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Abiogenesis and life on Earth - thoughts and pet theories?

Where and how did life on Earth first arise?

  • Warm little pond, membrane first

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Warm little pond, heredity (RNA/DNA/clay/?) first

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Tidal pool, metabolism first

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Tidal pool, heredity (RNA/DNA/clay/?) first

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Alkaline vent, membrane first

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Alkaline vent, heredity (RNA/DNA/clay/?) first

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Black smoker, heredity (RNA/DNA/clay/?) first

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    17
The "how" has several possible reasons, I myself vote for the little pond of goo, but as I wasn't there at the time, I can only theorize plus find tons of ways to include the ninth letter of the alphabet excessively...

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(Blimey, nobody'd posted that clip yet, woohoo! :beer: )

But the "why"... the why of it all*. The "how" is fascinating, but the why is as far more scintillating as it is unreachable knowledge. But if matter is never destroyed, just transformed, realigned, and rearranged, then where does something for nothing come from? Something must have always here before the proverbial big bang** and all... the universe is big enough place for oodles of theories, even if one or two don't match up with some of the other laws of physics, some of which get broken all the time anyhow and for anywhy.

Also, truffles. Nothing like a chocolate-coated mushroom-- wait, what now? :barf:


* How's that for melodrama? :biggrin:

** You can almost hear the studio audience yell in tandem, "HOW BIG WAS IT!" :devil: Well, it was so big... :guffaw:
 
Some work suggesting that the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all current life on Earth hight have existed 4.2 billion years ago, even before the late heavy bombardment 3.9 billion years ago. The organism also might have contained many more protein coding genes than previously suggested - around 2,600 instead of just 80. The work also suggests that the last eukaryotic common ancestor (of organisms such as yeasts, amoebae, trees, mushrooms, and humans) was 1.2 billion years ago.

The analysis suggests LUCA had genes for protecting against UV damage, so it likely lived at the surface of the ocean, that it was a hydrogenotroph (it probably metabolised hydrogen by carbon dioxide reduction to yield acetate, although other pathways are possible) and that it had a version of CRISPR to protect itself from viruses.

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...of-all-life-emerged-far-earlier-than-thought/ (might be paywalled, but references the paper in Nature)
 
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I just came across this article that agrees with Asbo's statement above, probably derived from the same research.
https://phys.org/news/2024-07-zooplankton-traditional-views-evolution.html
study-challenges-tradi.jpg

"A new study explores DNA samples from nearly 1,000 Daphnia, revealing new subtleties in the evolutionary processes of natural selection. Credit: Jason Drees, Arizona State University."

My vote is for the tidal pool/ heredity first, but that is only relatively appealing. What is hot and what is cool and what is tidal when talking about an early Earth/Solar system/Galaxy/Universe?

I disagree with a single individual ancestor only because the likelihood of multiple hereditary combinations forming across the globe (ignoring for the moment, the possibilities of a panspermia seeding of early Earth) seem highly probable. However, it also seems most likely that those early combinations, though independently formed, would be nearly identical in construction such that they may have been able to interact and be a catalyst for the next evolutionary steps among each other. In that respect, there would be no way to isolate a single ancestral parent of all life on Earth.

The oddest part of the apparent origins of life is that we have not witnessed the new forming of life from the current composition of primordial soup now present on Earth. It could be that we don't know what we are looking at. In order to scientifically say, "Here is a first life forming." We would have to actually witness the formation in process. The resultant new life form would very likely look exactly like any other previously existing old early stage form.

The matter of the sustainability of life upon life may make those early forms, or any intermediate transitional forms, short lived as the more advanced evolutionary forms fed upon and extinguish its own ancestors. We may not be finding much evidence of transitional stages of early life because the pupated stage cannibalized its earlier nymph stage to continue to grow.

They discovered that the strength of natural selection on individual genes varies significantly from year to year, maintaining variation and potentially enhancing the ability to adapt to future changing environmental conditions by providing raw material for natural selection to act on.
What I find most interesting about this article is that it suggests a mechanism that may specifically enhance genetic mutation, consequently evolutionary movement that is environmentally controlled. I read this to suggest that life adapts faster when stressed and not so much when the environment is stable and beneficial.

Because early life probably developed in a highly dynamic world, it makes sense that the surviving organisms would be the ones most responsive to their dynamic environment. It makes sense to me that if there is a form life can take to improve its survival in a given environment, life likely has a way of assessing that need and encouraging mutations that tend more often to meet that need. A form of intelligence (intelligent design), but not necessarily with consciousness or intent beyond the natural selection of such a mechanism.

-Will
 
Stress leads to increased epigenetic expression. It's not Lamarckian as the epigenetic factors have to be already present, although unexpressed.
 
I read on one Transformers site or wiki they ask where the Transformers came from and propose a theory they call "atechnogenesis", where naturally-occurring gears and rods combined spontaneously to form the first machines
 
I read on one Transformers site or wiki they ask where the Transformers came from and propose a theory they call "atechnogenesis", where naturally-occurring gears and rods combined spontaneously to form the first machines
But whence cometh the gears and rods? When you examine biological cells - especially eukaryotic cells - on the nanoscale, you realise they are also composed of molecular machines. There is even an equivalent of the allspark - the mitochondrial membrane potential (ΔΨm) of -50 mV generated by proton pumps. Across a 5 nanometre membrane, that's a field gradient of roughly 10 million volts per meter - similar to a lightning bolt. The equivalent of gears and rods could have been hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen sulphide molecules and the energy source was perhaps UV light. This is just one theory, of course. It would be more impressive if demonstrated experimentally.

 
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Someone explain to me why God created us with these fucked up digestive systems and then expects us to thank him for it.

If Abiogenesis seems impossible, so does the god as defined in the bible.

I'll take the scientific answer any day, even if I don't understand it. If it's wrong, it'll eventually change. Unlike religion.
 
Someone explain to me why God created us with these fucked up digestive systems and then expects us to thank him for it.

If Abiogenesis seems impossible, so does the god as defined in the bible.

I'll take the scientific answer any day, even if I don't understand it. If it's wrong, it'll eventually change. Unlike religion.
Another example is the stupid "design" of vertebrate retinae with the nerve fibres blocking the light path to the photoreceptor cells and the presence of the punctum caecum (blind spot) where the nerve fibres concentrate to form the optic nerve. Cephalopod eyes do not have this defect as molluscs evolved vision independently - although all bilaterians share a version of the master control gene Pax6 for the formation of eyes and other sensory organs. In cephalopod eyes, nerve fibres lie behind the photoreceptor cells. Does it not demonstrate that God favours octopodes over us?

 
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God favours octopodes over us?
Unless you're a pirate. I believe God favors pirates even above many-armed noodly creatures. Unless, of course, we're talking about octopus pirates. They have to be at the top of the heap.
davy-jones.gif


But the "why"... the why of it all*. The "how" is fascinating, but the why is as far more scintillating as it is unreachable knowledge.
Asking, "Why?" makes some fundamental assumptions that lead us back earlier than the beginning. Taking the atheists' position that everything was random, chance, and simply physical science, allows us to stop before the back of the first turtle. We can assign a word like "Singularity" as a place holder, to put a pin in the question of what came before the beginning.

We choose a non-descript word that basically means, "We don't know," to give the first event a name, then we can point to that name and act like we do know. In the beginning was the Word.

To draw some analogies between science and consciousness (Intelligent thought with purpose), In the beginning was the Void. The void is traditionally described as chaos, nothingness, indescribable, without form or definition. These are concepts for what was before the World. Most religions and metaphysical traditions describe such a state before everything. Here is the tricky part.

What, how, and why (where and when are obvious, at least by definition) are described by every tradition, except science and the Abrahamic religions, as some form of 'desire'. Before Creation, there was desire. Desire can be considered implied in the Abrahamic religions because we assume God chose to create the Universe for some desire of his own.

Scientifically, desire can be analogous to a vacuum, a sort of cosmic hole or, perhaps more appropriately, a low pressure. Everything that flows, moves naturally from high pressure to low pressure. What if there was an all encompassing vacuum? The perfect vacuum. Now, we know highs and lows are only relative. When there is no high, there can be no low, no 'anything' means no vacuum. Put two plunger together and they stick together like glue until you remove all the air around them. Then they fall apart. But what if the vacuum was absolute and there was no outside, no around them? Could there be this natural compulsion, need, desire to fill that vacuum? Consider that this state has more than an eternity of eternities to suffer its desire for something to fill the void. It would take forever and, at the same time, happen instantaneously.

Time starts because it's time for time to start. It's so short lived. It's a snap in an instant. There is no relative dimension to this nano-instant of time. It's over and another eternity of eternities of nothing. But, within that infinitesimal instant, all the Universe explodes into being. The Singularity is fed up with suffering the desire to be.

God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God then separated the light from the dark and there was day and night.

This phrasing is very specific in its absence of the use of the word 'create'. Was anything actually created, or was it simply defined and assigned a symbol, a word? Remember, it was very important that God brought all the animals before Adam so that he could name them. Why? God made Adam (human kind) in his own image. But, does that mean physical image, or perhaps he gave Adam the ability to name things so that humans can do as he had done and bring forth form to the Void.

What I'm talking about is more of an awakening, than a creating. Is the Universe expanding, or is it simply waking up and imposing order on more and more of the chaos? It is a high falling out, into the void. But maybe it includes consciousness.

If we consider our own consciousness as a result of some specific complex physical configuration manifesting as awareness, why not a consciousness that results from the vastly more complex physical state that encompasses every one of us who are aware? We, like the individual bees in a hive, or the neurons in a brain that are the foundation of our minds, are just a collection of vastly more numerous nodes in a larger mind. What we think and consequently turn into action, the Universe must experience the consequences. Physics says those consequences WILL result in a reaction. Does that not sound like the mechanics of a brain?

The 'why', more likely than not, came after. Desire came first.

-Will
 
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The Bible isn't science. It's mythology - just like the creation tales in any other religion. One might as well invoke the Ainulindalë from The Silmarillion.

Meanwhile, there are hints that there might have been a failed development of multicellular eukaryotic life 2.1 billion years ago.

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Meanwhile, it seems that random code can learn to self-replicate, which implies that thsi can also happen in the real world, presumably given the right conditions:
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The Bible isn't science. It's mythology - just like the creation tales in any other religion.
Agreed. There is no reason to expect to test and prove that the Giant Spaghetti Monster, God, or any other mythological creation story is accurate. However, we know and learn what we come to regard as truths through the same processes of observation of natural phenomenon and reason as most of those stories were constructed to explain. Humans have had many deep thinkers over the millenia and religion has been responsible for fueling the application of such accomplished intellect towards the nature and origins of the Universe since we gave names to the stars. I am suggesting that these mythologies may prove a good starting metaphor for physical scientific language that we now apply to the very same nature that has been studied thousands of years ago.

We, as modern students, tend to believe that the ancients could not have developed scientifically sound concepts out of the base (primitive) observations that they were limited to, but I would point out that Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the Earth sometime around 200 BCE. He was less than 20%, possibly as low as 4%, off. Who could do what he did with what we believe to be the limited data he had? Plus, how many people back then even believed the Earth was round? If the Earth had been flat and the Sun closer, the observations of shadows' angles as they change by latitude, may have been similar to that of a curved surface. It really should have taken three points of latitude to both determine the Earth was round and what its circumference is.

Hipparchus, shortly after Eratosthenes, calculated the Great Year. Another assumption of the Earth as a globe. And a conclusion that should have taken a lot of accurate observations over hundreds of years. Clearly he had that available to him.

Pythagoras put forth the concept of the "Music of the Spheres" in which he calculated the harmonic relationship between Earth and the Sun and other planets. In the 6th century BCE, even the planets and the Sun were observed to be spheres, and their relative relationships In Pythagoras's music reflects the distance between our planet and the Sun as well as the other observable planets. And, let's not forget that Euclid refined a math system that is still essential to modern physics and engineering today. Prime Numbers have been discovered etched into the femur of a baboon about 20,000 years before the first cities were believed to be built.

Just because the language used to express some of these concepts of origins and ontology were religious, doesn't mean we should dismiss their value to us as mere myth and religious dogma. The Vedas of ancient India teach that there are multiple Infinities, very much the way Cantor proved. Only the Vedas were written something like 3000 years before Cantor challenged the conventional notions of infinity.

While it may be unprovable, it makes more sense to me that a dynamic, complex system, within which conscious thought developed, would likely be developing its own consciousness. If thought is simply a response to stimuli before reaction, then it would be very easy to define the Universal Mind as thinking.

-Will
 
Sometimes what we intuit correlates strongly with what we observe. Sometimes we get it dead wrong. Being able to predict correctly what we will observe shows that we have some measure of control over what we like to term "reality". It's comforting to believe that there is some teleological purpose guided by an external entity, but if all possible futures exist in a timeless multiverse, there is no need to invoke the existence of such a prime mover. An individual consciousness would only ever experience one thread of existence. It would believe it had agency over its path, but that would be an illusion. Some threads have a set of belief engrams that they possess a unique and special soul beyond the physical realm; others do not. My thread's interpretation of delayed-choice quantum-eraser experiments is that the second option is more likely.
 
It's comforting to believe that there is some teleological purpose guided by an external entity, but if all possible futures exist in a timeless multiverse, there is no need to invoke the existence of such a prime mover.
I would suggest that purpose is irrelevant to the concept of a universal mind. No prime mover is implied.

The universe, to those of us who look at it with a conscious awareness, is filled with analogies. The identified forces can create relationships that are reflected in the other forces. Gravity creates star systems and galaxies, among other astronomical phenomenon that appear to mirror atomic and sub atomic structures created by electromagnetic forces. The growth patterns of fungi across a surface mimic the spread of human civilization and even appear to reflect the synaptic structure of a network of brain cells.
Sept20_2019_Getty-Images_Neurons-1068x711.jpg
(neuron networking)

night-time-satellite-image-of-a-city-panoramic-images.jpg
(city by satellite)

Just as I don't have control over the neurons and cells in my body, a Universal Consciousness is not likely to be any more aware of us or any other structure that helps bring it into being. That is not to say these structures don't move towards an identifiable singular destination. We get hungry, so we go looking for food. Where does our hunger come from? Why are we motivated to satisfy that hunger? Why would we not think such circumstances exist outside our limited perception of life on Earth? Hunger is such a natural state.

-Will
 
The speed of light would imply a very slow rate of cognition if one were to interpret the cosmic web as a neural network. Communicating with such a mind would be impossible by fleetingly existent beings such as ourselves. It'd be more frustrating than conversing with an Ent. Anyhow, just because the form of a thing reminds one of the form of another thing, that doesn't mean that they are automatically in any way equivalent.
 
All of the above that you point out is true.
Anyhow, just because the form of a thing reminds one of the form of another thing, that doesn't mean that they are automatically in any way equivalent.
But it does spur the imagination and calls for some consideration. As we all know, no proof isn't proof of non-existance, but neither does it mean the proof is simply occluded. And proof by analogy is only good if the one-to-one relationships can be established.

-Will
 
Anton's created a video about the latest research on the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all life on Earth:

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The estimates place it at perhaps 4.2 billion years ago, which is really early given its complexity.
 
While touring NASA, on Cape Canaveral, in Florida, I talked with a retired technician who volunteered to meet and greet and answer questions of the public. One of the things he told me was that no matter how clean and sanitized NASA treated their water and holding tanks, bacteria would eventually get in and grow.

Now, what if that bacteria didn't get in? What if it developed within the water system by the nature of the system and water?

It seems inconceivable that we can't purify an enclosed water system to remain completely free of biological contamination, but perhaps the even more inconceivable condition of the spontaneous formation of life would remain inexplicable simply because it was so ever present and inconceivable.

-Will
 
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