Posted on 12/04/2002 12:23:13 PM PST by forsnax5
A totally new and highly controversial theory on the origin of life on earth, is set to cause a storm in the science world and has implications for the existence of life on other planets.
Research* by Professor William Martin of the University of Dusseldorf and Dr Michael Russell of the Scottish Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow, claims that living systems originated from inorganic incubators - small compartments in iron sulphide rocks. The new theory radically departs from existing perceptions of how life developed and it will be published in Philosophical Transactions B, a learned journal produced by the Royal Society.
Since the 1930s the accepted theories for the origins of cells and therefore the origin of life, claim that chemical reactions in the earth's most ancient atmosphere produced the building blocks of life - in essence - life first, cells second and the atmosphere playing a role.
Professor Martin and Dr Russell have long had problems with the existing hypotheses of cell evolution and their theory turns traditional views upside down. They claim that cells came first. The first cells were not living cells but inorganic ones made of iron sulphide and were formed not at the earth's surface but in total darkness at the bottom of the oceans. Life, they say, is a chemical consequence of convection currents through the earth's crust and in principle, this could happen on any wet, rocky planet.
Dr Russell says: "As hydrothermal fluid - rich in compounds such as hydrogen, cyanide, sulphides and carbon monoxide - emerged from the earth's crust at the ocean floor, it reacted inside the tiny metal sulphide cavities. They provided the right microenvironment for chemical reactions to take place. That kept the building blocks of life concentrated at the site where they were formed rather than diffusing away into the ocean. The iron sulphide cells, we argue, is where life began."
One of the implications of Martin and Russell's theory is that life on our planet, even on other planets or some large moons in our own solar system, might be much more likely than previously assumed.
The research by Professor Martin and Dr Russell is backed up by another paper The redox protein construction kit: pre-last universal common+ ancestor evolution of energy-conserving enzymes by F. Baymann, E. Lebrun, M. Brugna, B. Schoepp-Cothenet, M.-T. Giudici-Orticoni & W. Nitschke which will be published in the same edition.
*On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells by Professor William Martin, Institut fuer Botanik III, University of Dusseldorf and Dr Michael Russell, Scottish Environmental Research Centre, Glasgow.
Uh huh...
The related news story in Nature Science Update is fun as well.
"I think it's a beautiful thing - it's important to have all-embracing theories," says evolutionary biologist Ford Doolittle of Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. We'll never have much definite information on the origin of life, he says. "But then, just because we'll never know why the Roman Empire fell doesn't mean it isn't worth talking about."
A great scientific mystery has been solved!!!
Why so many people seem to have "rocks" in their heads.
"They're like Napoleon's army in Moscow. They have occupied a lot of territory, and they think they've won the war. And yet they are very exposed in a hostile climate with a population that's very much unfriendly."
"That's the case with the Darwinists in the United States. The majority of the people are skeptical of the theory. And if the theory starts to waver a bit, it could all collapse, as Napoleon's army did in a rout."
Here's the reason why. It is not science, at least according to many here. That is due to the "hypothesis" being immune to falsifiability.---
It may be that no theory is going to fit all the evidence. The trick is to pick which bits to ignore, says John Raven of the University of Dundee, UK. "To create a coherent hypothesis we have to say 'this bit of data doesn't fit, but we're going ahead anyway'."
Oops! You say the evidence doesn't support it... Just ignore it.
Maybe they meant the night before GF day.
Before You Can Celebrate the 5th You must have Mischief Night on the 4th!
Is this true?
C'mon plenty of tomfoolery goes on around Fawkes day, despite its serious origins.
You are being overly generous in the opinion of this person(from the Nature link provided by Nebullis)----
Others disagree. "It's quite impossible that it could be right," says evolutionary biologist Thomas Cavalier-Smith of the University of Oxford, UK. Bacteria and archaebacteria have got hundreds of genes in common, he says. They share other features, such as the way that they insert proteins into their membranes.
Plausible and impossible are, shall we say, discordant.
BTW, there is an old adage about scientists claiming something is "impossible" ...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.