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Scientists Are Cracking the Primordial Soup Mystery
derekmead writes "Scientists have had a basic understanding of how life first popped up on Earth for a while. The so-called 'primordial soup' was sitting around, stagnant but containing the basic building blocks of life. Then something happened and we ended up with life. It's that 'something' that has been the sticking point for scientists, but new research from a team of scientists at the University of Leeds has started to shed light on the mystery, explaining just how objects from space might have kindled the reaction that sparked life on Earth. It's generally accepted that space rocks played an important role in life's genesis on Earth. Meteorites bombarding the planet early in its history delivered some of the necessary materials for life but none brought life as we know it. How inanimate rocks transformed into the building blocks of life has been a mystery. But this latest research suggests an answer. If meteorites containing phosphorus landed in the hot, acidic pools that surrounded young volcanoes on the early Earth, there could have been a reaction that produced a chemical similar one that's found in all living cells and is vital in producing the energy that makes something alive."
If we were to suddenly discover the exact mechanism, it changes nothing.
Oh yeah it does, if we can figure out how life was created, we can create more life. And THAT opens the door to a lot.....
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
One thing that has always stunned me is how fast after the Earths crust had cooled down that life appeared. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolutionary_history_of_life This if anything indicates that the determinig events leading to a self-replicating unit (perhaps RNA) must have happened pretty fast and thus been very probable. Take this perspective to the stars and all the potentially habitable planets out there and the universe is teeming with life! .... pretty cool if you think about it.
Just because it's "common knowledge in Germany", that doesn't make it right. Science isn't built on what's "common knowledge". Your insulting tone and wording lend credence to the theory that you're just pulling from your nether regions.
Further, if you actually read TFA, you'll note that isn't about proteins - it's about ATP, an enzyme. (Something your facile "explanation" doesn't address at all, further raising suspicions as to it's value.)
Even though you are being modded up by the usual suspects and I am being modded down, everything you said above is pseudoscientific crap. Sorry. Genetic algorithms have already shown that natural selection can operate on pre-life patterns? This is pure unmitigated BS on the face of it.
You're modded down because you're simply ignorant, and refuse to open your mind to new knowledge. I feel bad for you. You seek absolute truth -- Proof of exactly what happened. There is no absolute truth in science. This is where you fall short on the science stick. We don't have the absolute evidence -- It's gone. The oldest of Earth's crust has been reabsorbed into the mantle. This happened billions of years ago, but it was after life formed here.
Application of one set of inferences and conclusions based on observations to other similar systems is not bullshit. Not any more bullshit than applying math like Information theory to descriptions of biological processes, like evolution. Selection pressure is being used in many ways, both natural and artificially. That we can do so artificially indicates that such could occur naturally as well. In short: What we see in a lab may be applied in the rest of the world. It's a basic tenet of science.
We apply evolutionary concepts in simulations because it's cheaper, but what this tells us is that it's possible for life to emerge. If we did have the time to sit and wait, we could put molecules into a specific soup in the right conditions, and eventually life would emerge. If you're lucky, have a big enough environment, and have enough time, then sentient life can emerge. We may not have the exact recipe, but we've gotten similar results with so many other ingredients that the possibility is undeniably in the favor for the emergence of life in this way -- We're not even sure if the recipe was brewed here, it If not here, then elsewhere and seeded here, but we're sure enough about the mechanism of selection that we can say that it played a key role in the formation of life.
What's interesting to me is the application of information theory to the Universe. If our universe were as you say, having too much entropic forces that would destroy all complexity before it got complex enough to be called alive, then life could not have formed. You also don't want a Universe with too little chaos; Not enough randomness and you get a monoculture -- Something that just forms then degrades over time once, with no speciation -- Like crystals. However, the parameters of this Universe are such that there is enough chaos to allow complexity to arise, but not so much randomness that it can not arise.
IMO, Earth being in the gulf between spiral arms is a huge benefit to the rise of life. Less dramatic life eradicating entropic events, like gamma ray bursts. That's where we should look for other life: Cradled between the arms of the galaxies -- They should have sent a poet.
I leave you with more evolution in action.