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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 "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.
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."
... 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.
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."
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!
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.
We live bathed in an atmosphere rich in oxygen, on a planet with seas full of sodium and chlorine. Any of those exotic space minerals would eventually react with something in the atmosphere or ocean and become something that we're more familiar with. In space any mineral created will last pretty much forever, as there is nothing for it to react with unless the asteroid hits some other.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
We live bathed in an atmosphere rich in oxygen, on a planet with seas full of sodium and chlorine. Any of those exotic space minerals would eventually react with something in the atmosphere or ocean and become something that we're more familiar with. In space any mineral created will last pretty much forever, as there is nothing for it to react with unless the asteroid hits some other.
True today, but at the time of the start of life (generally recognised as before 3.5 Gyr ago), Earth was pretty much free of oxygen. Thelarge oxygen atmosphere we know today appeared around 2.3 Gyr ago; life before this was Bacterial (technically: Archea) and based more on methanogenic and sulphur-breathing bacteria, much as we find in hydrothermal vents and extreme environments today (such bacteria ironically produce oxygen but are poisoned by it, so we don't see them on Earths surface).
More important for the 'space mineral' is that its components aren't lost. Iron-based minerals that were in the original rocks that formed Earth would have sunk to the core in the first few molten million years of Earths existence: the stuff we find on Earths surface were from fresh influxes after the "Hadean" molten phase of Earths history, when it had cooled down. These stayed on the now cool surface and were available for life.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
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/