Jan 06 2009
Genesis
Interesting article on Wired from a few months ago that was brought to my attention by their end-of-year best-of post: Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life
It’s interesting that there are a variety of primitive bacteria and archaea that are still hanging around the planet, but the simple precursors of them seem not to be present. Why could this be?
- They are extinct – enable to compete with more advanced forms of life, or were too delicious.
- They are here and we haven’t found them yet – The entire Archaea branch of the tree of life was only recently discovered, with it’s affinity for high-stress environments. Perhaps the original buidling blocks are right under our nose, or came into being in hard-to-reach or unexpected places like deep in the earth’s crust.
- If you go with the spermogensis idea, the building blocks may have been synthesized on another planet, and their more complex decendants were delivered here by comet or what not. This seems unlikely, given that these arrivals may have had trouble surviving if they evolved in a different kind of environment.
- FSM
If the family tree of life on Earth involves the genesis of simple machines in a different environment like Venus, followed by an meteoric transplant to the Earth environment, which was more conducive to more complex life but not its basic synthesis, it would seem to reduce the odds of life arising elsewhere.
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