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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."
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.
A nice, crusty Asiago Cheese Bread.
#DeleteChrome
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."
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.
"The idea that a chaotic system can give rise to complex life is in the not even wrong category"
...
This non-chaotic-system that gave rise to complex life, what gave rise to it, and don't say it was just always there
AccountKiller
... and exactly how many multi-million-year simulations have you run that prove the negative you assert, that never, once, ever, a 'beneficial code combination' escaped destruction by the 'destructive combinations' long enough to make a few copies of itself? Or that it never can?
I notice you specifically said ".. complex life". Well of course, no one asserts the primordial soup went from a few simple molecules to "complex life" in one magical step. The crux is that systems can grow in complexity in small, incremental steps.
Genetic algorithms have already shown that natural selection can operate on pre-life patterns. It works like a ratchet, each step can build on the next up the "complexity" ladder.
Never say 'never'. Never say 'guaranteed' either. Especially when it comes to nature, given geologic time. It if doesn't out-and-out violate the laws of physics, who are you or anyone else to say it couldn't happen, given the right conditions and enough time?
You could argue that all of science is "educated guess work": taking what you already know, and making a hypothesis about something you don't. Make a guess and test it, rinse and repeat.
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.
We're doing that already - we call the processes science and mysticism, and every backdoor we discover opens the path to the creation of new kinds of mods. Really the only big difference would be the search for cheat codes, and a lot of religious people are already convinced they've found some of those as well, they just won't know for sure until they reach the game-over screen.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Well, if the Matrix is maintained by EA, we might be in trou---- AUTHENTICATION FAILED, DISCONNECTING.
Well, if /. wasn't here, I would probably be back in the electrical department testing electronics. But since it does exist, I'm not. Do all of you honestly believe that once we find out the exact mechanism that creates life that it will suddenly change everything? I will still have to eat, drink, poop, etc. I live near a rather large metropolitan area. Social things pass me by all the time. It isn't going to change the fact that I have to have a job, or that I need to put gas in my car, or need to sleep this evening. If a whole bunch of believers are affected by this knowledge, that is their issue. Not mine. Fads come and go. And yet, everything remains the same. There will still be illiteracy, poor people, homeless people, hungry people, people @ war, crime, whatever. This knowledge will not change the face and the actions of humanity as a whole.
My favorite is that mommy got fat and decided to go to the hospital for a doctor monitored diet. If she does really good, they give her a baby to take home as a prize.
Actually we're already at the threshold of creating life in any form we wish - I believe it was a year or so ago that someone successfully implanted a fully synthetic genome into a bacteria and had it develop and reproduce as a new organism. There are (presumably) limits as to how far you can reshape a given cell using the technique, but given the vast spectra of life on this planet we will probably soon be able to create almost anything we can imagine, though some of it may take several generations of successive modifications if we wish to drastically overhaul the internal cellular processes.
Knowing how life (may have) first arisen is largely an intellectual curiosity, much like anthropology, paleontology, or any other historical study. Knowing how we got here may give us some degree of insight into the forces that drive us, but our interpretation will be limited by our current understanding of the processes involved, and that understanding will have already opened the door to any new technologies.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Typos happen in all media, even The New York Times. I assume that the eds are busy ''behind the scenes", like setting up upcoming stories, formatting comments (who knows?) and 'shit happens' sometimes, the 'shit' gets fixed. It's a great tech info site, and I've learned a lot reading here over the years. The editors here care about the site, and don't always get the applause they deserve, that's part of the job, I guess.
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.....
Not necessarily. If we discover that the "secret mechanism" to creating life is spending a few billion years randomly slamming every combination of rocks and sludge together until you get the particular combination of self-replicating macromolecules that lead to all later life, then you haven't helped lab efforts much. The mechanism might be reliably reproducible: e.g., "every time you mix a sludge of precursors X, Y, Z, bake for 15 minutes at 325F, then zap with lightning, you'll get life." On the other hand, it might be a hard-to-reproduce fluke: e.g., "once in a trillion times you mix a sludge of precursors X, Y, Z, bake for 15 minutes at 325F, then zap with lightning, you'll get life; usually, you just get foul-smelling goop."
anyone who believes that humans are direct descendants of apes are using faith as a tool as much as one who believes in religion X.
Sigh. That's just absurd. This isn't some random philosophers sitting in a room coming up with "interesting ideas". There is well documented DNA evidence (as well as morphological and anatomical evidence, etc) that can be used to trace human evolution back millions of years with an extremely high level of confidence. And you are equating that to people who think the Earth is 6000 years old by claiming direct observation is all that matters, and everything else is "faith"?
Just because you don't know the first thing about evolutionary biology doesn't mean no one does. And reason and deduction are not the same faith.
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.
Try getting bit by a radioactive spider. It might help.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Predicting a direct path of influence is difficult or impossible. However, based on past history, rather "vague" shifts in philosophical understanding can have dramatic effects. For example, many current religious sects have major influence over national-level policies. Small shifts in the public credibility of these sects claims to have a "True" description of the universe might have major state policy effects, impacting the treatment of illiteracy/hunger/etc. Even without direct impact from, e.g., medical technology advancements from improved understanding of basic cellular function, the "secondary" impact of societal philosophical shifts can be quite large (and hard to predict). For a concrete example, consider the (usually negative) impacts of "Social Darwinism" in the 20th century --- nothing to do directly with technically correct interpretations of Darwin's theory, but the (misunderstood) implications of "advancement by competition and survival of the fittest" justified all sorts of really horrible social agendas.
You keep acting as if the mere fact that you can form an opinion gives that opinion weight.
Your opinions appear to be based on your personal ignorance. Even wtrse, you seem to hold your ignorance in high esteem, and condemn those that don't suffer your willful ignorance.
Humans evolved from apes, are apes and that is that.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
I sat in a login queue for nine months!
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 !
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 really hate how the "ignorant public" assumes that every time a scientist is really excited about the obscure details of the topic she's devoted years of his life to studying, that she's trying to "blow up details" in some sinister immoral conspiracy. Yes, scientists are nerds who derive great joy and excitement from delving deeply into the finest minutiae of obscure, technical subjects. They will get excited about things you won't understand. They're not trying to take over the world, and will likely be fine with you being passionate about whatever your own interests are, too.
We do; they just aren't all alive at the same time. As you go backward into the past, the genotypes of humans and other apes (e.g. chimpanzees) gradually converge, until several million years ago, they are the same. Taken as a whole, there HAS been a continuous spectrum of creatures from humans to apes. (And traced far back enough, between all living things.) It staggers me that people find this difficult to understand.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Given the utter absence of evidence, you could easily make any claim about souls you wish.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Actually we're already at the threshold of creating life in any form we wish - I believe it was a year or so ago that someone successfully implanted a fully synthetic genome into a bacteria...
That's the impression you'd get from skimming the headlines. I fear it's a bit sensationalist.
The experiment you refer to involved a synthesized -copy- of an existing organism's genome. An impressive feat, but not quite "creating life in any form we wish."
We've learned to copy-and-paste DNA. Right now that's about all we can do. Protein-folding is a hard problem, so we can't easily predict what a given DNA sequence will do, let alone invent new sequences. We can do a bit of remixing, copying a gene from here to there, but we can't create new genes yet.
We'll get there, I don't doubt that. But at this stage, our "synthetic genome" is just a xerox copy.
Informative link about the "synthetic genome" experiment: http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/%20projects/synthetic-bacterial-genome/press-release/
No, humans share a common ancestor with apes. Probably a fairly ape-like common ancestor, but nonetheless not an ape. We tend to forget that taxonomy is a point in time classification and evolution takes place over some period of time. The same reason why there is no such thing as an 'intermediate' species.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Even the simplest single celled organism is unbelievably complex and contains a prodigious amount of information. The theory that life on Earth was seeded from space begs the question, how did that life begins wherever it did begin?
That's true. But somehow you don't seem to draw the correct conclusions from that. When confronted with something complex, the theory of evolution tells you it can not have formed instantly, but instead it happened gradually. Therefore, the "starting point" of life is at the molecular level, not at the cell level. And I put the quotes there deliberately, because there won't be a single point, it will be a gradual process. Just like there isn't a point where there is a "first tree" or "first human".
Even with the best efforts of intelligent scientists and the expenditure of mountains of money, no one has yet created any life form whatsoever from nonliving matter.
So what? Why should we be able to create life? Why should it be simple? There are an unknown number of possibilities to consider. It might have been a freak accident or rather trivial, nobody knows. Whatever the odds, in a universe this big it is rather a non-issue.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Let me rephrase your question and see any answer comes back.
The theory that life on Earth was seeded by god begs the question, how did that god begin wherever it did begin?
I don't have an answer for you, and it's exceedingly doubtful that you have any sort of non-superstitious answer for me. I've seen little to no evidence that there isn't a god, but I've seen none at all that there IS, either. When we can detect only a tenth of all the matter and energy in our universe that leaves plenty of wiggle room for deities, ghosts, fairies and other oddball things. That **doesn't** mean that they actually exist, either.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
All great apes, including humans, are in Hominidae, the common ancestor would have been an ape.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.