Animal/Human Embryos Are Solid Evidence of Common Ancestry

[_Puck Mendelssohn]

Do you think it is possible to create simple microbial life in the lab? If so, when do you think it is going to happen?

Didn't Craig Venter just do that recently? It's now possible to assemble microbes from components of other microbes.

If instead you mean something more like a "primordial soup resulting in simple life" scenario, I have no idea. The difficulty here is that the process may have involved a lot of different factors and stops along the way. Bear in mind that the original happened in a planet-sized sample which housed a large variety of environments, over some long span of time. The likelihood that any quart jar, no matter how well the experiment is thought out, will generate results within a year or two doesn't seem great as it is separated in time, volume, and complexity from the original by many orders of magnitude. That's especially so if multiple stages involving different environments are involved. What if, for example, the chemistry required to jump-start metabolic processes has an origin in one environment, but doesn't encapsulate itself in anything like a cell wall until it enters another (or until some environmental parameter changes)? What if replication and metabolism arise differently and only become closely associated later?

People are certainly working on the puzzle. But not having final and definitive answers to something doesn't mean that oogity-boogity must hold the answer.

And do you think scientists have a good chance of finding life in Mars?

Not my particular area at all, but my guess would be that if there are organisms on Mars, they're sub-surface and that the size of the probes we send isn't likely to lend itself to a lot of excavation. But who knows? All one can do is look.

[_DoubtingThomas]

Do you think it is possible to create simple microbial life in the lab? If so, when do you think it is going to happen?

Didn't Craig Venter just do that recently? It's now possible to assemble microbes from components of other microbes.

If instead you mean something more like a "primordial soup resulting in simple life" scenario, I have no idea. The difficulty here is that the process may have involved a lot of different factors and stops along the way. Bear in mind that the original happened in a planet-sized sample which housed a large variety of environments, over some long span of time. The likelihood that any quart jar, no matter how well the experiment is thought out, will generate results within a year or two doesn't seem great as it is separated in time, volume, and complexity from the original by many orders of magnitude. That's especially so if multiple stages involving different environments are involved. What if, for example, the chemistry required to jump-start metabolic processes has an origin in one environment, but doesn't encapsulate itself in anything like a cell wall until it enters another (or until some environmental parameter changes)? What if replication and metabolism arise differently and only become closely associated later?

People are certainly working on the puzzle. But not having final and definitive answers to something doesn't mean that oogity-boogity must hold the answer.

And do you think scientists have a good chance of finding life in Mars?

Not my particular area at all, but my guess would be that if there are organisms on Mars, they're sub-surface and that the size of the probes we send isn't likely to lend itself to a lot of excavation. But who knows? All one can do is look.

Interesting. What is your field?

[_Puck Mendelssohn]

I'm purely an amateur at this biology/paleontology stuff. No formal training at all. My past work is as a civil rights litigator.

[_DoubtingThomas]

I'm purely an amateur at this biology/paleontology stuff. No formal training at all. My past work is as a civil rights litigator.

I see, but you probably read a lot. Can microbiology, organic chemistry, or biochemistry tell us something about the origin of life? What is the best evidence that life on earth started naturally? I am really looking for answers.

[Guest]

I'm purely an amateur at this biology/paleontology stuff. No formal training at all. My past work is as a civil rights litigator.

I see, but you probably read a lot. Can microbiology, organic chemistry, or biochemistry tell us something about the origin of life? What is the best evidence that life on earth started naturally? I am really looking for answers.

These are a few years old now but are interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqPGOhXoprU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ5jh33OiOA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfq5-i8xoIU

More current:
https://nai.nasa.gov/teams/can-8/ru/
https://news.rutgers.edu/nasa-funds-rut ... 7Zw8BRRfng

[_Puck Mendelssohn]

I haven't spent a lot of time reading about abiogenesis. There's a nice book by Nick Lane called The Vital Question which I've gone through -- but I tend to think that this is one of those questions where we're always going to have a lot of uncertainty. It would be enormously helpful if we could have some samples of very early living things.

Do bear in mind, though: people tend to look at this rather naïvely. I know that as a child I always figured that some assemblage of chemicals just sort of happened to drift together in just the right arrangement, and presto! A functioning cell. It's likely that, in fact, the process isn't simple. It's likely that there is no moment at which there is a "first living thing" unless we use some arbitrary criterion to decide what's "living" and what's not. It's possible that there are events akin to the endosymbiosis that generated the eukaryotic cell -- people used to speak of "metabolism first" and "replication first" models of the origin of life, but for all we know these things have distinct origins and one swallowed up the other. We may also be looking at phenomena which are quite improbable, in a small sample size and limited time scale, but which become well-nigh inevitable in a large sample size and long time scale.

As for whether natural forces can account for it -- well, what else is there? We at least know that chemical and physical principles operated in the past. We have no empirical basis for asserting that supernatural forces intervene in anything now, or ever did. If someone produces that evidence, then we can try to figure out whether these newly-identified forces had something to do with it.

[_Puck Mendelssohn]

Ah, and indeed Mike Griffith did make his weekly divine dropping on this board, in the AI thread, but he had nothing to say to defend his ludicrous remarks in this or the other thread. The seagull soars on to soil other places, other things.