On the Origin of Life on Earth

Science ^ | January 8, 2009 | Carl Zimmer

[js1138]

An Amazon of words flowed from Charles Darwin's pen. His books covered the gamut from barnacles to orchids, from geology to domestication. At the same time, he filled notebooks with his ruminations and scribbled thousands of letters packed with observations and speculations on nature. Yet Darwin dedicated only a few words of his great verbal flood to one of the biggest questions in all of biology: how life began.

[sickoflibs]

RE :”Darwin dedicated only a few words of his great verbal flood to one of the biggest questions in all of biology: how life began.”

Of course not. No one knows, now one will ever know. He’d be guessing, or making stuff up

[bert]

Except for the plethora of Creo FReepers whose nonsensical blather pours forth in unending torrents.

[UndauntedR]

Here’s a nice video which summarizes Dr. Szostak’s work at Harvard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg

[DaveyB]

The title means stupidest ideas, with most destructive and evil consequences...it’s an exclusive club.

I also nominate John Dewey, Horace Mann, Mohamed, John Maynard Keynes, Margret Sanger and John Jacques Rousseau for stupidest and most dangerous. I know Sanger is not a man and Mohamed is not exactly white, but I refuse to discriminate when it comes to deadly people with wicked ideas!

[js1138]

Good to see the comments are all science so far.

[Coyoteman]

Interesting. Getting closer to some discoveries there, eh?

[js1138]

Check out the video in post #5. I might live to see a theory.

[colorado tanker]

Maybe Darwin devoted few words to it was because his was not a theory of the origin of life but of the origin of species? Just a guess.

[LiteKeeper]

He’d be guessing, or making stuff up

You were referring to evolution, right?

[stanz]

Darwin was interested in adaptation and natural selection...not the origins of life.

[js1138]

He at least recognized the limitations of science in his time.

[Omedalus]

Indeed.

What I’m eager to see is a numerical breakdown once an abiogenesis pathway is found. More precisely, I want to see a function of the form:

P(X) = f(V,t,C0,W)

where

X := an event variable marking the rise of a self-replicating organic system
V := a volume of primordial fluid
t := a time duration
C0 := a set describing the initial (abiotic) composition of the primordial fluid
W := a function describing the influx of energy into the volume (for example, describing energy input by sunlight over a day/night cycle, or describing the intermittent massive energy in a lightning discharge, etc.)

Such a function, if derived from mathematical models and supported by experimental demonstration, would allow us to assert that abiogenesis is not only non-miraculous but is in fact inevitable. In other words, given a “laboratory” where V is the total volume of the early Earth’s oceans and t is the hundreds of millions of years between the formation of the oceans and the fossil record’s indications of the rise of organic life, such a function would show just how ridiculous it is to imagine that an organic self-replicator *wouldn’t* form.

And naturally, once formed, a self-replicator will tend to stick around, because, well, by definition that’s what a self-replicator does. Without competition for limited resources, the self-replicator would quickly propagate throughout the entire ocean until it ran out of primordial fluid to consume - at which point each self-replicating entity would have to consume other instances of the self-replicator, thus favoring variations that are more adept than others at doing so... And so the story goes. :)

[mel]

bump

[sickoflibs]

Referring to the ‘origin of life’ specifically but yes theories are guessing or making things up. But some guesses are better than others and origins of life guesses are far out there(calling origin’s ideas ‘facts’ is just silly) . But they do get the creationists worked up. Not sure if origins fit in ID or not.

[js1138]

I suspect it will be a while. But I am personally astonished how little time elapsed between the decoding of DNA and commercial applications.

I’ve been watching this research out of the courner of my eye. I’m thinking the pace is picking up.

[stanz]

I wonder what he would have thought of the discovery of the double helix and the related strides in unraveling the secrets of DNA.

[microgood]

The only way we will know how life or the universe started is to invent a time machine.

[wgb]

This whole concept of life coming from non-living material is a pipe dream. At least the article was honest enough to concede that the conditions in the Miller-Urey simulation were not an accurate representation of the early earth environment.

I mean really, this paragraph from the article says it all:

“This failure has led scientists to consider two other hypotheses about how RNA came to be. Cleaves and others think RNA-based life may have evolved from organisms that used a different genetic material—ONE NO LONGER FOUND IN NATURE. Chemists have been able to use other compounds to build backbones for nucleotides (Science, 17 November 2000, p. 1306). They’re now investigating whether these humanmade genetic molecules, called PNA and TNA, could have emerged on their own on the early Earth more easily than RNA. According to this hypothesis, RNA evolved later and replaced the earlier molecule.”

I get it. So some mysterious material that no longer exists created the building blocks for early life. Yeah, that has to be it. I mean, it just COULDN’T be God!! That would be unthinkable.

I can’t wait to see the reactions when yet another origin of life simulation fails. I’m sure many here are crossing their fingers, waiting with baited breath, hoping against hope that something BESIDES God made life, the universe and everything! What a joyful day it will be when we finally have proof that we’re just a mass of molecules in motion with no true free will or purpose in life!!!