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Did Octopuses Come From Outer Space?
A scientific paper, originally published in March, from peer-reviewed journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology has found its way in this week's news-cycle. The paper, which is co-written by 33 authors including molecular immunologist Edward Steele and astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe, suggests that octopuses could be aliens, adding legitimacy to a belief, which otherwise has been debunked several times in the recent years.
An excerpt from the paper, which makes the bold claim: The genetic divergence of Octopus from its ancestral coleoid sub-class is very great ... Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch color and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene. [...] It is plausible then to suggest they [octopuses] seem to be borrowed from a far distant 'future' in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large."Ephrat Livni of Quartz questions the basis of the finding: To make matters even more strange, the paper posits that octopuses could have arrived on Earth in "an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized octopus eggs." And these eggs might have "arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago." The authors admit, though, that "such an extraterrestrial origin...of course, runs counter to the prevailing dominant paradigm." Indeed, few in the scientific community would agree that octopuses come from outer space. But the paper is not just about the provenance of cephalopods. Its proposal that octopuses could be extraterrestrials is just a small part of a much more extensive discussion of a theory called "panspermia," which has its roots in the ideas of ancient Greece. Newsweek spoke with Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, who told the publication that the paper has raised "an interesting but controversial possibility." However, he added, that it offers no "indisputable proof" that the Cambrian explosion is the result of panspermia.
Further reading: Cosmos magazine has outlined some flaws in the assumptions that the authors made in the paper. It has also looked into the background of some of the authors. The magazine also points out that though the paper has made bold claims, it has yet to find support or corroboration from the scientific community. News outlet Live Science has also questioned the findings.
An excerpt from the paper, which makes the bold claim: The genetic divergence of Octopus from its ancestral coleoid sub-class is very great ... Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch color and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene. [...] It is plausible then to suggest they [octopuses] seem to be borrowed from a far distant 'future' in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large."Ephrat Livni of Quartz questions the basis of the finding: To make matters even more strange, the paper posits that octopuses could have arrived on Earth in "an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized octopus eggs." And these eggs might have "arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago." The authors admit, though, that "such an extraterrestrial origin...of course, runs counter to the prevailing dominant paradigm." Indeed, few in the scientific community would agree that octopuses come from outer space. But the paper is not just about the provenance of cephalopods. Its proposal that octopuses could be extraterrestrials is just a small part of a much more extensive discussion of a theory called "panspermia," which has its roots in the ideas of ancient Greece. Newsweek spoke with Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, who told the publication that the paper has raised "an interesting but controversial possibility." However, he added, that it offers no "indisputable proof" that the Cambrian explosion is the result of panspermia.
Further reading: Cosmos magazine has outlined some flaws in the assumptions that the authors made in the paper. It has also looked into the background of some of the authors. The magazine also points out that though the paper has made bold claims, it has yet to find support or corroboration from the scientific community. News outlet Live Science has also questioned the findings.
Seconded. Chandra Wickramasinghe is a one-trick pony whose answer to absolutely everything is panspermia. (life from space)
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
That's utterly ridiculous, as even basic high school science can tell you: there are numerous genes that are common to all animals, including octopuses; many of those evolved on earth long before octopuses. Even the eukaryotic cell itself is an idiosyncratic assembly of bacterial components, membranes, and genomes, something that is shared between octopuses and all other higher animals, and that would simply not have arisen the same way elsewhere.
The only way this could work is if life in the galaxy were in constant exchange everywhere so that life on all life bearing planets in the galaxy shares the same evolutionary history and that history is synchronized.
Check out the specifics of their Ribosomes and the genetic structure of their mitochondria. If those are near standard, then the answer has to be no. If they're wildly at variance with everyone else, I'll consider the possibility.
Even then, it would take considerable proof, because the encoding of amino acids by RNA looks as if it should be arbitrary. (This is actually a sub-comment under "specifics of their Ribosomes", but it's significant enough that I thought it rated a separate mention.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well said. And anyone who takes issue with it has only to look at almost 60 years worth of papers that "proved" that fat in our diets was causing heart disease and high cholesterol, a "fact" that just happened to make major industries in the US that are huge political donors lots of money. Or any number of other scientific claims that were sufficiently entrenched that it took at least years, maybe decades, for science to self-correct, even without a trillion dollars a year or so at stake.
It's not that AGW is "false" -- there is good support for some warming of the surface from increased CO2, in straight up physics, around 1 C per doubling of CO2, all things being equal. The trouble is that they aren't equal. The Earth's climate is a chaotic process, and it is pretty reasonable to doubt the predictive models attempting to integrate the Navier-Stokes double-coupled system on a spinning, tilted oblate spheroid covered irregularly with continents and oceans and mountains and warmed in a complex way in its evolving elliptical orbit by a somewhat variable star as far as "predictions" of things like water vapor feedback and changes in the global conveyor belt carrying oceanic heat around and atmospheric flow patterns, especially when the models are started with "arbitrary" initial conditions (since nobody has any idea what the actual state of the atmosphere and ocean is at anything like the granularity of the models, which is still 30 orders of magnitude greater than the Kolmogorov scale), run to produce a spectrum of possible futures, averaged and then superaveraged without regard to weighting, and then turned into a "prediction" that is supposed to carry more political weight then the lives and fortunes of all of those affected by the enormously expensive measures taken to ameliorate a future "catastrophe" that nobody can actually quite measure as being truly catastrophic.
There are also inconvenient facts that are quietly ignored during the public debate by supporters of AGW as a "catastrophe". One is that roughly 1/7th of the Earth's population is eating today thanks to the roughly 15% increase in growth rate of C3 respiring plants due to the increase in CO2 in Earth's CO2-starved atmosphere (the minimum CO2 during the coldest part of the Wisconsin glaciation dropped to just over the partial pressure required to prevent mass extinction of whole classes of respiring plants). That the Earth was coming out of the little Ice Age about the time we started really burning things for energy and gradually ramping up CO2, and that while too hot isn't great, too cold is TRULY a disaster for the breadbasket temperate zone for the planet, and isn't particularly good for the ecology, either, and is often accompanied by massive global droughts.
The point is that the climate is changing, and has always been changing. The notion that the Earth's climate is in any sense whatsoever a stationary process is a myth, a myth caused by the comparatively short "memory" of living humans compared to the timescales of change. The Earth is large enough that there are always climate/weather extremes happening somewhere on the surface, and if you look for them and report them as "news", you cannot avoid conveying the impression of disastrous change. It requires careful statistical analysis to detect anything like real change, and even then the statistics provides no reliable means of attributing cause, not in a chaotic model that has huge natural fluctuations year to year, month to month, week to week. It's a cherrypicker's paradise, an open invitation for confirmation bias to run amok, without the slightest possibility of a double blind experiment or observation that isn't multiply confounded by impossibly complex dynamics.
This is a case where in the long run, the entire debate likely will not matter. As solar technology continues to improve and become cheaper (including storage options and more efficient, cheaper cells) pure economics is going to drive a gradual abandonment of burning
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.