Scientists Are Cracking the Primordial Soup Mystery 278
derekmead writes "Scientists have had a basic understanding of how life first popped up on Earth for a while. The so-called 'primordial soup' was sitting around, stagnant but containing the basic building blocks of life. Then something happened and we ended up with life. It's that 'something' that has been the sticking point for scientists, but new research from a team of scientists at the University of Leeds has started to shed light on the mystery, explaining just how objects from space might have kindled the reaction that sparked life on Earth. It's generally accepted that space rocks played an important role in life's genesis on Earth. Meteorites bombarding the planet early in its history delivered some of the necessary materials for life but none brought life as we know it. How inanimate rocks transformed into the building blocks of life has been a mystery. But this latest research suggests an answer. If meteorites containing phosphorus landed in the hot, acidic pools that surrounded young volcanoes on the early Earth, there could have been a reaction that produced a chemical similar one that's found in all living cells and is vital in producing the energy that makes something alive."
Spunk? (Score:3, Funny)
Think about it. Who lives in space? Who can shoot hot spunk into space? This spunk then hit the primordial soup pool.
Now if god created man in his own image, god obviously must have had a penis. So where is god's missus?
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Then why does need a penis?
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So he can definitively settle those "mine is bigger than yours" arguments that crop up every now and then.
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To masturbate. And have sex with Jesus's mother.
Stop acting as if like was an on/off switch! (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no "alive" vs "not alive"! It’s a gradient! And there exists, and existed, every step in-between!
Why is this such a unknown thing in Leeds? Here in Germany, it's already accepted common knowledge.
It's as if they were completely blind to prions, viruses, and other things that are in-between what they like to call "alive" and what they call "dead". Or, and this is what I think, they are deliberately and obsessively trying to force a hard distinction because their rigid (and in this case willfully ignorant) world view is built on it.
You get proteins (not DNA) of bigger and bigger size forming from the same basic building blocks. Like Prions and the normal proteins of our bodies. Now get one that is by accident capable of self-reproducing (probably with the environment and other simpler proteins already doing most of job), and voila, you have something alive enough to fit your arbitrary (and varying with the mood of the day) lower limit.
This is ridiculous and embarrassing for people who call themselves scientists.
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You get proteins (not DNA) of bigger and bigger size forming from the same basic building blocks. Like Prions and the normal proteins of our bodies. Now get one that is by accident capable of self-reproducing (probably with the environment and other simpler proteins already doing most of job),
"Self-reproducing" is a bit of a stretch there. It's just an existing protein with a mis-folded tertiary structure. It's as alive as a slinky that doesn't slink.
Though I agree "alive" is an extremely subjective term... still, there are some definitions that allow you to "bin" organisms pretty effectively.
Re:Stop acting as if like was an on/off switch! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because it's "common knowledge in Germany", that doesn't make it right. Science isn't built on what's "common knowledge". Your insulting tone and wording lend credence to the theory that you're just pulling from your nether regions.
Further, if you actually read TFA, you'll note that isn't about proteins - it's about ATP, an enzyme. (Something your facile "explanation" doesn't address at all, further raising suspicions as to it's value.)
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Viruses, prions etc are all parasites, incapable of surviving on their own. They appeared after life, they didn't lead to it. You seem to be very confident in your theory, but offer no proof to back it up.
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You get proteins (not DNA) of bigger and bigger size forming from the same basic building blocks. Like Prions and the normal proteins of our bodies. Now get one that is by accident capable of self-reproducing (probably with the environment and other simpler proteins already doing most of job), and voila, you have something alive enough to fit your arbitrary (and varying with the mood of the day) lower limit.
I would tend to bet that RNA is of the oldest in the development of life. RNA is capable of providing structure (like protein), catalysis (like protein), and information storage (like DNA). Some of the oldest enzymes in our body still use RNA in the active site, too, like the ribosome. Mutation of RNA sequences for information storage is very likely, too, making it a good substrate for finding sequences that "work" in the huge space of possible sequences.
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I should point out that whenever we get "science" stories, usually the scientists had very little input into the story as we know it. Science just isn't all that interesting in isolation, so editors editorialize it.
Phosphorus in acidic pools (Score:5, Funny)
It's the diet soda theory of evolution.
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Phosphorus....The Life Maker!
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It's got what plants crave.
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It's got what plants crave.
Lol. If brawndo actually had phosphorus it probably would have worked as a fertilizer.
You know what goes well with Primordial Soup? (Score:3)
A nice, crusty Asiago Cheese Bread.
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I've had potato soup, tomato soup, and gazpacho soup, but never primordial soup.
Scientists Are Cracking the Primordial Soup Myster (Score:2, Interesting)
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Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about this, "The Left-Handed Universe". The book, of the same title, in which it was published is a collection of non-fiction science essays; "Why does ice float?", "Why is the night sky black?", etc.. I don't know if Asimov's ideas in "The Left-Handed Universe" are correct, but Asimov is always fun to read anyway.
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The probability for a DNA molecule to appear without having used a pre-existing DNA molecule as template is tiny. Maybe it has only happened once in the entire lifeti
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Simple enough - any random assembly will obviously be unstable, except for that vanishingly tiny minority which *is* stable, and capable of self replication, and in an environment that doesn't immediately destroy it. Those will begin to spread, creating a more benign pocket environment by using up the precursers which might otherwise become incorporated into destructive arrangements. By the time something as complicated as DNA arose the planet had probably been largely conquered by RNA at any rate, with r
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Self replication is practically a given in the primordial soup environment. It doesn't need to be A directly creates copies of A.
It could be molecule A promotes B, B promotes C, C promotes D,
Any such loop, no matter how many steps, will optimise as it progresses. That's what evolution means.
ps. Even that is a vast simplf
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If creationists listened when someone explained something, talkorigins.org wouldn't exist.
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Life forms, yes. But they're talking about creating chemicals which could have been later been incorporated into prmitive protolife, but seem unlikely to arise within the primordial open-faced sandwhich.
No matter how it happened, it happened fast... (Score:5, Insightful)
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A related consideration to the observation that primitive life (... based on an unfortunately small sample size of 1) appeared very rapidly once the thermodynamic conditions for stable organic chemistry arose, is that "advanced" life (starting from multicellular organisms) took several billion more years to appear (though once it did, further development was relatively rapid). This indicates that, while the universe may be teeming with single-cell life, that more "advanced" life forms might be much more ra
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Or that indicates that the self-replicant unit had a short time window to appear before the environment changed, and thus must be very rare.
Or there were several hard steps, and those tend to be equaly separated (the antropic principle has some interesting consequences), or it is a coincidence...
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No, but one way is probably better than others.
So other self-replicating chemicals were probably out reproduced by (e.g. RNA based chemicals). Once cells became a thing, they would have outcompeted all the free living self-reproducing chemicals.
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why isn't there evidence of more than one independent kind of life here?
Because the other lifeforms of independent origin were delicious.
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If it's so probable, then why isn't there evidence of more than one independent kind of life here?
Is there only one way it can work?
Probably the kind that got started first (LAWKI) ate the prototypes for all the latecomers.
Though perhaps an independent strain or two do exist in some isolated somewhere.
Ask Gil Gerard (Score:2)
Why doesn't somebody just ask Gil Gerard? After all, he was there TCB.
If you're wondering... (Score:4)
The chemical is ATP. Not really ATP completely, but they found that a sample of a meteorite reacted with some acidic solution gave pyrophosphite, a reduced pyrophosphate (I think, chemistry kinda rusty) and thus, they believed they could have found a possible, natural mechanism to give "life" energy without the "irreducibly complex" enzymes for breaking ATP down.
Politics everywhere, even in the sciences (Score:2)
Primordial soup ... (Score:2)
So then, it was take-out?
Re:Here we go again...... (Score:5, Insightful)
If we were to suddenly discover the exact mechanism, it changes nothing.
Oh yeah it does, if we can figure out how life was created, we can create more life. And THAT opens the door to a lot.....
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Actually we're already at the threshold of creating life in any form we wish - I believe it was a year or so ago that someone successfully implanted a fully synthetic genome into a bacteria and had it develop and reproduce as a new organism. There are (presumably) limits as to how far you can reshape a given cell using the technique, but given the vast spectra of life on this planet we will probably soon be able to create almost anything we can imagine, though some of it may take several generations of suc
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What exactly do you mean with the term "synthetic genome"? What was it synthesized from? How was the bacteria different after it was injected with the so-called synthetic genome? Was it a new kind of bacteria never seen before or simply a bacteria with slightly different characteristics?
Re:Here we go again...... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually we're already at the threshold of creating life in any form we wish - I believe it was a year or so ago that someone successfully implanted a fully synthetic genome into a bacteria...
That's the impression you'd get from skimming the headlines. I fear it's a bit sensationalist.
The experiment you refer to involved a synthesized -copy- of an existing organism's genome. An impressive feat, but not quite "creating life in any form we wish."
We've learned to copy-and-paste DNA. Right now that's about all we can do. Protein-folding is a hard problem, so we can't easily predict what a given DNA sequence will do, let alone invent new sequences. We can do a bit of remixing, copying a gene from here to there, but we can't create new genes yet.
We'll get there, I don't doubt that. But at this stage, our "synthetic genome" is just a xerox copy.
Informative link about the "synthetic genome" experiment: http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/%20projects/synthetic-bacterial-genome/press-release/ [jcvi.org]
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... actually, here's a more informative link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium [wikipedia.org]
Damned impressive stuff. They synthesized a copy of the m. mycoides genome from a computer record.
Re:Here we go again...... (Score:4, Informative)
Oh yeah it does, if we can figure out how life was created, we can create more life. And THAT opens the door to a lot.....
Not necessarily. If we discover that the "secret mechanism" to creating life is spending a few billion years randomly slamming every combination of rocks and sludge together until you get the particular combination of self-replicating macromolecules that lead to all later life, then you haven't helped lab efforts much. The mechanism might be reliably reproducible: e.g., "every time you mix a sludge of precursors X, Y, Z, bake for 15 minutes at 325F, then zap with lightning, you'll get life." On the other hand, it might be a hard-to-reproduce fluke: e.g., "once in a trillion times you mix a sludge of precursors X, Y, Z, bake for 15 minutes at 325F, then zap with lightning, you'll get life; usually, you just get foul-smelling goop."
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Oh yeah it does, if we can figure out how life was created, we can create more life. And THAT opens the door to a lot.....
Quite true - so much so, in fact, that my wife insisted I get a vasectomy.
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Good thing it takes two humans to make life!
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We do; they just aren't all alive at the same time. As you go backward into the past, the genotypes of humans and other apes (e.g. chimpanzees) gradually converge, until several million years ago, they are the same. Taken as a whole, there HAS been a continuous spectrum of creatures from humans to apes. (And traced far back enough, between all living things.) It staggers me that people find this difficult to underst
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And what have you accomplished that leads you to believe you have some special powers of judgment capable of discerning useless from useful knowledge?
Thank goodness we've had people throughout history who weren't so dismissive of certain lines inquiry and didn't share your lack of imagination.
Re:Here we go again...... (Score:4, Funny)
Try getting bit by a radioactive spider. It might help.
It's just chemistry. (Score:2)
I am not trying to change anyone's mind, just trying to share ideas.
Share this [youtube.com] (skip the first 2:30 if you don't want the anti-creationist rant). The idea that some special ingredient was missing until it landed here from outer space is fucking nonsense, the entire planet was made from "space rocks". The thing that is "special" about Earth is our liquid water oceans, ocean + time = life.
I haven't accomplished any great deeds in my life. I am just a guy.....trying to share my opinion.
I have a double maths/cs degree, yes it's an accomplishment, but so is cleaning the toilet. Ask me what accomplishment I'm most proud of and I will bore you to death with photos of my grand
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The idea that some special ingredient was missing until it landed here from outer space is fucking nonsense
From the article:
It's generally accepted that space rocks played an important role in life's genesis on Earth.
It's accepted consensus in science. I guess that makes you a denier.
Re: Here we go again...... (Score:2)
Sure we will. Oh, with the addition of a few million years of simmering.
What we're getting close to is understanding how it happened, not performing magic tricks.
Re:Here we go again...... (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, I for one don't really care about the exact details of how we came to be. If we were to suddenly discover the exact mechanism, it changes nothing. I still have to work, pay taxes and die....
It sounds like your life is completely pointless. Why not just die now and leave your nutrients for people who actually matter?
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What would be changed if we learned we're living in a Matrix? As long as the operators don't shut it off, and there aren't game-breaking glitches or backdoors discovered, then it shouldn't have any affect on our lives on the inside.
Re:Here we go again...... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, if the Matrix is maintained by EA, we might be in trou---- AUTHENTICATION FAILED, DISCONNECTING.
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I sat in a login queue for nine months!
Re:Here we go again...... (Score:5, Interesting)
We're doing that already - we call the processes science and mysticism, and every backdoor we discover opens the path to the creation of new kinds of mods. Really the only big difference would be the search for cheat codes, and a lot of religious people are already convinced they've found some of those as well, they just won't know for sure until they reach the game-over screen.
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Not to mention quantum mechanics - we're only just scratching the surface and look what the transistor alone has done...
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Evolution is already proven as an ongoing process, and if someone doesn't believe in the fairly well established historical evolution of Man from apes, much less small shrew-like creatures that shared the Earth with dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago, I seriously doubt they'll be convinced by theories of how life first arose hundreds of millions of years before the beginning of the geologic record (Earth's crust gets slowly recycled, a process which has mostly erased roughly the first billion years of
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anyone who believes that humans are direct descendants of apes are using faith as a tool as much as one who believes in religion X.
Sigh. That's just absurd. This isn't some random philosophers sitting in a room coming up with "interesting ideas". There is well documented DNA evidence (as well as morphological and anatomical evidence, etc) that can be used to trace human evolution back millions of years with an extremely high level of confidence. And you are equating that to people who think the Earth is 6000 years old by claiming direct observation is all that matters, and everything else is "faith"?
Just because you don't know the
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You keep acting as if the mere fact that you can form an opinion gives that opinion weight.
Your opinions appear to be based on your personal ignorance. Even wtrse, you seem to hold your ignorance in high esteem, and condemn those that don't suffer your willful ignorance.
Humans evolved from apes, are apes and that is that.
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All great apes, including humans, are in Hominidae, the common ancestor would have been an ape.
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What would you call ERVs? And if you don't know what they are, then you should be mightily ashamed of yourself for making such a grand declaration based upon your near total ignorance of human evolution.
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Of course we aren't direct descendants of apes, we are apes. The evidence is pretty overwhelming and how any educated person can even doubt it... Next you'll be stating that it is only faith to claim that lions and house cats are both felines, I mean lions roar, don't purr and hunt as a pack, obviously no relationship to the house cat who God created to keep lonely old ladies company.
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Actually, finding out how life got started wouldn't tell us diddley about evolution.
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WTF, Mods? I know my posts might not be worthy of a +1 for anything, but would anyone please respond to explain why my post above is "Redundant" and "Overrated"? I'm honestly baffled --- perhaps because I'm a complete idiot; someone please enlighten (or cleverly insult) me.
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Four words: slash, dot, week, end.
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Predicting a direct path of influence is difficult or impossible. However, based on past history, rather "vague" shifts in philosophical understanding can have dramatic effects. For example, many current religious sects have major influence over national-level policies. Small shifts in the public credibility of these sects claims to have a "True" description of the universe might have major state policy effects, impacting the treatment of illiteracy/hunger/etc. Even without direct impact from, e.g., medical
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But developing theories or how life came to be when we have absolutely no definitive way of knowing the original conditions is not science.
A lot of the initial conditions are known — the fundamental energetics of chemistry haven't changed since then, we can make a decent go of estimating what sort of rocks were present, and we know there are some weird things in meteorites because that's still true now — so it is possible to take a reasonable, educated guess as to what is feasible. If the energetics are right and the ingredients are (probably) present, it's a theory that doesn't fall at the first hurdle; the likelihood of something
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developing theories or how life cam to be when we have absolutely no definitive way of knowing the original conditions is not science.
Why?
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This non-chaotic-system that gave rise to complex life, what gave rise to it, and don't say it was just always there
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What caused the big bang?
I don't ask this to agree with the GP, I ask this to point out the brokenness of these types of questions in general.
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Since when did things not exist because they can be described as having two parts instead of one? I'll assume that by "purple" you technically mean "magenta," and not the purple/violet appearance of wavelengths slightly shorter than blue. Some wavelengths of light appear red or blue to the human eye; they are themselves no more "red" or "blue" than some combination of photons is "purple." If you accept that red and blue exist, then purple does too (it's just a thing consisting of two photons, or the capabil
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I never said there was a purple wavelength (and what wavelength is "magenta," which is the color produced by mixing red and blue light, and which you say "does exist"?). The AC's statement was not simply that "red" and "blue" wavelengths exist, but that "red" and "blue" exist "as" something ("red" and "blue" wavelengths of light) that they correspond to. But "red and blue photons together" (=magenta) is something equally existent to "red" or "blue" photons alone. Do you think that feathers exist, and beaks
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... and exactly how many multi-million-year simulations have you run that prove the negative you assert, that never, once, ever, a 'beneficial code combination' escaped destruction by the 'destructive combinations' long enough to make a few copies of itself? Or that it never can?
I notice you specifically said ".. complex life". Well of course, no one asserts the primordial soup went from a few simple molecules to "complex life" in one magical step. The crux is that systems can grow in complexity in small, i
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I agree, GP is a moron. I run simulations where dots have attractive and repulsive properties, with infrequent random energy events (cosmic rays, heat, entropic forces) -- It's somewhat like like atoms in primordial soup. In just a week of CPU time the entire sim is full of stuff that can copy. The reason is that the first thing that can copy does, and it copies up all the other useful atoms, and keeps doing so. A bit longer time and different copying "strains" will emerge because of the imperfection o
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http://youtu.be/lMkHYE9-R0A?t=46s [youtu.be]
Ack, messed up the link somehow?
Re:Pseudoscientific Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though you are being modded up by the usual suspects and I am being modded down, everything you said above is pseudoscientific crap. Sorry. Genetic algorithms have already shown that natural selection can operate on pre-life patterns? This is pure unmitigated BS on the face of it.
You're modded down because you're simply ignorant, and refuse to open your mind to new knowledge. I feel bad for you. You seek absolute truth -- Proof of exactly what happened. There is no absolute truth in science. This is where you fall short on the science stick. We don't have the absolute evidence -- It's gone. The oldest of Earth's crust has been reabsorbed into the mantle. This happened billions of years ago, but it was after life formed here.
Application of one set of inferences and conclusions based on observations to other similar systems is not bullshit. Not any more bullshit than applying math like Information theory to descriptions of biological processes, like evolution. Selection pressure is being used in many ways, both natural and artificially. That we can do so artificially indicates that such could occur naturally as well. In short: What we see in a lab may be applied in the rest of the world. It's a basic tenet of science.
We apply evolutionary concepts in simulations because it's cheaper, but what this tells us is that it's possible for life to emerge. If we did have the time to sit and wait, we could put molecules into a specific soup in the right conditions, and eventually life would emerge. If you're lucky, have a big enough environment, and have enough time, then sentient life can emerge. We may not have the exact recipe, but we've gotten similar results with so many other ingredients that the possibility is undeniably in the favor for the emergence of life in this way -- We're not even sure if the recipe was brewed here, it If not here, then elsewhere and seeded here, but we're sure enough about the mechanism of selection that we can say that it played a key role in the formation of life.
What's interesting to me is the application of information theory to the Universe. If our universe were as you say, having too much entropic forces that would destroy all complexity before it got complex enough to be called alive, then life could not have formed. You also don't want a Universe with too little chaos; Not enough randomness and you get a monoculture -- Something that just forms then degrades over time once, with no speciation -- Like crystals. However, the parameters of this Universe are such that there is enough chaos to allow complexity to arise, but not so much randomness that it can not arise.
IMO, Earth being in the gulf between spiral arms is a huge benefit to the rise of life. Less dramatic life eradicating entropic events, like gamma ray bursts. That's where we should look for other life: Cradled between the arms of the galaxies -- They should have sent a poet.
I leave you with more evolution in action. [youtube.com]
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So... do you get extra sins forgiven on Sunday if you get on the internet on Saturday and tell the heathens that they should be as ignorant as you are?
(Were you a bad boy this week, or do you do this every weekend?)
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The idea that a chaotic system can give rise to complex life is in the not even wrong category. I am not saying that the probabilities are small. I am saying that the probability is exactly zero.
Did you miss Darwin's Theory of Evolution? It's kind of obscure, you might not have heard of it yet. Anyway, it demonstrates one mechanism that simpler life can become more adapted to its environment and become more complex. So the idea that chaotic systems can't give rise to more organized systems already has a big widely-accepted contradiction.
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What has computer source code got to do with the behavior of complex molecules?
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If everybody knows that, why do we have so many religious people in the world?
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The article pretends to be a scientific article, but it really is a religious article full of "could" this or that. Yes I could have won the lottery if I had picked the right numbers and could be such a chemical reaction could have happened, but no one knows whether it really did. When you start talking about what could have happened, why could there not be a God who made life? I always thought that science was about how things work and what DOES happen, not about what could have happened millions or billio
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Even the simplest single celled organism is unbelievably complex and contains a prodigious amount of information. The theory that life on Earth was seeded from space begs the question, how did that life begins wherever it did begin?
That's true. But somehow you don't seem to draw the correct conclusions from that. When confronted with something complex, the theory of evolution tells you it can not have formed instantly, but instead it happened gradually. Therefore, the "starting point" of life is at the molecular level, not at the cell level. And I put the quotes there deliberately, because there won't be a single point, it will be a gradual process. Just like there isn't a point where there is a "first tree" or "first human".
Even with the best efforts of intelligent scientists and the expenditure of mountains of money, no one has yet created any life form whatsoever from nonliving matter.
So what?
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The theory that life on Earth was seeded by god begs the question, how did that god begin wherever it did begin?
I don't have an answer for you, and it's exceedingly doubtful that you have any sort of non-superstitious answer for me. I've seen little to no evidence that there isn't a god, but I've seen none at all that there IS, either. When we can detect only a tenth of all the matter and energy in our universe that leaves plenty of wiggle
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Especially in the NYT.
That rag is a load of bullshit. That article on the Tesla car, basically faking results, then the public editor just ignoring all the lies that the writer put in his article. I'm amazed that people use it as an example of quality journalism!
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Nice to know that soulskill has multiple accounts...
Exotic minerals from space rocks (Score:3)
From TFA:
Disclaimer: I ain't a space scientist, I'm just a geek
What I want to know is this --- How come those exotic minerals exist in space rocks but not on planet Earth ?
Where those space rocks came from ? Weren't they were formed from the same batch of space dusts that gelled up the Solar System ??
Or could it possibly be that those space rocks were from an ancient planet (or star) that had exploded?
If the space rocks that contained all the exotic minerals came from an anci
Re:Exotic minerals from space rocks (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Exotic minerals from space rocks (Score:4, Insightful)
We live bathed in an atmosphere rich in oxygen, on a planet with seas full of sodium and chlorine. Any of those exotic space minerals would eventually react with something in the atmosphere or ocean and become something that we're more familiar with. In space any mineral created will last pretty much forever, as there is nothing for it to react with unless the asteroid hits some other.
True today, but at the time of the start of life (generally recognised as before 3.5 Gyr ago), Earth was pretty much free of oxygen. Thelarge oxygen atmosphere we know today appeared around 2.3 Gyr ago; life before this was Bacterial (technically: Archea) and based more on methanogenic and sulphur-breathing bacteria, much as we find in hydrothermal vents and extreme environments today (such bacteria ironically produce oxygen but are poisoned by it, so we don't see them on Earths surface).
More important for the 'space mineral' is that its components aren't lost. Iron-based minerals that were in the original rocks that formed Earth would have sunk to the core in the first few molten million years of Earths existence: the stuff we find on Earths surface were from fresh influxes after the "Hadean" molten phase of Earths history, when it had cooled down. These stayed on the now cool surface and were available for life.
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From TFA:
Disclaimer: I ain't a space scientist, I'm just a geek
What I want to know is this --- How come those exotic minerals exist in space rocks but not on planet Earth ?
If the space rocks that contained all the exotic minerals came from an ancient planet, wouldn't that mean that it is very likely that the planet, which was itself rich with all those exotic minerals, had lifeforms of its own ??
Its not clear in the article, but its possibly because iron-based ("siderophilic") elements become trapped in the Earths core.
As the Earth forms and is a molten magma ocean, heavy iron (the largest part of the Earth) sinks to the core. It brings with it in solution siderophilic elements, and for that matter a lot of water, etc. Life on Earth then required fresh supplies of such materials delivered from space _later_ over the first few hundred million years, after the Earth had mostly cooled.
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As contrasted with "uneducated guess work"...
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Rejecting magic meat essentially means that you rejected the idea of having a soul.
One could easily retain (rather than reject) the idea of a soul by positing that a sufficiently good meat-clone would have one too. Assuming the existence of souls does not require assuming the existence of magic meat, though the two propositions are often co-joined in many belief systems.
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Given the utter absence of evidence, you could easily make any claim about souls you wish.
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What was the "primordial Earth" like? They have plenty of ideas, BUT theory and conjecture of what it was like is not proof of what it was actually like.
It is quite possible to determine many aspects of early earth by analysis of minerals. Certain minerals are only formed under certain conditions. Some minerals form only in a water environment, some only without water. Same with oxygen/anoxic environments. Temperature controls mineral formation also. Mineral compositions from the earliest formations and isotopic analysis tell us what particular percentages of asteroidal or cometary accretion happened during that phase. It is impossible to determine every as
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I really hate how the "ignorant public" assumes that every time a scientist is really excited about the obscure details of the topic she's devoted years of his life to studying, that she's trying to "blow up details" in some sinister immoral conspiracy. Yes, scientists are nerds who derive great joy and excitement from delving deeply into the finest minutiae of obscure, technical subjects. They will get excited about things you won't understand. They're not trying to take over the world, and will likely be