Did Life Originate From 'Protocells' By Hydrothermal Vents? (independent.co.uk) 86
"Darwin may have been wrong and 'protocells' forming near hydrothermal vents undersea may actually be responsible for the origin of life as we know it," writes Slashdot reader nickwinlund77.
From the article: An experiment replicating the hot, alkaline conditions found at the vents saw the successful creation of protocells -- regarded as a vital basic building block for life... For the new study, the research team tried creating protocells with a mixture of different fatty acids and fatty alcohols which had not previously been tested...
The research, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, even suggests that heat and alkalinity might be not just useful but essential for spawning living things... At the vents, seawater comes into contact with minerals from the planet's crust, reacting to create a warm, alkaline environment containing hydrogen. This process creates the mineral-rich chimneys with alkaline and acidic fluids, providing a source of energy that facilitates chemical reactions between hydrogen and carbon dioxide to form increasingly complex organic compounds. Some of the world's oldest fossils, discovered by a UCL-led team, originated at such underwater vents....
The researchers also pointed out that deep-sea hydrothermal vents are not unique to Earth. The study's lead author, Nick Lane, professor of evolutionary biochemistry at UCL, said: "Space missions have found evidence that icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn might also have similarly alkaline hydrothermal vents in their seas. While we have never seen any evidence of life on those moons, if we want to find life on other planets or moons, studies like ours can help us decide where to look."
From the article: An experiment replicating the hot, alkaline conditions found at the vents saw the successful creation of protocells -- regarded as a vital basic building block for life... For the new study, the research team tried creating protocells with a mixture of different fatty acids and fatty alcohols which had not previously been tested...
The research, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, even suggests that heat and alkalinity might be not just useful but essential for spawning living things... At the vents, seawater comes into contact with minerals from the planet's crust, reacting to create a warm, alkaline environment containing hydrogen. This process creates the mineral-rich chimneys with alkaline and acidic fluids, providing a source of energy that facilitates chemical reactions between hydrogen and carbon dioxide to form increasingly complex organic compounds. Some of the world's oldest fossils, discovered by a UCL-led team, originated at such underwater vents....
The researchers also pointed out that deep-sea hydrothermal vents are not unique to Earth. The study's lead author, Nick Lane, professor of evolutionary biochemistry at UCL, said: "Space missions have found evidence that icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn might also have similarly alkaline hydrothermal vents in their seas. While we have never seen any evidence of life on those moons, if we want to find life on other planets or moons, studies like ours can help us decide where to look."
I'm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Darwin never did more than hypothesize. Furthermore, no one knew hydrothermal vents existed in the mid 19th century.
And finally, I'd like to take a moment to state that science journalists, in generals suck.
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And finally, I'd like to take a moment to state that science journalists, in generals suck.
I'd have to agree but add that it's not just the science journalists who've been eaten by generals that suck, most of them do. I think there was even a scientific study on this that was poorly covered.
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For those that don't get it, Abiogenesis is seperate from Evolution.
Evolution is the changes of life over time. It doesn't even imply Abiogenesis, it just covers what happens after that.
Abiogenesis is life from non-life. Science has that happening from non-living chemical reactions getting more complex until they hit self replication, the start of what we consider life. Religion relies upon magic where some god waves their hand or pisses on a rock or whatever their particular mythology is. Either wa
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Abiogenesis is life from non-life. Science has that happening from non-living chemical reactions getting more complex until they hit self replication, the start of what we consider life. Religion relies upon magic where some god waves their hand or pisses on a rock or whatever their particular mythology is. Either way, it's still Abiogenesis, the creation of life where there was none before.
Anti-evolutionists often don't seem to understand that the two are not the same and make some really bizarre claims.
My father is a Deist, and he said, "Why couldn't God use evolution to form His creation? Why do these people have such a small God?"
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In my own opinion, it is that Christian Preachers generally piss on science because it presents something not in the Bible. It matters not to them that their own theology demands that G-d is capable of anything. If G-d is busy with evolving things currently, what the hell do we need the Preachers for? We could just look around and get any relevant messages. Rather, they work on the basis of funneling access to G-d through them and do not really believe in a personal G-d for everyone.
Personally, I think reli
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In my own opinion, it is that Christian Preachers generally piss on science because it presents something not in the Bible. It matters not to them that their own theology demands that G-d is capable of anything. If G-d is busy with evolving things currently, what the hell do we need the Preachers for? We could just look around and get any relevant messages. Rather, they work on the basis of funneling access to G-d through them and do not really believe in a personal G-d for everyone.
Personally, I think religion is one of Man's darkest creations.
It is not just Christian Apologists it is all religious Apologists of different faiths.
It is always fascinating to watch religious Apologists cherry-pick, deflect, gish gallop, tapdance and generally lie just to prove in their mind or for their faith's believers rather than accept demonstratable facts. Hmm, a bit like some politicians you see and hear in the news, sure, the actual words may be different but the basics are all there, with the main ones being "deflect" (whataboutism), "tapdance" (spin) and
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Because that violates the idea that he created man. There's no reason to do that.
Click bait (Score:2)
Click bait headline. Darwin's theory of evolution remains unchallenged. His *speculation* that his theory could mean that life may have originated in a warm little pool (a.k.a. "primordial soup") has been "challenged" - only not really, because it hasn't been taken all that seriously as a literal description in a very long time (and as a broader concept "warm little pool" is a pretty accurate description of a hydrothermal vent).
Pretty much everyone agrees that to get started, early protolife probably need
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After arguing very cogently and persuasively based on pure evidence and logic that God is not needed for species creation, he was speculating, may be God was not needed even for the origin. That aspect of it does not change whether it originated in warm pools or hot vents or tepid clays.
He did that in 1860. He did not know about Gregor Mendel's research on p
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Agreed. Given the phenomenal ground-breaking substance of Darwin's speculation, arguing over the specific details of his speculated source is in no meaningful way a challenge.
And it is truly a shame that Darwin did not learn of Mendel's research - not he would necessarily have believed it, or that it would have benefited Mendel's legacy if he had. But had might have collaborated to impressive effect.
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Later writings after 1860s suggest one of the biggest issue he was wrestling with, on the scientific dimension, is the issue of heritable units, mechanism for passing traits through generation without "graying out or smearing out" of the features. Mendel showing some traits are passed whole, never merged or grayed out, and they persist latently skipping generations, and fixed rat
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The most critical, significant and mind blowing aspect of "life originating in warm pools" is NOT the presence of warm pools, but the absence of God..
Except in no way would that mean an absence of God, at that point or anywhere else. That's a trivial non-sequitur fallacy.
There would have to be, by definition, some intersection between God's actions and material reality. That if "God did it", that God did it -in some particular way- resulting in intended effects on matter, is a given.
Nowadays, it's fashionable to handwave this sort of thing to "quantum effects", as if that's any more causally specific. In fact, QM is exactly how I would intellige
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Then again, it's on the NYPost via Fox News, so there's that.
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Never click. Never.
You could be bitten by Batboy and get infected with gonoherpasyphilaids.
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Science journalists suck even if they're not in a command officer.
Just saying.
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Well except that you could interpret the area around a hydrothermal vent as a 'warm little pond'. Depends how literally you take Darwin's phrase.
News from 30 years ago! (Score:2)
I'd like to take a moment to state that science journalists, in generals suck.
Indeed, apparently this one only just noticed the hydro-thermal vent theory for the original of life [wikipedia.org] that was suggested about 30 years ago.
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You should try the ones in colonels. Much less sucky....
Um, excuse me (Score:1)
Darwin wrote about the origin of the *species*, not life itself. Dummies.
Protocells? (Score:2)
Protocel is a made up word (It's actually the brand name of a hoax magic cure).
But it obviously is being used to mean "first" or 'just before' the real word, cell. Which makes it entirely the worst kind of jargon.
The only thing it does in the title is to make people THINK the speaker/writer is knowledgeable.
The title should be "Did life originate near hydrothermal vents."
But the question while valid and it might be true, but as of yet we have no real evidence. It is not proven by the research. (i.e. ques
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It's hardly a new idea. It's been floating around for decades. It's just an oversexed headline
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It's hardly a new idea. It's been floating around for decades.
And don't forget the Miller–Urey experiment [wikipedia.org]:
The Miller–Urey experiment (or Miller experiment) was a chemical experiment that simulated the conditions thought at the time to be present on the early Earth, and tested the chemical origin of life under those conditions.
The experiment used water (H2O), methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), and hydrogen (H2). The chemicals were all sealed inside a sterile 5-liter glass flask connected to a 500 ml flask half-full of water. The water in the smaller flask was heated to induce evaporation, and the water vapour was allowed to enter the larger flask. Continuous electrical sparks were fired between the electrodes to simulate lightning in the water vapour and gaseous mixture, and then the simulated atmosphere was cooled again so that the water condensed and trickled into a U-shaped trap at the bottom of the apparatus.
After a day, the solution collected at the trap had turned pink in color. At the end of one week of continuous operation, the boiling flask was removed, and mercuric chloride was added to prevent microbial contamination. The reaction was stopped by adding barium hydroxide and sulfuric acid, and evaporated to remove impurities. Using paper chromatography, Miller identified five amino acids present in the solution: glycine, -alanine and -alanine were positively identified, while aspartic acid and -aminobutyric acid (AABA) were less certain, due to the spots being faint.
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Since them, amino acids have been observed around the solar system. There's no speculation left about whether amino acids formed on a young Earth, as they just form everywhere near the sun where there are PAHs [wikipedia.org], and PAHs have now been observed in the interstellar medium.
The building blocks of life are so common there's no mystery left. It's now the step up from amino acids to self-replicating RNA that's the mystery.
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It's a protoword.
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Protocel is a made up word
There are two L's in protocell.
Jordan, S.F., Rammu, H., Zheludev, I.N. et al. Promotion of protocell self-assembly from mixed amphiphiles at the origin of life. Nat Ecol Evol (2019) doi:10.1038/s41559-019-1015-y [nature.com]
Sometimes, the best words are "made up", and don't have additional meanings to confuse search engines. Have you ever tried to search for "LaTEX" on google? Generally the best practice is to add the term "tex".
A search for Protocell [google.com] on google scholar or on Pubmed [nih.gov] will turn up hundreds of relevant resu
Re:Protocells? (Score:5, Insightful)
Protocel is a made up word
Protip: In the English language you can add any known prefix or suffix to any root word, and the result is not even a new word. Certainly it isn't a "made up" word. Cromulent is a made-up word. And yet, because this is English, a real word. But protocromulent isn't a new word, or a made-up word, it is just the known word "cromulent" combined with the known prefix proto-.
translated into English
Please learn you some English right away.
replicate (Score:4, Interesting)
The key characteristic of life is that it replicates itself. Containment in the form of a cell can be nice, but is not essential, and probably not the first step in forming life, because a cell wall doesn't really become useful until you have a mechanism for controlled passing of nutrients through the wall. Otherwise, it just gets in the way.
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So when I'm too old to replicate, I'm not "life"?
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So when I'm too old to replicate, I'm not "life"?
Indeed. You will be dead long before the last cell division in your body.
Fuck Darwin (Score:3, Funny)
Betteridge already says NO.
We will never know (Score:2)
Scientists have shown that the basic forms can self-assemble in a [simulation of a] murky pool. It's probably at least as likely that life originated in a tidal zone, or a river, where various compounds can have washed into it. Barring the invention of a hist-o-scope, we will never know.
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You would be right except for the role of proton pumps in biology and hydrothermal vents. That kind of action along with some other ingredients pretty much guarantees vesicles will form near hydrothermal vents that can eventually become life itself.
Peanut Butter (Score:2)
One creative creationist argument against "spontaneous life" is that a jar of peanut butter has all the ingredients of these abiogenesis experiments and there have been billions of PB jars. "Nobody has reported new life in them", they point out.
It's an excellent question in that it makes one think. Counter arguments include:
1. If somebody found something odd, they'd probably just think it's a bad batch and throw it out, not send it to a lab.
2. The earliest life was probably slow and clunky. It had yet to be
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2. The earliest life was probably slow and clunky. It had yet to be shaped by competition. It may not grow fast enough to even be noticed in time.
Oh, I thought you said chunky there, I thought we were talking about peanut butter again.
As far as I know, part of the idea is that complex life required some mixing of some sort, but not too vigorous. You can get that around a vent, or you can get it in a tidal zone, or you can get it in a river. Or probably lots of other places, but those are all places with water and motion which leap rapidly to mind.
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One creative creationist argument against "spontaneous life" is that a jar of peanut butter has all the ingredients of these abiogenesis experiments and there have been billions of PB jars. "Nobody has reported new life in them", they point out.
It's an excellent question in that it makes one think. Counter arguments include:
1. If somebody found something odd, they'd probably just think it's a bad batch and throw it out, not send it to a lab.
2. The earliest life was probably slow and clunky. It had yet to be shaped by competition. It may not grow fast enough to even be noticed in time.
3. If it were sent to a lab, the scientists possibly would not even recognize the substance as "life" because it may not resemble anything around to day. Concluding it was some kind of processing contamination would be the likely result.
4. Maybe the conditions for the formation of life are different than our current speculation suggests.
You missed 5, Darwin's own point from the "warm little pond" quote. The result if any modern abiogenesis would immediately be eaten.
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Barring the invention of a hist-o-scope, we will never know.
Right, just like we'll never know if the dinosaurs were real, or if Satan planted the bones to confuse us, because we lack a hist-o-scope.
Talk about stupid, jeeze. What happens if you find out that your senses don't give you direct knowledge of your surroundings and everything you experience are guesses your brain makes? Do you implode into a blob of ignorance, or do you learn that indirect knowledge is already everything we have?
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Basic forms of what? Certainly not life. Yes it is simply unknown where or how or why the self-replicating nanotech we call life began. Thermal vents are a good candidate location but certainly not the only one.
Regarding Professor Nick Lane (Score:1)
Nick Lane in London has been a biochemist for a while and has written some good books on origins. I am reading "The Vital Question" now and in it he talks about the role of mitochondria in helping form life.
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Mitochondria evolved from prokaryotic cells (bacteria). Life had evolved quite some time before a eukaryotic cell absorbed a bacteria. Mitochondria d not explain the origin of life.
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I do not claim to be an expert in biology (or oceanography) here. I meant to say that the presence of mitochondria in the cell accounts for some interesting stuff that leads to our cellular origins beyond our initial origins when all life began.
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They are of interest in studying eukaryotic cells, but life had been on earth a very long time before mitochondria came along.
Q theory (Score:2)
Re: Q theory (Score:1)
Learn your lessons well. (Score:2)
Life needs three things (Score:3)
2. It needs some kind of genetic material to record information to build parts.
3. It needs some kind of metabolism to provide energy and build parts of the organism.
Not sure if you can create all three in a hydro-thermal vent. Life exists there now, but can it start in such an environment?
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If you start with only the 2nd thing in a single molecule, the rest can evolve, which greatly reduces the number of things that need to happen by chance, all at the same time and place.
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Did you read the Nature paper that Nick Lane, et al. wrote? It is pretty technical but they address several of those criteria.
I read thru the main summary plus a few of the details on the vesicles:
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
I got this link from:
https://thenextweb.com/insight... [thenextweb.com]
Darwin's speculation might be wrong. (Score:2)
Descent. Not origin. Darwin's Achievement. (Score:5, Insightful)
He admitted very clearly he did not have any idea of origin of life. He had some speculation, and he just said a purely mechanical/chemical origin of life was possible, and divine intervention, or a divine creator need not be pre supposed.
So life originating in hot thermal vent would not contradict anything Darwin said, it does not contradict evolution. Infact it reaffirms his speculation that a divine origin might not be needed.
"Darwin" "Wrong" is a clickbait strategy.
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Matthew 3:9: "And do not presume to say within yourselves, 'We have Abraham as father.' For I say to you that out of these stones God is able to raise up children unto Abraham."
Magma vents specifically are n
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Torture the language until it confesses, I suppose.
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Eh, you felt the need to respond, so the same can be said of your thought processes, I suppose.
It isn't definitive, in itself. You won't be force converted by the required cognitive response to a presentation of "proof". You get to choose.
But, well, some organisms don't "make it" in evolution, and just serve to advance other ones. Seems natural to me, don't you agree?
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I would have been more impressed if the old texts wrote about "mysterious deep-sea hydrothermal vents", rather than "stones", and that these strange and unknown words were copied faithfully by scribes until we finally understand the meaning today.
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Your expectation would be that the terminology used should have been specific ones that no one for two thousand years would have the slightest chance of understanding when presented?
And nothing conceptually has changed of this content since first written. It is, actually, possible to have an accurate translation of a language to another, and to copy a document accurately.
Do you often approach reading material in general by concluding that the most accurate way to read what it says, is to conjecture it mean
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Many things are partial reflections of the truth.
You still have to investigate enough to evaluate them, and have the capability of nuanced analysis. You don't get a Ph.D in Religious Studies with a one-line paper to your thesis advisor reading "They're all wrong". Ignorance of a topic is nothing to announce proudly, in my experience.
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But it is a fool's errand to discover modern scientific truths from ancient texts. Motivation for such studies come from vested interests. It is not a coincidence vested interests mean the interest of the "vest wearing church official" over the interests of the King, or the People.
Scripture shaped the society. Laid out the basic frame work for the evolution of cooperation in the society. Natural instincts created mother-offspring altruism, it evolved into parent-offspring altrui
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is the work of fundamentalists, authoritarians, etc.
I was reading until this. Then this absurd nonsense.
I also post. And you post. Posting is the work of political demogogues, fork-lift operators, and mass murderers. Or not.
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After Darwin God was in Origin of Life, not Origin of Species.
Now many modern theories, artificial DNA, engineered life etc closed/closing that gap.
God was needed to explain why we humans cooperate and help each other, while evolution says we are/should be competing with one another.
1980s, University of Michigan tournament of strategies, game theory was seminal in kicking off the understanding of Evolution of Cooperation and Altruism
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Please sir, do go on.
Oh, I will. Your unbacked assertions aside.
Though, you won't. And that doesn't require any claims at all.
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Where are they now? (Score:4, Interesting)
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They could be short lived, getting eaten by modern life.
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You mean the building blocks of lunch.
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Great question!
If you're truly curious, it has a simple and obvious answer that you can discover by maintaining your interest for a few years and remembering that question when other stories are published about that part of the science. This story is about a different part of the science, so doesn't go into those details.
But I suspect you're only asking because you enjoy wallowing in ignorance, and your interest is not in the answer.
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It is a great question, and not just at face value, but about how science gets done and makes discoveries. Several possibilities:
1 - They are there, but we never took appropriate samples or explicitly looked for them. For example, has anyone ever done EM on the residue of a deep water sample?
2 - We saw them but didn't recognize them. They might have shown up under someone's microscope but were overlooked because it looked like mud and dirt.
3 - We saw them, recognized them as biological, but assumed they
Re: Where are they now? (Score:2)
It's not just compartmentalization (Score:3)
darwin is about natural selection not abiogenesis (Score:3)
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Why speak about darwin ?
I can haz clickburder?
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It has sense (Score:1)
In a prebiotic non-oxidation environment, every energy compound can exist for long time, so an archea methabolism could exist without cells. All in the soup work as a enormous cell, where enzymes, ARN (just by random assembly) and a lot of organic compounds exists and begin to replicate without login order.
So the pieces of a cell could exist just by a similar procedure to life itself, only that not a cell itself exists.
The vents are very likely places because could generate a lot of the chemicals needed jus
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Nobody I know of seriously suggestes that photosynthesis was a component in the origin of life. We're (speaking for geologists in general) pretty sure that photosynthesis was a component in the formation of stromatolites, which fossil structures have been found back as far as a little over 3 billion years ago. But the first claimed cellular fossils are nearly 500 million years older, and there have been claims (disputed, I'll
Darwin may have been wrong? (Score:1)
“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present.— But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etc present, that a protein compound was chemic
Three Things Needed ... (Score:2)
For life to emerge, in the form of a cell, there are three things that need to happen:
1. Containment (i.e. a cell membrane, which is permeable allowing for chemicals to come in and out)
2. Metabolism (i.e. extracting energy from the environment. This requires proteins which form structure, as well enzymes that catalyze many processes of life)
3. Replication (i.e. cells can create copies of itself)
The cell membrane is the easiest part. If you have phospholipids in water, they self assemble into a lipid bilayer [wikipedia.org]
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... to the extent that the main scientific organisation involved in the subject is called International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life [issol.org] while the main journal is called " Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres ". [springer.com]
I've never attended one of their shindigs, but I'm told that half the name labels are printed with the "Origins" phrase, and the other half are "Origin". Distribution is, hopefully, random - to stimulate disagreement.