Sludge In Flask Gives Clues To Origin of Life 361
sciencehabit writes "In the 1950s, scientist Stanley Miller conducted a series of experiments in which he zapped gas-filled flasks with electricity. The most famous of these, published in 1952, showed that such a process could give rise to amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. But a later experiment, conducted in 1958, sat on the shelf--never analyzed by Miller. Now, scientists have gone back and analyzed the sludge at the bottom of this flask and found even more amino acids than before--and better evidence that lightning and volcanic gasses may have helped create life on Earth."
Twinkie (Score:3, Funny)
Didn't he leave a Twinkie sitting on the shelf too? (And scientists found fewer amino acids than ever before!)
Oh my... (Score:2)
Who will all just plug their ears (Score:2)
But don't let that stop you.
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:4, Interesting)
No. At least, not the knowledgeable ones.
They'll say something like:
"Stanley Miller's 1952 experiment has been shown to be flawed by more modern views of early Earth. The collection of gases that Miller filled his apparatus with before electrifying it was not characteristic of Earth's early atmosphere. Repeating the experiment with the proper gas mixture as generally accepted by current thinking shows no amino acid generation at all."
And then they'll say something about the right handed amino acids generated, which will destroy life, rather than create it, and the other toxic compounds created during the same experiment, that would have destroyed any chance of the left-handed amino acids forming life, if the acids hadn't been filtered out by the intelligent design of the experiment by the scientist.
And after that, they'll probably question the gases used for this 1958 experiment, assuming that the same mistakes made in 1952 would probably be repeated in 1958.
But then, I'm just guessing, and they may all say "NANANANANOTLISTENING" after all.
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:4, Informative)
Change your rant. Replace 'anyone who believes in a creator God' with 'any creationist' and your rant is 100% true.
Except the babble after because...
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't disagree with your assertion, but when someone says "Creationist" here its a safe assumption that they mean someone from the ID, young earth, Satan hid the dino bones etc. spectrum, not the "A creator sparked the big bang/started up the server we're running on". The OP, however childish, was speaking specifically to the type of creationist that denies scientific evidence rather than working with it.
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Can you just not read or something?
Here's the OP In full:
In that context "creationist" can't mean anything but "young earth creationist". If you use any other meaning for "creationist" the post makes no sense at all, and so doing to is misrepresenting the statement.
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:4, Informative)
Every creationist regardless of religious orientation depends on a logical fallacy to advance their beliefs. Which is essentially a form of lunacy as the OP advanced.
As soon as you reject occum's razor and introduce non-empirical shenanigans every theory is subject to the Spaghetti Monster/Last Tuesday fallacies.
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:4, Interesting)
That isn't what creationist means, in the context being used. It's short-hand for "young earth creationist, which is in turn short for "evolution didn't happen, God created everything in 6 days just like the bible says". Everyone knows that, well maybe you really are ignorant of context rather than just intentionally misinterpreting.
And there's only one rant in this thread, and it's not by anyone claiming religious types are wrong.
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Creationist means that they believe in a creator.
Not generally, no. Creationist means (to most people) that the bible is the story of how things were made by God. And I don't recall a Big Bang theory or evolution in there anywhere.
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:4, Insightful)
Words have meanings, but when Young Earth Creationists go 'round calling themselves creationists as loudly as possible, don't be surprised when the definition changes over time from a broad one to a narrow one.
"Gay" used to mean happy. Now in nearly every context, it means homosexual.
When you ignore vernacular use of words in an argument, people tend to laugh and deride you for "arguing semantics" because you're not arguing the point anymore, you're just being an asshole.
Ignore vernacular at your peril.
--
BMO
Re:Let there be Light (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the thing about Genesis chapters 1 and 2: they are poetry. It wasn't meant to be a play-by-play description of How We Got Universe. The most obvious clue is the repetition of "And there was evening, and there was morning, the x day." Scholars I am willing to trust because they know Hebrew say that it's still more obvious in its original tongue.
Too many Christians (led by the institution of the church) and also people in general are ignorant of the different kinds of literature found in the Bible. Psalms and Proverbs and Song of Solomon are pretty obviously song, poetry and...well, proverbs; but there is also history, which includes incidents most of us find far-fetched but also accounts with corroborating evidence from other historical documents. There is also apocalyptic literature, the most famous being Revelation. That, too, was never meant to be taken literally but was more of a sort of pep-rally for the Christians of the time to give them encouragement to persevere knowing that they win in the end. St. John may have also eaten some funny mushrooms.
There is a willful ignorance among many American Christians* that doggedly claims "read it literally!" without consideration for the genre within which a particular piece was written and makes those who practice it into fools. There is a willful ignorance among many opponents of Christianity, and religion in general, who do the same thing.
*I will not speak about trends in other countries because I don't have experience with the Christians in them.
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because as we all know, anyone who believes in a creator God is a backwards moron who hates science.
If they take their religion literally, I give them much respect. They are still wrong but at least they are true to their beliefs.
Today's 'religious' people very conveniently ignore the parts of religion they find distasteful or outright horrifying. Those people I do not give any respect towards their beliefs. If you want the 'good' parts you have to take the bad parts.
Religion is entirely a human creation - to explain the (at the time) unexplainable and to provide the ability to live 'nicely' with your neighbor. Every single religion on the planet has the same basic tenets; be nice, be honest, be good. That could be a sign of a 'creator' or it could just as easily be evidence of the same human desires manifesting themselves in very similar ways in disparate circumstances. In which case their 'creator' was 'necessity' the mother of invention.
Science is continually expanding our knowledge. What about religion? It is only clinging to the as yet unprovable factoids. It is introducing no new evidence to the record. Hell science is introducing proof of pieces of the biblical fables. Not of their true meaning but that they at least happened. I find that both infinitely fascinating and ironic.
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:4, Insightful)
to explain the (at the time) unexplainable and to provide the ability to live 'nicely' with your neighbor
What part of the new testament tries to explain the origin of rain again, or states that the point is to live well with your neighbor? I seem to remember Jesus specifically going after those who placed too much emphasis on personal righteousness and rebuking them-- to the point where they desired his death.
The problem with today's armchair religious historians is that they make assertions such as these which fly in the face reality.
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The real problem with any religious activity is that it's a drain on human energy. There's no value in attempting to prove which particular set of fairy tales is true.
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What part of the new testament tries to explain the origin of rain again...
1) The New Testament never tries to explain the origin of rain. (Neither does the Old Testament. Although the story of Noah is the first time rain is mentioned in the bible, it does not state that it never rained before Noah.)
or states that the point is to live well with your neighbor?
2) Several places. In Matthew, Christ teaches that peace makers are blessed. In fact, He specifically states that although the Old Testament states thou shalt not kill, even calling someone names in anger places them in danger of judgement. The stor
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Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, I do have evidence that God exists but whether or not you will accept that evidence depends on your experience with that evidence. For more about what I really mean, read this post: http://www.theeternaluniverse.com/2011/02/everyday-philosophy-epistemological.html [theeternaluniverse.com]
I cannot prove to you that God exists or that religion is not just a creation of humans (many of them certainly are though) but that does not mean that there is not evidence the He exists.
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I can prove that God doesn't exist.
If God existed, you would have either logical or empirical proof that God exists. This stands to reason, as theologists have been searching for such proof for centuries; if it existed, someone would have found it and it would be everywhere.
You have admitted you have no such proof.
Therefor
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On the other hand, I do have evidence that God exists but whether or not you will accept that evidence depends on your experience with that evidence. For more about what I really mean, read this post: http://www.theeternaluniverse.com/2011/02/everyday-philosophy-epistemological.html [theeternaluniverse.com] [theeternaluniverse.com]
I read your linked post and it basically confirms that religious people are prepared to say "I have had a personal but incommunicable experience of God, therefore He exists, but I can never prove it to you". Which us atheists knew already.
It most certainly does not prove the existence of God.
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In any case, let's substitute pink unicorns. Person X says, "I have seen a pink unicorn." Can person Y, who has not seen a pink unicorn, say, "Pink unicorns
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From your mouth to Darwin's ears, AC.
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahhhh my teen years. No there can be intelligent people who believe in God. But they just haven't spent enough time thinking about all of that to realize that such a God is a complete and utter asshole who you better errr... pray, doesn't actually exist.
Think about it. He's all powerful. He's all caring. He creates a universe with deterministic laws which will undoubtedly create a very specific result... and we're the best he could do?
Any engineer who isn't a raving lunatic could sketch the basic design for a new species you want evolved which isn't subject to so much pain and suffering in about 3 minutes.
If we're the product of a divine plan set to unfold over billions of years than God is a callous asshole without any ethics.
Furthermore if you assume that God used science (and a deterministic universe) to create us that we have no free will. Without free will we all are behaving exactly as programmed and once again God is responsible for all of our actions. Which means when Hitler exterminated the Jews... God. When the Tsunami washed across Japan... God. Etc...
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He creates a universe with deterministic laws which will undoubtedly create a very specific result... and we're the best he could do?
Maybe we are living in the universe that God left in a flask on the shelf without checking on us further. That would mean that God's chosen people are actually living in the other flask He carries around with Him, and which he occasionally gives it the odd shake.
Or maybe we are not the finished product yet. God is still waiting to hear the "ding!" that will sound when the human race is cooked finally.
Or maybe God's plan for the universe is so ingenious that the chosen people will actually evolved from the u
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Well, I don't mind our basic layout, but I can certainly think of a few improvements.
1) I want my beagle's stomach. He can eat a sandwich that has been laying in the bushes for a week and not get sick (although I really don't want his taste in snacks).
2) I want a pig's teeth. They'll crunch down a bone that even a pit bull has given up on, and they'll do it in two seconds flat.
3) Something has **GOT** to be done about knees.
4) We need immune syste
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:4, Funny)
Then whence cometh evil? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God!
-- Epicurus, philosopher (c. 341-270 BCE)
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Arguing "God must not exist because I stubbed my toe once and it really hurt" is a bit shallow, don't you think?
Yeah. It gets more difficult when you start discussing deep human suffering--the pain of losing a loved one, the trauma of being sexually assaulted, the sting of betrayal, the violent death of millions through war and auto accidents. These are things that happen all the time, and it is quite hard to reconcile the really ugly stuff with an all-good God who, according to the big 3 monotheistic religions, cares deeply about us. You could cut your second paragraph down to "the Inquisition happened" and it's
Jumpy aren't you? (Score:2)
... no person who believes in God can possibly be fascinated by what this scientist has discovered, right?
No person who believes in God can be anything other than a raving lunatic fanatic because ...
Some fundamentalist atheists might claim that. And they often do so on /. But this time you jumped the gun. The claim was only that some religious people refuse to listen to anything scientific unless they just made it up themselves.
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The rest of us know what "creationist" means, but don't let your ignorance get in the way of your ranting.
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...could have used evolution as the means of creating life on Earth, setting first causes into motion (i.e. big bang) ...
God could have possibly done that (and it would be hard to determine that one way or the other), but that's not what creationist believe. Otherwise, why would they fight against teaching evolution in schools?
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"I love it when people think they know more than God."
That's easy to do. I also know more than Zeus, Odin and Ra.
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Lightning zaps a volcano
2. Wait X [m/b]illion years
3. ...
4. Profit
And yet the creationists are the ones with fairy tales? [does not compute]
Until and unless scientists can create actual life forms in a sterile clean-room from periodic table elements, life on this planet and exactly how it got here remains quite a bit more myserious than some would have you believe despite our best efforts to understand it.
Personally the part that confounds me is that DNA is highly organized information. Assuming a starting point of a planet with no life forms and no pre-existing DNA to bootstrap the process, its formation seems like negentropy in an otherwise entropic Universe. Evolution doesn't seem to have a real answer to this question other than throwing large amounts of time at the problem. Creationism merely relocates the problem; one could ask if God created all of this then what are God's origins, or if there was never a time when God did not exist how does one even begin to comprehend that or really understand what that means? Panspermia of course has the same flaw; if Earth got its life from a visiting comet/asteriod then where did that get living organisms?
Any way you look at it, the very fact that we're here to have this discussion is incredibly mysterious. I don't share the urge some have to dismiss or gloss over that fact. I actually find it a beautiful thing to celebrate, not a nuisance to be explained away.
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If I had modpoints, I would mod you up-- not because I agree with you but because you have given more thought to this than "how can I troll religious folk?"
Creationism merely relocates the problem; one could ask if God created all of this then what are God's origins, or if there was never a time when God did not exist how does one even begin to comprehend that or really understand what that means?
Well, as I see it, THAT particular mindbender will be there whether you espouse secular or supernatural origins. If the Big Bang was just a ball of stuff, where did that stuff come from? (Stephen Hawking speculated recently that it just 'popped into existence' "due to gravity"; but that doesnt really solve the problem) If it was always there, then pre
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming a starting point of a planet with no life forms and no pre-existing DNA to bootstrap the process, its formation seems like negentropy in an otherwise entropic Universe.
Earth is not a closed system - it receives constant input of energy from the Sun. Therefore there is no contradiction in formation of more highly organized chemicals (and eventually life), so long as the process is driven by that external energy. The "primordial soup" theory is compatible with that.
We still don't have a complete explanation of how things went there, of course. Some prominent theories hold that something akin to "evolution" actually started before DNA was in place (with RNA, or possibly even earlier), and DNA is the result of that evolution. But the "mystery" there is largely due to our inability to conclusively prove that things happened one way or another, and not due to some missing links or somesuch.
Re:Who will all just plug their ears (Score:5, Insightful)
Until and unless scientists can create actual life forms in a sterile clean-room from periodic table elements, life on this planet and exactly how it got here remains quite a bit more myserious than some would have you believe despite our best efforts to understand it.
A scientist believes the theory with the most scientific support, while still experimenting. It is not scientific or rational to look at a theory, see it is not 100% explained, and thus decide to believe an alternate hypothesis with no scientific support.
Assuming a starting point of a planet with no life forms and no pre-existing DNA to bootstrap the process, its formation seems like negentropy in an otherwise entropic Universe.
I take it you failed thermodynamics? The second law applies to closed systems and overall entropy, not localized entropy within a system. We can't even definitively define the universe as a closed system and you think you can assess the overall entropy in the system?
Any way you look at it, the very fact that we're here to have this discussion is incredibly mysterious.
Everything is very mysterious until you investigate. The scientific method is the best tool we have for such investigation. As a scientist I disagree with your characterization. By the same token you could claim gravity is very mysterious and thereby imply it is not really be happening. The only qualitative difference is that people understand the theory of gravity better than the theory of abiogenesis.
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All computers can REALLY do is shift and add. Everything you see a computer do is built on combinations of those two actions. With your computer, you are seeing several orders of magnitude of complexity of these two basic actions.
Just because something winds up becoming complex does not make it beyond comprehension. You might see it that way, but I don't in the slightest.
And in case you haven't been following, DNA is mostly useless and obsolete information left over from countless iterations of building
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TL;DR - DNA was probably not the original genomic material, it was probably RNA. And there is an increasing body of experimental evidence that creates a plausible series of links between likely prebiotic conditions on earth and the subsequent appearance of self replicating chemical entities that could then evolve into Life As We Know It.
Lots of big jumps between the Primordial Ooze and Dancing with the Stars but the general framew
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The smart ones will say, "Yes, but the Miller Experiments never produced anything but racemates, which while interesting makes it difficult to show how an organized process could arise from something like this."
To which most smart scientists will probably grin and keep looking for more answers, since that's what new questions represent...
The problem is, too many people don't want new questions and the great possibilities they represent. They want easy answers so they can bask in the feeling of finally understanding it all. This is a deep drive, not easily uprooted. All sorts of arrogance masquerades as scientific explanation because of it. What so many really seem to want to avoid is saying "these are profoundly deep questions with no final answers, and the huge knowledge we have amassed over centuries of pursuring the scientific method
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actually if you note that equal numbers of left and right handed amino acids were produced. I think the left handed ones would be considered toxic to any "life" being formed
plus the experiment filtered out a bunch of very nasty TAR from the gunk. so unless you can even using a pair of 100MW tesla coils and a "beaker" the size of a small shed get a pocket of just right handed amino acids then the staff of AIG and ICR will not give you any points.
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How will that change their beliefs?
The concept of gods being the cause of lightning and volcanoes have been in religion since pre-history.
So the lightning is from God and that volcanic gas reminds people of volcanic eruptions that creates Lava which when breaks down makes a good soil/dust/mixed with water (mud) Heck the sludge could be considered mud by some people.
You just put more fuel to their beliefs.
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* Goes off running to go show this to his creationist "friends"...*
You do realize that if you get noisy, they will too, right?
Re:Oh my... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do I even bother reading these threads in hope of some interesting discussion? The only threads more retarded than evolution/origin of life ones are the ones related to global warming.
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Try showing them when it's actually life and more than just amino acids. Might get farther.
I'm guessing they'll probably all be dead in a billion years.
Why wasn't the experiment ever repeated? (Score:5, Informative)
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It has been repeated many times, in a variety of ways. This is more "history" than "science". The original experimenters for some reason didn't analyze the data, so it's like completing the experiment, a half-century later. Think of it as "closure".
There are some moderately novel results from this. There are so many variables in the experiment that there's hardly any reason to do the same one twice. In this case, the inputs had some more sulfur than other experiments, and they got out some different am
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No Repeats? (Score:5, Informative)
It took hundreds of millions of years and a lab the size of a planet to do it the first time. It may take more than a few decades to reproduce that.
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A simple protein can be made from as few as 50 or as many as several thousand amino acids, and they must all be put together in a specific order. The average functional protein contains 200 amino acids. The simple cell contains thousands of different proteins. The probability of just one protein contain just 100 amino acids forming by itself is a mind boggling huge number. Oh, and you need RNA first before you can make a protein, yet proteins are used to make RNA...
Lot of claims there, with no evidence presented for support.
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Biology is not my area of expertise, but I have to wonder why we haven't managed to "create life" yet (or have we?).
I create life every morning. Unfortunately it usually goes swirling down the shower drain.
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Jc venter is very close to synthetic life where all things in the lifeform are synthrtic. As for what you asked earlier, many people have replicated the work. You have to look to find... yahoo news isn't about to publish astory where someone repeated something... get me?
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What Venter is doing is trying to solve the problem from the other end, trying to replicate something very much like existing life forms, using DNA, but made entirely from non-living materials. The first replicators would be far, far simpler than what he wants to do.
Both are important work, but the latter is what people have in mind when they talk about creating life from scratch. Venter's experiment will prove that an intelligent designer can create a complex life form, but it doesn't prove that it can a
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We haven't revisited it because there's really no point.
The conditions on ancient Earth were, basically, various different permutations on this experiment repeated over and over again in a million trillion gallons of water (i.e, the entirety of the liquid water present on this planet) for several million years. The Miller-Urey experiment was conducted in order to demonstrate feasibility, and it did so; in conditions similar to what we think the ancient Earth looked like, the basic building blocks of life wo
The work here is being done (Score:2)
Biochemist and Ohio U Ph.D. Fuz Rana in Creating Life in the Lab makes a strong case that a basic life form created by scientists is approximately a decade away.
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Life-Lab-Discoveries-Synthetic/dp/0801072093 [amazon.com]
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I'm curious as to whether these results have been revisited--or replicated--since the 1950s. This article seems to indicate that people have been talking about the experiment without really revisiting the science for more than half a century.
I don't know why no one else has done it, but for my money it's not very interesting anymore. We've since discovered that amino acids form even in deep space. It's just organic chemistry. The interesting question is how do we narrow down all the conjectures about how life might have gotten started, to the one(s) that actually happened.
Biology is not my area of expertise, but I have to wonder why we haven't managed to "create life" yet (or have we?).
I haven't read anything about it for a few years, but we're probably within a few years of it. Several well-funded teams have been working on it.
However, AFAIK none of them a
Re:No Repeats? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are plenty of repeats of this - they just don't bother publishing them because there isn't much new to learn.
In fact, we repeated a version of the Urey-Miller experiment in my undergraduate biology lab independent project. The hard pard was going around bumming free equipment (high voltage transformer from the EE dept, balloons of elementary gases from the chemistry dept, even the help of a very cool tech in the physics dept who helped us make a simple spark gap chamber out of a glass bottle, a couple tungsten rods, and a blowtorch).
The goal was to repeat a few times with slightly different starting materials, and see what different amino acids we could find. Unfortunately, we managed to blow up the custom made spark bottle on the second run; someone dropped it and caused a hairline crack after the first run, and that let enough oxygen get in after we (not-so-successfully) evacuated it to cause a nice little explosion after turning on the spark gap. Luckily we were careful enough to put it under an enclosed fume hood ;)
In the end it was more an exersice in begging for supplies than novel science. But that was probably a lot more useful skill to learn for a budding researcher than how to inseminate a sea urchin...
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1- Create life- done.; the polio virus has been synthetically produced
I was astonished to learn that biologists don't consider viruses to be "life". They don't meet some of the criteria of the common definition(s) of life.
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In school we were taught that they weren't life, exactly, because they couldn't reproduce themselves, but IIRC there was a minority position that they were life nonetheless.
Re:No Repeats? (Score:4, Funny)
They don't meet some of the criteria of the common definition(s) of life.
I know some biologists that don't meet some of the criteria. It's usually in the "reproduction" area where they have problems.
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Complexity- doing this experiment the first time took a researcher 25 years of his life zapping assorted vials of sludge with electricity before he could find a result among them, while some of this can be automated; it would still be a VERY complex experiment taking thousands of man hours to repeat.
See my post above about my experience with this - but the gist is that this just isn't remotely true. It's not a trivial experiment to execute, but with the right equipment it's pretty straightforward to reprod
Pinatubo 1991 (Score:2)
Just imagine (Score:5, Funny)
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sludge in a 50-year old flask
Gnutella
I'll add that to my Top 10 Freudian Slips list.
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RNA World Hypothesis Says No (Score:5, Interesting)
THEREFORE: the availability of amino acids isn't relevant to the origin of life; only that they're around later for higher life forms to evolve. We really need to worry about the availability of ribonucleotides. The idea that we need to worry about the availability of amino acids only comes later.
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Re:RNA World Hypothesis Says No (Score:5, Interesting)
We really need to worry about the availability of ribonucleotides.
Then you'll want to check out one of my favorite papers of the last several years (if you like organic chem):
Powner, M., Gerland, B., & Sutherland, J., Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions, Nature 459, 239-242 (2009).
These are activated (i.e., as the phosphates) ribonucleotides being synthesized in fairly high yields from a few simple molecules under mild conditions. It still blows my mind.
Man that article sucks` (Score:2)
Earthquakes generate sparks. (Score:2)
No reason to believe the lightning had to come from the sky.
Examining my flask would show actual human cells (Score:2)
After sitting around for 53 years... (Score:3)
Actual evidence of the FSM (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps this so called 'sludge' is not really sludge at all. I believe that is is actually sauce, sauce from the Flying Spaghetti Monster itself. And being a sauce, this gives us believers in the FSM more actual evidence for its existence, than the magic man in the sky.
Glory to the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
I cannot say with certainty... (Score:3)
...that this sludge has given me clues to the origin of life, but I can say certainly that life has given me clues to the origin of this sludge.
Re:Earth is BIG (Score:5, Funny)
But how is it that lightning formed amino acids found they're way deep among the deep ocean floor, and in large enough quantities for life to have formed and survive?
Two words: shit sinks
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Really it does. It's just you're so full of it, it fills the bowl. It only looks like it's on top of the water.
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FLUSH! FLUSH DAMN YOU!
And get some stink slayer in here. God! What crawled up inside of you and died?
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Possibly when the earth was young and hot there was greater volcanic activity and so hydrothermal vents were not as deep as they are now? Also maybe earth had less water back then and so shallower oceans.
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I'm of the understanding that the origin of life can be traced back (in theory) to hydrothermal vents deep within the ocean.
No, it can't be traced back to any origin. Hydrothermal vents represent one of many conjectures of what kind of environment let it happen.
Re:Earth is BIG (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: i was a student under one of Miller's former post-docs. That doesn't mean I know much more than you.
From my understanding, the problems to be solved had to do with the misconception that organic molecules could only be made "organically." It was well known that life makes amino acids, fats, etc.; however, it was also well known that such things were done by the action of enzymes or other structures within living cells. So the question was more of a "how do we break the chicken-and-egg paradox?" instead of "can we reverse engineer exactly how life was created".
The fact that you could start off with inorganic materials and make organic building blocks without a living system processing them was the ground shaking breakthrough. Once you had that, then it's easy to conjecture that enough organic molecules would eventually build up that some of them would become self-organizing (and eventually resemble life). If some other technique was discovered to make organic molecules from inorganic, then the key missing link would still have been satisfied.
Re:Earth is BIG (Score:4, Interesting)
Creationists (and other ill minded ilk) seem to miss that this was the big revolution not just for abiogenesis. Suddenly organic compounds were in easy reach of inorganic reactions. This was really relevant for both biologists interested in the origin of life, but also people interested in organic chemistry basic research at the time. I was 'introduced' to this experiment twice in college - the first time was in biology, where you'd expect. But the second time was in organic chemistry.
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They're actually very similar, in the grand scheme of things. They're DNA and RNA based, use the same amino acids (or at least, almost exactly the same) etc. There was a common ancestor between archaea and all known life, so far as I know.
It's quite possible that life evolved twice, or more than twice. The trick would be recognizing it when we see it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_biosphere
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Not much though. Creation of amino acids in the "primordial soup" does not explain where life came from, which is what both of those theories are in search of. Also, the original experiment has been improved greatly so they have the data now to confirm the formation of amino acids along with other building blocks. Fact is there's still a huge gap of knowledge between molecule and cell formation.
One interesting theory, possibly related depending on your view, is RNA-first formation. Another is silicate-based
Re:If true... (Score:4, Insightful)
That could really put a spin on things. Evolution ~ Creationism. Humm...
No amount of evidence would convince creationists that they're wrong.
As the saying goes, you can't use reason to leverage someone out of an opinion that wasn't acquired by reason.
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That could really put a spin on things. Evolution ~ Creationism. Humm...
No amount of evidence would convince creationists that they're wrong.
As the saying goes, you can't use reason to leverage someone out of an opinion that wasn't acquired by reason.
What if GOD cames down and tells them that the Scientist are right?
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Early earth was a reducing environment, not an oxidizing one.
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Molecular oxygen was only released when the first living beings were able to either chemo- or to photosynthese oxygen. Until then the atmosphere was mainly nitrogen, water and carbondioxide.
it surely must apply (Score:2)
Proof doesn't work that way in science. 'Proof' isn't really a scientific concept. Disproved is common in science though.
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Your analogy is broken...
This is more like finding worms eating a corpse, and then saying it's proof that the worms must have been there when the person was living.
Re:Science. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your analogy is broken...
This is more like finding worms eating a corpse, and then saying it's proof that the worms must have been there when the person was living.
I can assure you that those samples were intact all these years. Besides, most of the samples were in vials and not in flasks. How do I know this personally? I did my PhD work in a lab right next to Jeffrey Bada's (see the paper, he's one of the main authors). I was there when he found these samples from their storage or something and told us all about it.
Also any amino acids that were in the vials must have been synthesized in the Miller's apparatus since there was no starting materials left in those vials (remember the S.M. were gases). Even so this experiment is still irrelevant to the origin of life for the reasons I've discussed in another comment of mine (see below).
Regardless, this experiment is still irrelevant because those gases Miller used (H2S, H2, NH3, CO2, esp.) cannot coexist in the same place for any appreciable amount of time. Gases like CO2 would not exist without a significant amt of O2, but H2S, H2, NH3, etc (and the amino acid products) would be quickly oxidized at elevated temp in the presence of O2. Moreover, if O2 was absent, unfiltered UV radiation (w/out O2, no O3 layer) would also quickly destroy those reducing gases and amino acid products.
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In legal terms, there is the concept of "chain of evidence" meaning that the material has not left authorized hands, nor sat on a shelf unattended for 53 years. If this was a murder trial, that "chain of evidence" would be completely broken. If this is required to prove the death of someone, it surely must apply to prove the "life" of something.
If you have a corpse, and you can identify who it is, but you don't know where it was for a little while, you're no longer sure that that person is dead?
I think the point must be that since we don't know what was going on with the flask during all those years, God could have easily slipped in and planted those amino acids!
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