFA states that equal amounts of right handed and left handed organic molecules were found, ruling out contamination as a source of the amino acids.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It took hundreds of millions of years and a lab the size of a planet to do it the first time. It may take more than a few decades to reproduce that.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
If examining sludge in a 50-year old flask can give clues to the origin of life, just imagine what scientists could learn by examining the inside of my fridge!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
1. Lightning zaps a volcano
2. Wait X [m/b]illion years
3. ...
4. Profit
And yet the creationists are the ones with fairy tales? [does not compute]
Until and unless scientists can create actual life forms in a sterile clean-room from periodic table elements, life on this planet and exactly how it got here remains quite a bit more myserious than some would have you believe despite our best efforts to understand it.
Personally the part that confounds me is that DNA is highly organized information. Assuming a starting point of a planet with no life forms and no pre-existing DNA to bootstrap the process, its formation seems like negentropy in an otherwise entropic Universe. Evolution doesn't seem to have a real answer to this question other than throwing large amounts of time at the problem. Creationism merely relocates the problem; one could ask if God created all of this then what are God's origins, or if there was never a time when God did not exist how does one even begin to comprehend that or really understand what that means? Panspermia of course has the same flaw; if Earth got its life from a visiting comet/asteriod then where did that get living organisms?
Any way you look at it, the very fact that we're here to have this discussion is incredibly mysterious. I don't share the urge some have to dismiss or gloss over that fact. I actually find it a beautiful thing to celebrate, not a nuisance to be explained away.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Assuming a starting point of a planet with no life forms and no pre-existing DNA to bootstrap the process, its formation seems like negentropy in an otherwise entropic Universe.
Earth is not a closed system - it receives constant input of energy from the Sun. Therefore there is no contradiction in formation of more highly organized chemicals (and eventually life), so long as the process is driven by that external energy. The "primordial soup" theory is compatible with that.
We still don't have a complete explanation of how things went there, of course. Some prominent theories hold that something akin to "evolution" actually started before DNA was in place (with RNA, or possibly even earlier), and DNA is the result of that evolution. But the "mystery" there is largely due to our inability to conclusively prove that things happened one way or another, and not due to some missing links or somesuch.