How Life Began: New Research Suggests Simple Approach

[tocqueville]

Michael Schirber
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com
Sat Jun 10, 9:00 AM ET

Somewhere on Earth, close to 4 billion years ago, a set of molecular reactions flipped a switch and became life. Scientists try to imagine this animating event by simplifying the processes that characterize living things.

New research suggests the simplification needs to go further.

All currently known organisms rely on DNA to replicate and proteins to run cellular machinery, but these large molecules—intricate weaves of thousands of atoms—are not likely to have been around for the first organisms to use.

"Life could have started up from the small molecules that nature provided," says Robert Shapiro,a chemist from New York University.

more here

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060610/sc_space/howlifebegannewresearchsuggestssimpleapproach

[Warpy]

1. "Primordial soup" experiments that duplicated

the stew of water, inorganic chemicals, toxic (to us) atmosphere and heavy storm conditions on a newly formed Earth have produced proteins that self replicate. It's not much of a leap to more and more complicated proteins and acids combining and eventually producing the first strings of DNA or RNA.

The only surprise in these experiments was how quickly those proteins were produced, in a matter of weeks rather than decades or even years.

One branch of philosophy says that life is most likely an artifact of planets, and that we're likely to find at least bacterial life on most of the planets and moons we manage to visit.

I find it preposterous to think the universe is populated by English speaking bipeds as in Star Trek, but likely that life exists nearly everywhere.

[Kutjara]

2. Damn, I was hoping to meet...

...one of those hot, tall, blue, antennaed Andorian women. Or maybe a Vulcan curious about my illogical emotions. Looks like I'll have to content myself with dating bacteria. No change there, then.

[dysfunctional press]

3. star trek clarification...

the reason that all species appear to speak english is due to the existence/use of the "universal translator".

[Kutjara]

4. And the reason they're all humanoid...

...is because of the 'proginator species' that travelled the galaxy seeding planets with life.

[dysfunctional press]

6. as outlined in "the chase", Stardate: 46731.5... star trek: tng

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708789/

[Warpy]

8. I liked the Babel fish better as a translation device

and the only aliens I thought were much good were the bacteria in a sand layer just under the surface that had formed a neural net over the surface of the planet.

That's what we're likely to find, not Klingons.

[LeftyMom]

5. I hate to be a nit-picking geek , but I am anyhow so here goes:

The reason so many of the aliens are alike on Star Trek is that they were seeded through the galaxy by a previous civilization. That's discovered in Next Gen episode The Chase.

[Junkdrawer]

7. The origin of life is something I've thought about a bit...

and, from what I see, I think new ideas, principles on a par with Evolution, are required. For example:

Imagine a primordial goo of random amino acids. Now imagine there are various polymers, simple proteins, that could spontaneously form from these amino acids. Which of these proteins would nature select? Answer: the protein that locks up the most amino acids for the longest period of time. So pre-life may be a competition to see which structures lock up limited resources. Could enzymes be the first predator?

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

9. I Read The Article, But Found Nothing Substantially New.

It seemed to be all personal theory and a little bit of science, but nothing that is ground breaking or of any real magnitude of nailing down how life originated.

It is an interesting theory, but it seemed like just a personal theory without any real substantially new information. The newly found microbe that gets energy from a two protein reaction was interesting, but that discovery is a far cry from explaining how life originated on earth.