And where did that god come from? Primordial soup full of magic and stardust? The idea of life starting by chance is completely absurd to you but somehow a god that just came out of nowhere is perfectly reasonable.
> The idea that life came about by luck is completely absurd
Argument by ridicule is a fallacy.
> even more so than thinking that a computer chip was created by chance erosion of a silicone wafer in exactly the right pattern.
But, as I'm sure you have been told many times, that's an absurd strawman, and suggests that you didn't read TFA or anything else that discusses how life may have arisen, including any of the other comments here. Life didn't spring up fully formed, it developed in stages.
> As I see it
I can't think of anything less compelling.
> life was clearly designed by God.
That is semantically incoherent, as well as being a violation of HN guidelines ("Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.")
> Life didn't spring up fully formed, it developed in stages.
Have these stages been observed, or are they merely a speculative story? No one has ever demonstrated life arising from non-life (a violation of the Law of Biogenesis).
What is semantically incoherent about my perspective that life was clearly designed?
4 days to respond? I had to scroll pretty far in my threads to see this. And no response to my points about bad faith argumentation and not having read TFA? And you still want to argue theology and metaphysics despite my pointing out that it is a violation of the guidelines? I'm not going to waste my time explaining to you why "God designed life" is semantically incoherent, which would just get us deeper into an ideological/metaphysical dispute. And beyond that, you say "clearly" but billions of intelligent scientifically educated people think otherwise, so in addition to be stupid and ignorant it's smugly arrogant bad faith.
> a violation of the Law of Biogenesis
An obviously circular argument, as any intellectually honest person with any sense acting in good faith can see. That life generally comes from life rather than, say, maggots spontaneously generating from meat as was once believed does not mean that abiogenesis isn't possible -- this is a grossly dishonest argument crafted by those despicable worms at "Answers in Genesis". And by basic logic if there were a "law" that abiogenesis violates then theogenesis would violate it too. Adam and Eve weren't born so they violate this supposed law. This is obvious and only the most profoundly stupid and dishonest people could deny it. The fact is that there is no such "law" and people who idiotically base arguments on it don't understand what empirical (as opposed to those imposed by governments) laws are.
As my LLM put it, "The entire apologetics argument relies on a massive equivocation fallacy and historical semantic games".
I despise willfully ignorant intellectually dishonest godbot science denying trash so I won't see any further comments from you (muted with my frontend to HN) and you won't hear further from me.
unfortunately the field of abiogenesis, just like extraterrestrial life, is a lost cause.
The reality we will never be able to replicate creation of life nor find life on other planets (except via contamination). it's why we've never gotten any closer. and i'm not even religious
Likely we don't need to replicate. We just need to get a sample of life with completely independent origin to our kind of life here on Earth, to study. This way we would be able to separate what are universal properties for any life from historical contingencies specific to us. To have samples of a single kind of life complicates things.
We seem to make gradual progress in investigating like this article and recently there was stuff on how RNA could self replicate https://youtu.be/EhPgu0I8yaY
> “When we react phosphite, a form of phosphorus that naturally occurs in hydrothermal vents, with organic compounds, we get metabolic phosphorylation reactions overnight in water. Phosphite and palladium replace ATP and enzymes; it’s amazing, and it makes early evolution a lot easier to grasp” says Schlikker.
As far as I know, there are no palladium enzymes ... checks ... ok, no _natural_ ones (that we know of). Which is interesting, as other enzymes in metabolism that use metals seem to have 'adopted' the metal(s) as a cofactor - like nickel, iron, molybdenum, even vanadium in at least one case.
The headline is a little confusing. They're still talking about a "split" between bacteria and archaea, so even under this theory, the very roots of metabolism and (I'm guessing) genetic code etc still have a single origin.
Anyway, it does provide a nice reason that bacterial and archaeal cell membranes are different.
Should be "Life left mineral substrate at least twice" or some such. The research is interesting, but they're playing word games in the telling of it by saying the most recent common ancestor of all life wasn't alive (because it was dependent on a mineral surface), but two of it's children gave rise to lineages that were.
what's really going to blow your mind is our solar system looked completely different several times with different proto-planets and Earth/Moon is likely made from remnants of those other planets
The Youtube channel Kyplanet recently had an episode on recent arguments that the Earth/Moon system was formed from at least three giant impact events, not just a single one between proto-Earth and Thea that formed the current Earth and the Moon.
The metabolic science is really cool. The conclusion that life arose twice requires you to buy that proto-cells that grew on these vents and needed those metallic surfaces to survive didn’t count as “life”.
Then, free living cells, bacteria and archea, could maybe be argued as having independent paths as they plugged the gaps in their metabolism independently. Same DNA/RNA, same proteins. Same broad rules of metabolism. Just some alternate paths through chemical space to plug in the metabolic gaps and get free from metal surfaces.
To me, these are clearly not independent paths, but rather the branching of proto-life into two of the great kingdoms of life. It’s a stretch to call this two origins rather than a branching.
Then a couple billion years later, one of em ate the other, and rather than destroy it, they both started a symbiotic relationship, and we were off to the eukaryotic race. This is all the same web of life. Not two independent streams.
I was already under the impression that life on Earth has had several "Game Over -Play Again?" periods.
I assume that the difference here, is that it went completely to zero, before restarting. The other times, there was a bit clinging on, that seeded the restart.
If life could arise once, why would the conditions not be amenable to it arising more than once? Sure, life tends to pollute-terraform for itself, but it's a big planet, with more than enough distance between the first occurrence and pristine environment for it to happen several more times.
I find this fascinating. LUCA clearly predates some pretty core, basic metabolic capabilities, and yet nucleotide metabolism is complete. This seems to indicate that LUCA and its progenitors were confined to their hydrothermal vents and that the cells could not survive beyond due to the missing metabolic networks.
I wonder if LUCA was not a single cell, but many different populations in different hydrothermal vents, exchanging genetic material wrapped by accident in the remains of the cell membranes as the host cells die and are ejected from their vents.
Perhaps the missing post-LUCA metabolic enzymes evolved by accident from proteins recruited simply to concentrate the required metal ions that are scarcer and ever more diluted the farther from the black smokers you get. Free living was merely a happy bonus effect.
Many essential metabolic enzymes require metal ions for catalysis, structure, or substrate binding. So in some sense the dependence is still there, we just learned to take bits of substrate with us while travelling.
The "life arose twice" makes for a sensational headline.
Free-living cells arose twice would be more accurate.
I heard a good way to describe LUCA is "half-alive", with about 40% of its metabolic reactions driven by the mineral substrates in the pores it lived in, and lacking a complete cell membrane.
I can't help but speculate LUCA would have some simple membranes to cover the "windows" of the mineral pores and keep vital molecules inside - a tiny pore-dwelling metabolic network.
The question of "how much independent metabolism counts as life" is looking a lot more like the question of "how many facial hairs make a beard"
Life may have arisen loads of times but life as we know it out competed the other forms. It's still a bit unknown how rare or common abiogenesis is. It'd be interesting to check out Mars more to see if there's any underground there.
31 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 59.7 ms ] threadYes, wide-bosomed Gaia, foundation of us all, this research is about the manner in which She did it, if it was one birth or two.
Argument by ridicule is a fallacy.
> even more so than thinking that a computer chip was created by chance erosion of a silicone wafer in exactly the right pattern.
But, as I'm sure you have been told many times, that's an absurd strawman, and suggests that you didn't read TFA or anything else that discusses how life may have arisen, including any of the other comments here. Life didn't spring up fully formed, it developed in stages.
> As I see it
I can't think of anything less compelling.
> life was clearly designed by God.
That is semantically incoherent, as well as being a violation of HN guidelines ("Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.")
Have these stages been observed, or are they merely a speculative story? No one has ever demonstrated life arising from non-life (a violation of the Law of Biogenesis).
What is semantically incoherent about my perspective that life was clearly designed?
> a violation of the Law of Biogenesis
An obviously circular argument, as any intellectually honest person with any sense acting in good faith can see. That life generally comes from life rather than, say, maggots spontaneously generating from meat as was once believed does not mean that abiogenesis isn't possible -- this is a grossly dishonest argument crafted by those despicable worms at "Answers in Genesis". And by basic logic if there were a "law" that abiogenesis violates then theogenesis would violate it too. Adam and Eve weren't born so they violate this supposed law. This is obvious and only the most profoundly stupid and dishonest people could deny it. The fact is that there is no such "law" and people who idiotically base arguments on it don't understand what empirical (as opposed to those imposed by governments) laws are.
As my LLM put it, "The entire apologetics argument relies on a massive equivocation fallacy and historical semantic games".
I despise willfully ignorant intellectually dishonest godbot science denying trash so I won't see any further comments from you (muted with my frontend to HN) and you won't hear further from me.
The reality we will never be able to replicate creation of life nor find life on other planets (except via contamination). it's why we've never gotten any closer. and i'm not even religious
We seem to make gradual progress in investigating like this article and recently there was stuff on how RNA could self replicate https://youtu.be/EhPgu0I8yaY
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1138775
> “When we react phosphite, a form of phosphorus that naturally occurs in hydrothermal vents, with organic compounds, we get metabolic phosphorylation reactions overnight in water. Phosphite and palladium replace ATP and enzymes; it’s amazing, and it makes early evolution a lot easier to grasp” says Schlikker.
As far as I know, there are no palladium enzymes ... checks ... ok, no _natural_ ones (that we know of). Which is interesting, as other enzymes in metabolism that use metals seem to have 'adopted' the metal(s) as a cofactor - like nickel, iron, molybdenum, even vanadium in at least one case.
Anyway, it does provide a nice reason that bacterial and archaeal cell membranes are different.
Should be "Life left mineral substrate at least twice" or some such. The research is interesting, but they're playing word games in the telling of it by saying the most recent common ancestor of all life wasn't alive (because it was dependent on a mineral surface), but two of it's children gave rise to lineages that were.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the...
To me, these are clearly not independent paths, but rather the branching of proto-life into two of the great kingdoms of life. It’s a stretch to call this two origins rather than a branching.
Then a couple billion years later, one of em ate the other, and rather than destroy it, they both started a symbiotic relationship, and we were off to the eukaryotic race. This is all the same web of life. Not two independent streams.
I assume that the difference here, is that it went completely to zero, before restarting. The other times, there was a bit clinging on, that seeded the restart.
I wonder if LUCA was not a single cell, but many different populations in different hydrothermal vents, exchanging genetic material wrapped by accident in the remains of the cell membranes as the host cells die and are ejected from their vents.
Perhaps the missing post-LUCA metabolic enzymes evolved by accident from proteins recruited simply to concentrate the required metal ions that are scarcer and ever more diluted the farther from the black smokers you get. Free living was merely a happy bonus effect.
I'm your distant ancestooor
I have some news for you
Yes, they think life came once before
Free-living cells arose twice would be more accurate.
I heard a good way to describe LUCA is "half-alive", with about 40% of its metabolic reactions driven by the mineral substrates in the pores it lived in, and lacking a complete cell membrane.
I can't help but speculate LUCA would have some simple membranes to cover the "windows" of the mineral pores and keep vital molecules inside - a tiny pore-dwelling metabolic network.
The question of "how much independent metabolism counts as life" is looking a lot more like the question of "how many facial hairs make a beard"