Shaped from clay [origin of life]

Nature Magazine ^ | 03 November 2005 | Philip Ball

[MineralMan]

Actually, there is a fossil of a snake with legs. It was written up in 2000. Here's a link to a page, describing it:

http://www.karencarr.com/News/legs/legged_snake.htm

[RobbyS]

I probably don't have twenty years to wait.

[MineralMan]

"I probably don't have twenty years to wait."

Well, there is that. At 60, I don't know if I do, either, but it's something to look forward to.

[Quark2005]

Yes and the Catholic priest who proposed it was accused of injecting religion into science.

Keep in mind that LeMaitre (the priest you speak of) didn't have any physical evidence to back his claims. It wasn't until Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was expanding (a mere two years later) that the idea began to receive vindication. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and Hubble found it. If we had accepted LeMaitre's claim without evidence, it would have been a leap of religious faith.

[Antonello]

Amazing link; thanks.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Mutation itself isn't truly random. It occurs more frequently in some parts of the genome than in others.

That may still be truly random, only that the underlying distribution isn't uniform. Having a uniform distribution isn't all that important as the distribution may be changed by looking at things differently.

For example; atoms undergoing radioactive decay have a uniform probablity for within a given time interval is constant (depending on the length of the interval, not the starting point of the interval); however, the waiting time for an atom to decay is exponentially distributed. The number of atoms decaying in an interval is Possionly distributed.

It's not a big point, but I have seen some papers by economists who think only a Normal distribution is random or some who think only a uniform distribution is normal.

What's Normal for one may be Poisson to another.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Ironic!

[RadioAstronomer]

What's Normal for one may be Poisson to another.

ROTFLMAO!

[RobbyS]

Let me be clear. I do not reject the idea that life came from "inanimate" matter. Because "inanimate matter" is nothing like what Lucretius imagined, images which was incorporated into the early atomic theory. What it "is" we do not know. What we do know that that it is not "dead" and if not "alive," then dynamic--and elusive.

[From many - one.]

Sorry you got jumped on and glad you posted the info.

I cut my science-loving teeth on "Micobe Hunters" which covered this with fairly florid prose and I particularly relished the back-and-forth of the early experiments.

Thanks for the nostalgia trip.

[js1138]

Clay has been under suspicion as significant in biogenesis since at least 1966.

[dread78645]

... but I believe the fossil record supports birds first, then mammals.

The earliest transitional shows mammal-like fossils just before the Permian extinction ~250Mya.
Some of those survived into the Triassic -- as did some of the reptiles that went on to become dinosaurs and then avians.

Although birds reached a more or less modern form first, proto-mammal showed up before the proto-bird.

[js1138]

I'm going to have to apologise for misreading your motives. It seems like nearly evo thread has someone post a story about Pasteur as a refutation of evolution. Some of are pretty tired of this.

The history of vitalism and spontaneous generation are fascinating when put in perspective and context. It's just that they have no direct bearing on current research.

[Varda]

I think it was less a leap of faith than a conclusion drawn from from calculations and observation.

[From many - one.]

Well, roughly 60 years ago, that's precisely what got me fired up about doing experiments to find out things.
(Yeh, I'm -that- old.)

[js1138]

Mutation is random on the individual level, but it is guided by natural selection, which is inherently non-random and purpose-driven.

I'm not happy with your choice of words. Selection is not purposive in the usual sense of the word. It doesn't have a goal or direction. It's a difficult distinction and one that seems to elude understanding, just as the invisible hand of economics eludes easy understanding.

[js1138]

I imagine that snake skeletons are pretty fragile.

My son had a junior high science teacher who asserted that snakes don't have bones. Needless to say, she did not teach anything about evolution.

[GreenOgre]

It's not a matter of faith. It is a matter of evidence. If one wants to simulate conditions on the primative earth we have a mechanism, that still exists today, to create large organic molecules and look, they form themselves into cells. Not capable of reproduction, but making this happen in six weeks in a lab is pretty cool.

And this can be repeated over and over and over.....

[js1138]

Yes and the Catholic priest who proposed it was accused of injecting religion into science.

The odd thing about science is that first impressions fade away with evidence. The details of the big bang are still under investigation, but the event was accepted as soon as the evidence appeared.

Same with evolution. It is the hyperliteral interpreters of the Bible who have not accepted the big bang.

[js1138]

What's that? It's "Beat up on Pharmboy" day?

I was the first to jump, and I've apologized. I'm tired, though, of posters asserting that Pasteur disproved abiogenesis.