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Did Life Emerge In Ponds Rather Than Ocean Vents?

ananyo writes "The prevailing scientific view holds that life began in hydrothermal vents in the deep sea. But a controversial study (abstract) suggests that inland pools of condensed and cooled geothermal vapor have the ideal characteristics for the origin of life. The study hinges on the observation that the composition of the cytoplasm of modern cells is very different to that of seawater. On the other hand, the mix of metal ions in cytoplasm is (almost exclusively) found where where hot hydrothermal fluid brings the ions to the surface — places such as geysers and mud pots. There are a number of problems with the study, however — for instance, a lack of land 4 billion years ago would have made it difficult for life to start in such pools."

25 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. My grandpa wasn't a monkey, or pond scum! by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Funny

    First you college boys, with your fancy book smarts, try to tell me my grandpa was a monkey. Now you're calling him pond scum! Jesus will make you commie elitists pay when you die!

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    1. Re:My grandpa wasn't a monkey, or pond scum! by Haxagon · · Score: 4, Funny

      Not if they're backed by your commie bitcoins, he doesn't!

    2. Re:My grandpa wasn't a monkey, or pond scum! by SJHillman · · Score: 3, Funny

      You didn't know that Jesus posts as Anonymous Coward?

    3. Re:My grandpa wasn't a monkey, or pond scum! by fatphil · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What's more shocking is that at least one of the real rocket scientists who helped put men on the moon can, and will if sparked off, prove that the earth is only 6000+ years old, using the bible as his only source. (I know this, as I've met one, and was *ordered* by my friends to not spark him off.)

      3 scientific degrees from Ivy league universities, and a job at NASA doesn't mean you're batshitproof, alas.

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    4. Re:My grandpa wasn't a monkey, or pond scum! by g0bshiTe · · Score: 4, Funny

      Considering how he was treated when he was alive, I don't blame him.

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      I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
    5. Re:My grandpa wasn't a monkey, or pond scum! by g0bshiTe · · Score: 2

      You could argue the point by handing him a copy of a high school math book and telling him all the math he needs to get to the moon is in that book. No doubt he would argue that data in the book is not sufficient enough to make the true calculations. I think he would then see the parallel.

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      I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
    6. Re:My grandpa wasn't a monkey, or pond scum! by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      We have so many perception bubbles and foaming at the mouth fanbois i fully expected to be modded down and frankly don't give a shit. i mean look at the "I'm holier than though" bullshit going on right now in the rep POTUS selection, we have out of control debt, have lost more than 40,000 factories in a decade to outsourcing and our unemployment is growing to unmanageable levels, Foxconn and other Chinese manufacturers are using slave labor and China has put tariffs in place to keep our goods OUT while their are given free reign to our markets and THIS, which candidate thumps on the goat herder book or believes in the correct manner, is seriously having an effect on the outcome?

      I'm seriously tempted to use that "Opiate of the masses" line because obviously just like a drug it seems to be quite good at turning their brains off.

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  2. Spoilers by eternaldoctorwho · · Score: 5, Funny

    I know that a River can come from Ponds.

  3. Interesting. by Haxagon · · Score: 2

    Does this mean that life on exoplanets without deep seas and hydrothermal vents is still possible? Perhaps a more arid world, where water isn't quite as common as on Earth. I'm interested to see what implications this has for the search for life. It could expand the possible amount of planets that are likely to evolve life.

    1. Re:Interesting. by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Does this mean that life on exoplanets without deep seas and hydrothermal vents is still possible?
      Perhaps a more arid world, where water isn't quite as common as on Earth.
      I'm interested to see what implications this has for the search for life. It could expand the possible amount of planets that are likely to evolve life.

      Sure. So far we (seem) to have only one data point for conditions that allow for biological activity. We can postulate many others but until we get probes on Mars, Arcturus and other heavenly bodies, it's just a guess.

      As, of course, is TFA. Interesting theory - that current ion concentrations within the cell more or less faithfully represent the ion concentrations of some ancient ancestor due to the inherent conservation bias found in living organisms (if it works, it works, keep it around). The big problem with that idea, IMHO, is that it can just as easily be postulated that very early life was unable to keep ion gradients within the cell (because they did not have an established, complicated cell membrane) but didn't need to because, well, because they were barely conscious pond scum and didn't need the ion gradient (or whatever) found inside modern cells because they were dumb and primitive and did nothing besides make a couple more copies of themselves. Perhaps the folding and unfolding of the primitive nucleic acid (likely RNA or something similar to it) was more tolerant to ion fluxes than the complicated machinery we have now.

      Interesting however. Much better than the typical PR piece.

      Thus, they may have evolved anywhere where conditions were favorable for the primordial pond scum, be it hydrothermal vents or whatnot.

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  4. high P high T doesnt require enzymes by peter303 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The gist I got from Robert Hazen's course on the Origin of Life is that the metabolic citric cycle and protein polymerization does not require enzymes in high pressure and in certain mineral substrates. Otherwise you have the chicken-egg problem of how to elvolve these special enzyme proteins first. Dr. Hazen generated many of these results in the lab.

  5. Prevailing View? by mrxak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is actually a bit surprising to me. Years ago, which admittedly was the last time I payed any attention to such things, the theory that life first formed in little pools was the common explanation. Up near the surface is where a lot of the energy was from sources such as the sun, volcanos, lightning, etc. I could be wrong in remembering this, but the primordial soup was always depicted as fairly shallow pools (though, perhaps, saltwater tide pools).

    1. Re:Prevailing View? by DigiShaman · · Score: 2

      I always though the prevailing view was life starting near the ocean vents. Energy was derived via chemosynthesis. Some of those lifeforms worked their way to the surface eventually evolving photosynthesis and thus became more independent. From there, life spread to all corners of the Earth from a substance that covers 3/4ths of its surface.

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      Life is not for the lazy.
    2. Re:Prevailing View? by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There are, as usual, competing ideas. Ever since hydrothermal vents were discovered to be full of living things in supposedly inhospitable conditions (which really isn't true, there is plenty of life in an abyssal plain surrounding a hydrothermal vent, it just isn't as photogenic as it's glopping around in the mud) it has been thought that perhaps these structures were candidates for nurturing very early life forms. Such vents were likely to occur as soon as water precipitated. So you have water (of some unknown ionic concentration, likely fairly anoxic), dissolved metal ions, dissolved bits of clay (both useful as a catalysts) and energy. Next thing you know kids are texting and doing drugs....

      I could wave my flippers and postulate that there were micro environments in the vents that were also ion rich but that's just speculation ...

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  6. All Good Things... by Colonel+Korn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In the final episode of TNG we saw that life began in some sort of pond or tidal pool, not deep under the surface of the ocean.

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    "I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
    1. Re:All Good Things... by SJHillman · · Score: 3, Funny

      There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the heavens with tribes of humans...

  7. OMG by bwintx · · Score: 3, Funny

    Life began in skin care products? Bizarre.

    /ducks

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  8. Life originated in much colder conditions. by dietdew7 · · Score: 2

    Judging from my experiments, the early conditions for life must have been similar to the Chinese food containers in the back of my refrigerator. From which two questions remain. 1. How did the refrigerator originate 4.5 billion years ago? 2. Who ordered Chinese?

  9. Re:No by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2

    Anyway, everyone knows the aliens seeded the planet with DNA and stuff and then...LIFE!

    But God created the Aliens. However, we created God in our own image, so it's all one big circle of life.

    No, I'm not trying to be snarky. This, I believe.

    But I also took the Patriots, giving the points, so what the fuck do I know?

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  10. Re:The real problem with this is.... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 2

    You will be getting to the point of this at some point in time, won't you?

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    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  11. Huh? by rs79 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why is this idea that life happened *once*? Precursor reactions invariably happened many times all over the place. Who knows how many time it almost began and didn't quite make it, or began and got wiped out. Eventually, obviously, it happened and life fanned out from there. But I'm guessing it happened all over the place and not just one time in one place. The odds would seem to be against that.

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    1. Re:Huh? by Mr+Z · · Score: 2

      Not only that, but could it be that some of the pieces came from one place and others from others? For example, you could have one set of reactions near hydrothermal vents, filling the ocean with one set of building blocks, and another happening on land. A major land shift or oceanic event then mixes the two sets. Wash, rinse, repeat over a billion years. To me, the argument that it couldn't happen on land because what land there was was too unstable is more an argument that it could happen with pieces coming from both land and sea.

  12. True: Darwinism isn't science by F69631 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Darwinism certainly isn't science. Darwin was one fella, whose theories very significantly influenced a scientific discipline known as Biology. I think that the term "Darwinism" is used widely in only two instances: 1) In natural language, when people refer to something/someone stupid that will probably disappear soon due to obvious reasons (see Darwin Awards). 2) By religious people who call evolution theory Darwinism in order to make it appear somehow separate from biology (They know how stupid it'd sound to say "The prevailing theories in Biology are bogus, thus the discipline of Biology is pretty much bogus" so they instead say "Darwinism is jut replacing JESUS with this DARWIN prophet. We can totally refute that without refuting biology!").

  13. Seawater then and now by Zharr · · Score: 2

    "The study hinges on the observation that the composition of the cytoplasm of modern cells is very different to that of seawater." Seawater now or seawater 4 billyun years ago?

  14. Re:Idiocracy by Psmylie · · Score: 2

    Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, or trolling or whatever, BUT...

    The Big Bang Theory (a theory of how the universe in its present state came into being) is not the same as the theory of abiogenesis (the theory of life arising from non-living matter)

    Neither the Big Bang theory nor abiogenesis have anything do with the theory of evolution, as evolution has nothing to do with how life or the universe got started. It simply details how life develops once it exists. That you confuse these three theories, and apparently think that they are all the same theory, indicates to me that you really don't understand any of them.

    The story of Darwin recanting his theory on his deathbed is false, and was made up by someone who was not even in the room when he passed away. Even if that story were true, that would be no reason to discard the theory, as evidence for it comes from many different sources, and not just from Charles Darwin. He was a scientist, not a prophet.

    You don't know that God created man, in his image or not. Assuming there is a God, we could be an unintended by-product of the initial creation of the universe. You simply don't know, and can't know. That it says so in the Bible isn't enough. The contents Bible can't be proven to be true by it simply stating that it's true in those same contents.

    I have no problem with you believing whatever you want if it makes you happy. Don't expect me to buy into it as well, though. I certainly don't expect you to believe all the things that I believe, and that includes evolution. It's just a pity that you can't hold on to your faith AND accept that there may be things that the Bible doesn't cover, and that evolution may be one of them. You might lead a happier life that way.

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