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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."
There is no scientist in the world who would ever describe it this way. For fuck's sake.
Suggestion for the editors: if an article is interesting, cite it. But if the initial submitter writes something totally idiotic, feel free to delete that part.
Jesus.
It's like when you shoot a load of sperm on your girlfriend's face and it splashes in her eyes. Oh, and this is in the back of a car or something.
Well, I for one don't really care about the exact details of how we came to be. If we were to suddenly discover the exact mechanism, it changes nothing. I still have to work, pay taxes and die....
Doctor Shaddup Enfundme will submit a grant proposal anywhere along the spectrum from Dr. Seuss to iambic pentameter.
Seriously, keep funding the work, and let's see if they get to a reproducible experiment.
Are we just souless zombies.
Think about it. Who lives in space? Who can shoot hot spunk into space? This spunk then hit the primordial soup pool.
Now if god created man in his own image, god obviously must have had a penis. So where is god's missus?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
There is no "alive" vs "not alive"! It’s a gradient! And there exists, and existed, every step in-between!
Why is this such a unknown thing in Leeds? Here in Germany, it's already accepted common knowledge.
It's as if they were completely blind to prions, viruses, and other things that are in-between what they like to call "alive" and what they call "dead". Or, and this is what I think, they are deliberately and obsessively trying to force a hard distinction because their rigid (and in this case willfully ignorant) world view is built on it.
You get proteins (not DNA) of bigger and bigger size forming from the same basic building blocks. Like Prions and the normal proteins of our bodies. Now get one that is by accident capable of self-reproducing (probably with the environment and other simpler proteins already doing most of job), and voila, you have something alive enough to fit your arbitrary (and varying with the mood of the day) lower limit.
This is ridiculous and embarrassing for people who call themselves scientists.
It's the diet soda theory of evolution.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
check Free C Programs with output samples.
A nice, crusty Asiago Cheese Bread.
#DeleteChrome
Stardust assembled itself to form us. How can it not be clear to everyone?
Karl Popper is turning in his grave as I write. This crap is about as scientific as the flat earth hypothesis. The idea that a chaotic system can give rise to complex life is in the not even wrong category. I am not saying that the probabilities are small. I am saying that the probability is exactly zero. Why? Because, as any programmer can tell you, the beneficial code combinations are dwarfed by the destructive combinations by many, many orders of magnitude. Things can never get to the self-replicating stage because they are guaranteed to be destroyed before anything vaguely interesting can happen.
This is just propaganda crap for dirt worshipers. Sorry, the dirt-did-it crowd is much less credible than the aliens did it crowd.
So please report back after you have added some phosphorus to your primordial soup and you have multiple examples of original life.
Ah ahahahahaha !
Some of the dumbest crap I have heard in a LONG time.
This only works when someone explains the non-existent mechanism by which ONLY laevo-rotary DNA molecules were selected . . . because any random assembly not only has the molecule as quickly disassembled but also randomly assembles an equal number of laevo-rotary and dextra-rotary DNA molecules. The latter are not only useless but dangerous to life. Thus, these notions about space rocks are only distractions.
Cranky educator.
I've always understood life to have arisen from or near hydrothermal vents. These cells thrived via a process known as chemosynthesis.
I'm sorry, but the idea of valcanos, soup ponds, meteorite, and lightning bolts sound too wacky. Such an environment is also too unstable for delicate life forms to survive IMHO.
Life is not for the lazy.
Most scientists don't know shit about the origin of life. It's educated guess work.
Laevo was forced by polarized light from the stars.
Orig Life Evol Biosph. 1991;21(2):59-111.
1. Meteorite hits the young Earth
2. ???
3. Life
My proposal for (2): Earth experienced a Menthos meteorite shower which produced Life after it rained in the big lake of Cola that formed around Mount Bullshit.
Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about this, "The Left-Handed Universe". The book, of the same title, in which it was published is a collection of non-fiction science essays; "Why does ice float?", "Why is the night sky black?", etc.. I don't know if Asimov's ideas in "The Left-Handed Universe" are correct, but Asimov is always fun to read anyway.
Seriously, this dickcheese-eating-surrender-monkey is purely here to troll.
Brains ENTIRELY in their arse.
The probability for a DNA molecule to appear without having used a pre-existing DNA molecule as template is tiny. Maybe it has only happened once in the entire lifetime of the Earth. In that case the orientation is completely random. It would be 50/50 for one orientation or the other. In that case if we ever find DNA based life elsewhere, the orientation of DNA molecules can give hints as to whether life has evolved independently or spread from a common origin.
It may be the probability is higher, and DNA created from scratch has happened more than once in the lifetime of the Earth. But if hundreds of years passed between the first two times it happens, it could be that life had already spread across the entire planet in the meantime. In that case the second DNA molecule could have caused some havoc in the area where it appeared, but eventually life around it adopted enough to wipe out the DNA molecule, that did not fit in.
Maybe both variants existed for some time, but during the evolution of life, one variant got extinct.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
It isn't random, it's chemistry. You were informed of this the last time you posted on the subject.
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.
I understand the challenges of putting evolution against the scientific method... but something like this seems like a no-brainer. I want atheism to be based on fact. Theories without proof is just religion. These guys are scientist right? Let see them do some actual science. Create an environment that proves this theory to be correct. If it doesn't work modify the theory and try again.
So everyone knows plate tectonics explain the formation of the planet, or do they? The expanding earth hypothesis is ridiculed, yet we have been and still are bombarded with megatons of meteors for billions of years. How on earth has the planet not been expanding?
decades ago they came up with a "theory" for the origin of life and they have been working ever since to find the bits that fit their theory... this is 180 degrees out; they ought to have followed the evidence they could find to whatever destination it led.
What was the "primordial Earth" like? They have plenty of ideas, BUT theory and conjecture of what it was like is not proof of what it was actually like. They then compound this by looking for an imagined set of circumstances and events that *might* dovetail into an environment they imagine was present and then imagine a miracle (a meteor strike with just the right elements and impact conditions) and declare that they have the answers. Excuse me, while I hike to a remote mountain top to seek a robed eastern guru hermit suffering from oxygen deprivation and frostbite for an equally valid and scientific explanation of the origins of life...
Simple enough - any random assembly will obviously be unstable, except for that vanishingly tiny minority which *is* stable, and capable of self replication, and in an environment that doesn't immediately destroy it. Those will begin to spread, creating a more benign pocket environment by using up the precursers which might otherwise become incorporated into destructive arrangements. By the time something as complicated as DNA arose the planet had probably been largely conquered by RNA at any rate, with randomness having been "tamed" into driving mutation rather than running free among the precursor molecules.
Which is more likely? That both chiralities of proto-life by chance developed simultaneously, with neither ever getting a significant advantage over the other, or that at some point one chirality gained a significant advantage and eradicated/starved out the opposing chirality? By the time the first cells arose the question of chirality was likely long since settled.
One of the interesting things to be learned when we start discovering independently arisen life (if we survive long enough it seems inevitable) will be whether there's anything "special" about our biochemistry. Is something like DNA a common solution to information storage? Is there a universal preference for chirality? Are the handful of amino acids we use any more common than the hundreds of others that might have been used instead? Are amino acids even a common building block? Unless life is *extremely* probable it seems unlikely we'll ever answer these questions by creating spontaneous life ourselves - it took a planet-sized laboratory and quite possibly hundreds of millions of years for it to happen the first time. I doubt anyone will have the patience to attempt it intentionally, and any "accelerated" experiment will likely be strogly biased towards biochemistry similar to our own simply because that's the only kind of protolife we'd recognize as being worth fostering.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I really hate how immoral "scientists" blow up every detail they find to epic proportions. It is time to classify such behavior as scientific misconduct and to start removing PhDs for repeated offenders.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Atheists (not scientists) have found absolutely no evidence for universal common descent, can not defend abiogensis, and are coming up with more desperate imaginary fairy tales to defend their faith.
I see it starting in Oort clouds and other such low grav areas, possibly more energetic areas like Europa or gaseous clouds around stars then being spread like dandelion seeds by natural forces raining down on planets everywhere.
Micro gravity seems more conducive to cell formation to me.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
IAAMB
It's not generally accepted that 'space rocks played an important role in life's genesis on Earth'. More like, it's generally accepted that life probably began at ocean floor in proximity to hot vents something akin to the lost city hydrothermal field.
Why doesn't somebody just ask Gil Gerard? After all, he was there TCB.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I am not trying to change anyone's mind, just trying to share ideas.
Share this (skip the first 2:30 if you don't want the anti-creationist rant). The idea that some special ingredient was missing until it landed here from outer space is fucking nonsense, the entire planet was made from "space rocks". The thing that is "special" about Earth is our liquid water oceans, ocean + time = life.
I haven't accomplished any great deeds in my life. I am just a guy.....trying to share my opinion.
I have a double maths/cs degree, yes it's an accomplishment, but so is cleaning the toilet. Ask me what accomplishment I'm most proud of and I will bore you to death with photos of my grand-kids. Hopefully they will outlive me but in the end everything is temporary and "pointless", we had to come up with religion for people who failed to find their own point
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The chemical is ATP. Not really ATP completely, but they found that a sample of a meteorite reacted with some acidic solution gave pyrophosphite, a reduced pyrophosphate (I think, chemistry kinda rusty) and thus, they believed they could have found a possible, natural mechanism to give "life" energy without the "irreducibly complex" enzymes for breaking ATP down.
From TFA:
Disclaimer: I ain't a space scientist, I'm just a geek
What I want to know is this --- How come those exotic minerals exist in space rocks but not on planet Earth ?
Where those space rocks came from ? Weren't they were formed from the same batch of space dusts that gelled up the Solar System ??
Or could it possibly be that those space rocks were from an ancient planet (or star) that had exploded?
If the space rocks that contained all the exotic minerals came from an ancient planet, wouldn't that mean that it is very likely that the planet, which was itself rich with all those exotic minerals, had lifeforms of its own ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Carl Sagan did some work on the synthesis of ATP in the primordial soup. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/8/21/sagan-synthesizes-atp-in-laboratory-plaboratory/
The step from prokaryotic to eukaryotic took much longer - 3 billion years. It looks like that may actually be the difficult step. .... all the way to ZZ9pluralZAlpha promotes A.
Self replication is practically a given in the primordial soup environment. It doesn't need to be A directly creates copies of A.
It could be molecule A promotes B, B promotes C, C promotes D,
Any such loop, no matter how many steps, will optimise as it progresses. That's what evolution means.
ps. Even that is a vast simplfication. It is more like "the presence of A increases the chance of B forming C instead of D".
Millions of such "rules" acting together in the soup will produce self-promoting systems that eventually evolve into fully self replicating entities. ie Life.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
I'm From Leeds. Well I was born in Leeds. Actually, I grew up in Leeds then I moved to the States.
I lived at the hospital mostly.
Recommend Robert M. Hazen's book on the Origins of Life. This is just one theory. There are many others all probable. There is also a lot of politics here too. The primordial soup camp has starved researchers into alternate theories of funding. Recommend Hazen's book because he covers AFAIK all of them.
So then, it was take-out?
Have gnu, will travel.
The rocks the molecules, the whole enchilada. FU PETA. Aware as well. My favorite part of asimov has always struck me as true and obvious
If creationists listened when someone explained something, talkorigins.org wouldn't exist.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Finally an answer to the question: What goes with primordial soup?
a. Oyster crackers
b. Crusty French or Italian Bread with butter
c. Saltines
d. Sliced Bread (any type) with butter or margarine.
RHB
I'm beginning to wonder whether religion is spread by a microscopic biological vector that cause some kind of mild, localised encephalitis. The alternative is to believe that these people really are that dumb, and that really *does* strain my credulity.
Robert Hazen's lab should many metabolic reactions that require emzymes (catalysts) at surface conditions dont need such at high pressures and temperatures. Life-like stuff could have began at the seafloor first, then migrated to to surface niches as protein emzymes evolved.
This only happened 6000 years ago. Don't believe me? Ask your neighborhood Bible Thumpers, they know all the answers.