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Earth Science

Was This Life's First Meal? (sciencemag.org) 91

Posted by BeauHD from the who's-hungry dept.
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Studies of the origin of life are replete with paradoxes. Take this doozy: Every known organism on Earth uses a suite of proteins -- and the DNA that helps build it -- to construct the building blocks of our cells. But those very building blocks are also needed to make DNA and proteins. The solution to this chicken-and-egg conundrum may lie at the site of hydrothermal vents, fissures in the sea floor that spew hot water and a wealth of other chemicals, researchers report today. Scientists say they have found that a trio of metal compounds abundant around the vents can cause hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide (CO2) to react to form a collection of energy-rich organic compounds critical to cell growth. And the high temperatures and pressures around the vents themselves may have jump-started life on Earth, the team argues.

The new work is "thrilling," says Thomas Carell, an origin of life chemist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich who was not affiliated with the new project. The organic molecules the study generated include formate, acetate, and pyruvate, which Carell calls "the most fundamental molecules of energy metabolism," the process of converting nutrients into cell growth. The new results support a long-held idea about the origin of life known as "metabolism first hypothesis." It posits that geochemical processes on early Earth created a stew of simple energy-rich compounds that drove the synthesis of complex molecules, which eventually provided the materials for Darwinian evolution and life. The findings appear in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
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Was This Life's First Meal? More

Was This Life's First Meal?

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  • It's hard to study how life came into being, since life now exists anyplace on Earth that is similar to those original places. Whatever was there that started life, now just gets eaten.

    • Yep, we could be on the 100th iteration of life that finally produced multicellular organisms. Those early single cell iterations left no fossil records. We know that at least one of the mass extinctions was caused when organisms started producing oxygen which was toxic to most other organisms at the time. Itâ(TM)s likely this scenario has played out dozens of times where the newer organism caused the rapid extinction of whatever it evolved from.

      • Re: Life now eats it (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @09:43PM (#59790230) Journal
        True. It kind of bakes your noodle a little to think that perhaps all the fossil records we've uncovered are just what survived as fossils, and that for all we know there could have been other forms of life that existed even before those, but there's nothing left of them now, the Earth itself reabsorbed them so completely that we'll never find any sort of fossil records of them.
        Reminds me of a Larry Niven story on that very subject. A very old extraterrestrial race called the Chirpsithra (billions of years older than humans, if you believed them) had one very old member of their species that had visited Earth long before oxygen-breathing life existed; there was a sentient species with their own civilization, but oxygen was toxic to them, and the newer organisms that exhaled oxygen were literally causing them to go extinct -- and eventually they did.
  • We all came from God's pecker.

    • God's pecker is a thermal vent?

      Sounds plausible..

      • Matthew 3:9
        and do not think to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones.

        So... if this comes back on me... it's the Gnostics' fault.

        • Meh. The Gnostics got wiped out by the Christians because they were so offended and threatened by the mere idea that you could have a religion without a hierarchical structure. Blaming the Gnostics for something is like blaming the guy at work who doesn't speak english well and/or is out sick for something that got screwed up.

          • It... was a joke.

            And not exactly "wiped out", concepts such as theosis and hesychasm exist yet today, acknowledged as Gnostic or not.

            Basically, Valentinus messed it up for everyone, by calling his nonsense "Gnostic". He clearly didn't Know.

            • It's all good. And I meant physically wiped out, as is 'they murdered them all'. Been a long time since I read any of that, but I think they considered them all to be heretics of the worst kind therefore they felt the massacre was justified. :p
    • But Raif, where did this 'God' come from, then? Who made him?
      • My favorite way to put it: Is God irreducibly complex?

        • The improbability of IC structures is in that they need to be genetically produced. That is, sequential mutations, with survivability of each step. That's rather far afield of God.

          • I'll take that as a "yes, God couldn't have evolved".

            • Couldn't have, and had no need to. He's eternally existent. Rather like the "steady state" model of the universe.

              Until that theist Lemaitre proposed the Big Bang, and corrected the scientists on that.

            • Well, reading the bible you'd sure get the idea that he has. At least he matured over time, from a kid throwing a tantrum when its toys don't work the way he wants so he flushes them down the toilet to a laid back guy who lets his son take over the family business.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            Never heard Internal Combustion engines being used as a justification for religiosity. That's a unique approach.

          • What do integrated circuits have to do with it?
        • Hmm, that's an entirely different question, not one of 'where did God come from' but more the nature of this so-called 'God' entity.
          Of course I've messed with people who have knocked on my door before, and the closest thing I ever got to an answer was "We're not supposed to know that yet", which really isn't an answer at all, just a dodge.

      • If the material universe ceased to exist, would 2+2=4 still be true?

        Welcome to the world of metaphysics. Like math.

        Does math need to be created, or is it that it just -is-?

        May as well go straight to the boss-level questions tonight.

        • If the material universe ceased to exist, would 2+2=4 still be true?
          If the 'material universe' ceased to exist, there would be no 'laws of physics', and for that matter there'd be no us, so, really, the question seems to be pointless. More philosophical than scientific.
          If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it fall, does it make a sound?
          Kind of like that.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          does 2 exist though?
          Does squiggly line + triangle = banana? Why or why not?
          Some thinking entity had to create the number 2.

          People made up math, the same as they made up god.

    • Oh and by the way you're telling us all quite a bit more about yourself that you automatically think this 'God' of yours is male. Would actually make quite a bit more sense for 'God' to be female, since females produce offspring.

    • So we're a piss take?

  • "chicken-and-egg" problem simple (Score:3)

    by perpenso ( 1613749 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @09:00PM (#59790138)

    chicken-and-egg conundrum

    That is a simple problem. Egg first. Something that was not a chicken laid a chicken egg. The "not a chicken" being one genetic mutation away from being a chicken. The egg being named by its contents.

    • I name an egg by how it is prepared, poached, fried, scrambled...

    • Then a boss-level problem next for the level, naturally: What objective validity is there to any conceptual division of "chicken" versus "not a chicken"?

      And you haven't made it to the world boss yet. [wikipedia.org]

      • Then a boss-level problem next for the level, naturally: What objective validity is there to any conceptual division of "chicken" versus "not a chicken"? And you haven't made it to the world boss yet. [wikipedia.org]

        Already answered. The DNA, the mutation that turns is-not into is. That mutation should have a physical manifestation, or else it would not have been selected as the "difference".

        • The DNA, and the resulting differences, are arbitrarily selected and arbitrarily called a particular species.

          That's what the link is about.

          • The DNA, and the resulting differences, are arbitrarily selected and arbitrarily called a particular species. That's what the link is about.

            Sure. However there are two different questions. Is there a line genetically differentiating one species from another? Yes. Where is the line? Don't care, only the existence of the line is necessary to answer chicken or egg. If we don't have an is-not parent and an is offspring we need to revisit Darwin.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            Human beings are all about arbitrary thresholds. Our brains crave them. We also hate to look closely at them because the cognitive dissonance hurts too much.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        Then a boss-level problem

        Why invoke some sort of boss? Just let the chickens sort it out among themselves.

        BTW, the correct answer to 'which came first, chicken or egg' is 'the rooster'.

  • https://www.sciencefacts.net/m... [sciencefacts.net]
    I was sufficiently fascinated by this experiment in college to learn about Urey's role in WWII's development of an atomic bomb by separating heavy water and that Miller (a much younger man) was named by a popular magazine as America's most eligible bachelor.

    That a single path or process of inorganic compounds becoming organisms is the default presumption is curious and suspicious to me. The framing is: What we first discover is the only means!

    Even more specious is the r

    • The Miller-Urey experiment took organic chemicals, applied a process to them, and got... organic chemicals.

      Nothing approximating evolution was demonstrated. Congratulations.

      • That's all metabolism is
  • It was simply the early life form of soylent green.

  • Million Monkeys, Universe edition (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @09:48PM (#59790240) Journal
    As much as the Creationists seethe and rage at the thought, life apparently was just a happy accident: just the right conditions at just the right time with just the right elements, and something alive was the result. Assuming there was some sort of 'intellgent design' is just indulging in circular logic, because whoever the 'intelligent designer' was had to have come from somewhere -- and then we're back to the who-made-who conundrum.
    Maybe it took a trillion trillion sequences of events all over the oceans of Earth for that one viable single-cell organism to be created. We'll probably never know.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dsanfte ( 443781 )

      As much as the Creationists seethe and rage at the thought, life apparently was just a happy accident: just the right conditions at just the right time with just the right elements, and something alive was the result. Assuming there was some sort of 'intellgent design' is just indulging in circular logic, because whoever the 'intelligent designer' was had to have come from somewhere -- and then we're back to the who-made-who conundrum.

      Maybe it took a trillion trillion sequences of events all over the oceans of Earth for that one viable single-cell organism to be created. We'll probably never know.

      The exact order of events doesn't matter. You exist, ergo all evidence you will find in this universe will be evidence of the natural processes that allow(ed) you to exist.

      You might as well think of it as procedurally-generated, like No Man's Sky: as far as you look, as deep as you look, you'll only find evidence of past events consistent with you being alive today. So we *know* what's out there, in broad strokes. There will be no big surprises. It's not like we're going to find that there was a red giant t

  • Panspermia can hardly be ruled out. Ever hardier bacteria has been incrementally discovered. We probably haven't found the limit yet.

    But even so, thermal vents on any volcanic water-filled world are still a strong contender.

    • I think many, if not all, our questions concerning the Origin of Life on Earth will be answered if and when we find any sort of life, or at least evidence of any sort of life, anywhere outside Earth. I keep hoping one or the other Mars rovers will find something. Of course it'll also start the Shitstorm of the Millennium when we do, because the Creationists will go into epileptic seizures over it, their entire worldview turned upside down.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        If life is found on Mars that more or less is similar to Earth life, it could be argued that Earth seeded Mars. The only way to truly rule in favor of Panspermia is to find similar life on a relatively distant star system.

        because the Creationists will go into epileptic seizures

        I suspect different sects will have different responses. The Bible doesn't rule out other inhabited planets. It's generally vague about most cosmological issues.

        • If they find life on Mars that 'resembles' Earth life it'll be microbial, and if its' DNA doesn't match any known species of microbe from Earth then you can make an argument that it originated on Mars.
  • I wish I was primordial pre-life ooze. Things were simpler then

  • high temperatures and pressures around the vents themselves may have jump-started life on Earth,

    So: pulling yourself up by your bootstraps way before there were even bootstraps -- that's a pretty neat trick!

    And once you're got that infinitesimal BIOS up and running, everything else is just adding on layer after layer. (Seven level OSI level my foot.)

  • Seriously, I think I have known this for a long time. Maybe this is new research with new findings but the idea that steam vents in the ocean might be where life originates from is not news.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      The observation that the conditions around vents can produce useful organic compounds is the new part.

      The fun part of science is the getting drunk in a pub and saying "hey, what if life started around hydrothermal vents?" The work part is spending the next few decades (or centuries) figuring out the details.

  • I seem to recall some H.P. Lovecraft short, that the first civilization was based on the same biology as botulism.

  • If that's the case then I would expect life to continually reinvent itself. If life began in the thermal vents then isn't it reasonable to think that those conditions continually create life or the precursors to life. How can we test that hypothesis?

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