'Monumental' Experiment Suggests How Life on Earth May Have Started - Slashdot
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'Monumental' Experiment Suggests How Life on Earth May Have Started
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An anonymous reader shared this article from the Washington Post:
A much-debated theory holds that 4 billion years ago, give or take, long before the appearance of dinosaurs or even bacteria, the primordial soup contained only the possibility of life. Then a molecule called RNA took a dramatic step into the future: It made a copy of itself. Then the copy made a copy, and over the course of many millions of years, RNA begot DNA and proteins, all of which came together to form a cell, the smallest unit of life able to survive on its own.
Now, in an important advance supporting this RNA World theory, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., have carried out a small but essential part of the story. In test tubes, they developed an RNA molecule that was able to make accurate copies of a different type of RNA. The work, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, gets them closer to the grand goal of growing an RNA molecule that makes accurate copies of itself.
"Then it would be alive," said Gerald Joyce, president of Salk and one of the authors of the new paper. "So, this is the road to how life can arise in a laboratory or, in principle, anywhere in the universe...."
John Chaput, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California at Irvine who did not participate in the study, called the crossing of that threshold by the Salk team "monumental," adding that "at first, I looked on it as a little bit jaw-dropping. ... It's super-neat."
The Post adds that "the scenario they tested probably mimics one of the earliest stirrings of evolution." And Michael Kay, a professor of biochemistry at University of Utah, says the new paper has given the RNA World theory "key evidence" to show "it is plausible and reasonable."
He added that the RNA copier developed at Salk will "provide a valuable tool for people wanting to do directed evolution experiments."
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I think you mean cell membranes, not cell walls. Plenty of lifeforms don't have cell walls.
The sine qua non of life is replication, not membranes. Self-replicating RNA is alive.
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Not to disagree with your general point, but it's a stretch to call a floating RNA molecule "alive".
Dunno about you, but I draw that boundary later in the process.
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If some small group of complex molecules can replicate themselves, then they can be subject to natural selection and so be "alive".
It is thought that the earliest life evolved in or pumice or some other natural environment that provided a protected space without the need for a membrane.
And of course, the first living thing did not have to worry about being eaten.
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another un-falsifiable hypothesis
You seem to be very confused about the meaning of "falsifiable".
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"Tell me you don't really understand any of this without telling me you don't really understand any of this."
Also as someone else mentioned, you're woefully unclear on the meaning of "falsifiable".
"Falsifiability is a deductive standard of evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses, introduced by the philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934). A theory or hypothesis is falsifiable (or refutable) if it can be logically contradicted by an empirical test."
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going viral. #MakeRNAGreatAgain -
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Ackshually.. I found this book to be a fascinating read https://www.amazon.com/Genetic... [amazon.com]
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No, it was GOD, y'know your invisible intelligent creator in the sky. He created the world, then he created all life, then he created man from a mud sculpture and finally he took one of the man's rib and transcoded his male DNA to create woma... wait,... that means... women are... uhh... transcoded men??... uhh... n-never mind... I need to go re-examine my entire world view.
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Yeah the whole "magical super-being crafting the universe from nothing" makes so much more sense than all that sciency stuff.
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Reading the paper, it took scientists 10-years to develop (not sure of procedure) hammerhead RNA which is now able to copy itself.
The origin of the RNA in this story is lab created RNA.
Electronic Arts promised me a molecule construction set back in the 90's, where is it?
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10 years is all? The planet had (literally) zillions of chemicals randomly mixing in diverse and fucked up conditions for 500 million years before the first cell life emerged. The Earth timeline according to phylogenetic studies and paleontology record is (if I recall correctly.. please fact check): Earth formation --- 500 million years pass --> single cell life emerges --500 million years go by--> last universal common ancestor (LUCA) --1 billion years--> multicellular life --1 billion years--
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This was so stupid that I had to come and tell you how fucking stupid you are.
You're blindingly stupid, so much so that you deserve your own page in the Guinness Book of Really Stupid People.
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1. Form a hypothesis based on current knowledge and understanding.
2. Perform experiments/observations to test the hypothesis.
3. If the experiments/observations refute the hypothesis, then reject the hypothesis. Else accept the hypothesis provisionally and keep testing.
4. Go back to 1.
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This still required someone to create the RNA molecule in the lab. So, wouldn't this actually be proof of intelligent design?
I don't disagree with this part of Gerald Joyce's statement because there's an intelligence behind the creation of that life:
"this is the road to how life can arise in a laboratory"
But this is where the giant leap happens...
"or, in principle, anywhere in the universe...."
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That something can happen in a lab environment is a demonstration of how it can happen in nature given enough time and lots of options. Given millions of years, there's a lot of time for things to happen. And further research will likely find even more plausible ways this could end up happening. Heck, humans made nuclear reactors, but even that turns up in nature by sheer accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .
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You're assuming the Earth is the only dice the universe rolled.
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Theoretically? Yes. Practically? No. The problem is in "enough time". This universe is neither infinite in size nor infinitely old.
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If it can be found with 10 years in a lab it can be done with randomness for 500 million years across trillions of star systems. You are assuming Earth is the only dice that the universe was rolling.
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Nope. And nope. You just have no grasp of statistics.
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And of course, you have numbers to back your assertion. You probably studied the issue deeply and have serious credentials in the area, of you wouldn't make such categorical statements. You certainly wouldn't go pontificating on the subject only based on your personal incredulity [wikipedia.org] - because that would be a fallacy!
So please show some of the numbers that show there is "practically" no chance that life can appear anywhere without an infinite universe and infinite time!
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Yet here we are...
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To quote everyone with 2 or more active brain cells, "No."
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Obviously not. Like basically any "modern" religious delusions, "intelligent" design cannot be proven unless the creator itself decides to show up. The religious fuckups just cleaned up their crap enough so you cannot actually disprove their claims anymore. That does obviously not make them valid in any way.
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Not only does he have to show up, but take an IQ test and probably a mental health evaluation too.
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Indeed.
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Still one of my all-time-favorite scientism terms. Deus Ex Moleculo.
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"Directed evolution" is a bit like a "guided democracy". A smokescreen term for something that belongs into a high-sec lab in a Petri dish because it makes you puke.
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Oh, so it turns out that life can arise through purely physical means, no magic sky fairy needed? Dang.
Too be honest, I kinda liked the bullshit story about the sky fairy making the earth and then a man and then taking a rib from the man to make a woman.
It's just a much cooler story than boring shit like molecules combining according to physical forces that are well known and understood.
Damn you, Science!!
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I'm around the half-century mark, and it's been a steady beat of discovery towards a deterministic origin of life the whole time.
We're now at the point where we have found plausible observation-supported evidence that if you have a high-metallicity yellow or orange dwarf star in a low-density stellar neighbourhood that forms a wet rock of approximately an Earth mass, the raw materials required for life will rain down on it and there's no reason to believe they won't constantly mix all over that world for mi
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At least this isn't an ignorant comment, I'll grant you that. But is it so hard to simply say your system of logic (the "scientific method") never was imagined to address questions of origin, which, by definition, are concerned with what cannot be observed? I do not understand this desire to stretch science to answer questions of metaphysics.
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Stop bullshitting. No scientific field purports to delve into the metaphysical.
Scientists aren't doing that. If they are, they're not scientists.
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Congrats, I'm ~65 and every single bit of religion I've ever seen has been planted in bullshit, watered with superstition, and sustained by ignorance.
After 2000 years you'd think they'd have something to show for all that preaching and worshiping, but nada. Absolutely nothing. Meanwhile science keeps coming up with the answers- answers that work.
The fact is that every good thing in our lives is the result of science and technology...not whispering into our hands hoping the magic sky fairy will alter his *im
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Talk about bullshit science reporting. Read the article. "An RNA enzyme with RNA polymerase..." yadayadayada... Sure once you get a polymerase lots of cell-manufacturing shit happens. But, polymerase are proteins, not raw RNA and building proteins randomly or otherwise is still ( always? ) impossible. In the day I did plenty of protein folding kinetics , and my samples would fold-to-function in a couple dozen milliseconds. But, nobody knows how that mathematically impossible ( Leve
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Your post boils down to "we don't understand the entire process yet, therefore it is impossible and God exists".
That is the "God of the Gaps" argument, and it's used by people with tiny minds who refuse to accept that the unknown can become the known when smart people dedicate themselves to the task. People who are afraid of a universe without a parent-substitute supernatural being promising everything will be OK so they imagine one.
And you're communicating this stupid, ignorant argument over the Internet.
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I mean, a book written by ignorant, desert-dwelling sheep herders 20 centuries ago couldn't possibly be wrong about anything, could it?
Never mind that these people knew nothing of science, biology, astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, chemistry, zoology, botany, astrophysics, climatology, cosmology, hydrodynamics, hygienics, immunology, magnetics, neurology, palaeontology, or geology, and never mind that most of them had never been more than about 10 miles from the place they'd been born in their entire li
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I see a lot of blather from you but nothing substantive.
Somehow you know more than all the scientists, and I respect that the same way I respect fortune tellers and psychics, which is not at all.
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And that's only one of the four thousand plus stories available to propose how magic sky fairies created humans. Some are even more interesting.
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Exactly. It's turtles all the way down.
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This is such a ignorant take. Science cannot explain the "origin" of anything and still be scientific. Science is a discipline of materialism first and last. To have such a discipline, the material must FIRST exist.
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Wrong, but thanks for sharing your ignorance!
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Hats off to understanding more about RNA world and how it might have worked. That's great. That said, a growing number of physicists like me think that RNA world could not have been the first life as the headline implies. There's a debate between genome-first and metabolism-first scientists, and I fall into the latter camp. We think metabolism of some kind probably predated RNA. Here's why.
RNA is cool because it can both catalyze reactions and act as a template for making more of itself. Each sugar has an extra hydrogen bond (compared to DNA) which makes RNA able to twist into functional shapes kind of like enzymes, but RNA can also serve as a template for a complementary strand to be made. RNA thus can do a half-assed job of both of DNA and of proteins, and RNA is an intermediate in the DNA -> RNA -> protein synthesis that happens in today's cells, so it's very likely to have been a precursor to both DNA and proteins, and avoids a lot of chicken-and-egg problems with all three having to appear at the same time.
That said, lots of physicists today are pretty confident that the first life had to include some form of metabolism: a channel through which free (i.e. low-entropy) energy is flowing. Any chemical reaction in thermodynamic equilibrium will by definition progress as fast forwards as backwards. "Life" without free energy would statistically be exactly as likely to shrink as to grow in size. Suppose there were a soup of elements at equilibrium and you added RNA to it. It would just sit there or decompose; without a source of free energy any movie of what it does would necessarily be equally likely played forwards or backwards. That's what equilibrium means.
The first life therefore almost certainly was linked to some inorganic source of free energy; probably geochemical in origin. Molecules that shape the chemical reactions in specific, contagious ways would tend to propagate to the limits of the source of free energy. At some point, RNA probably became the dominant molecule enabling metabolism with contagious specific properties, but without the flow of free energy, you'd get no propagation.
Living is a verb. I'd even say that "metabolism with contagious specific properties" might be an interesting definition for life. (NASA's current definition is "a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution" but self-sustaining discounts the necessity of the flow of free energy and you might not always have the time to see Darwinism in action. Is my spayed cat alive by NASA's definition? She needs cat food to sustain herself and cannot participate in Darwinian evolution anymore! Yet, her metabolism's specifics can be contagious and infect her cat food, causing its molecules to make more cat in a way the cat specifies.) The idea that the right brew of RNA in the absence of free energy flow and metabolism could "be" life is misguided and doesn't do justice to the centrality of metabolism in understanding what life really is.
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The headline doesn't imply that RNA was the first form of life.
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The argument about an energy gradient being required to allow localized reversal of entropy is pointless, because it's such an obvious and necessary assumption it does not normally bear mentioning. The entire universe requires it, so there is almost never any point in mentioning it for smaller scale specific cases unless you're trying to identify locations where the energy gradient is within the range that supports the chemical reactions you are looking for.
Also, if you abstract your individual cat to the
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I would say a star doesn't require an external energy gradient to keep being a star. It needed free energy to become a star, but it isn't reliant on continued external flows of free energy to keep on being a star.
Channeling free energy from an external source is a key property of living matter.
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Natural selection is the key.
Without replication, metabolism is just a chemical reaction.
The environment in which the first replication arose might indeed have many support molecules that supply appropriate energy. But they cannot evolve without replication.
My guess is that the first life was not RNA but something that eventually evolved into RNA.
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It seems pretty obvious that there was some sort of machinery in place (which by definition might be considered as life) to have created something as complex as RNA. This is basically the concept of assembly theory. If RNA is made in the lab, then humans are the assembler.
I agree with Stuart Kaufmann's "At home in the universe" that self-perpetuating "metabolisms" would be almost inevitable in the right environment, and this seems infinitely more plausible as the origin of life. RNA would be many steps late
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I completely agree!
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RNA is different from DNA in a few aspects.
One of them is that RNA is less stable, and therefore has a higher mutation rate than DNA.
That is one reason why the Influenza viruses keep changing from season to season, because the flu is an RNA virus.Another aspect of RNA, is that in addition to carrying genetic information, it can also act as a catalyst (enzyme).
So it is a dual tool if you like...
Life today still depends on that latter function of RNA: the ribosomes in every living cells depend on RNA's catalytic function for one of the most essential functions: protein synthesis.
Even after DNA took over, and after eukaryotes evolved (including multicellular life like us), RNA from the RNA World is still around.
There are also similarities between RNA and certain essential nutrients such as some B vitamins (niacinamide,...), which suggest common biochemical origins.
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You could also start with:
- two molecules that (moderately) accurately copied each other (though getting them both at the same time makes the time scale to the big event much longer.)
- A molecule that makes NEARLY always inacurate (but occasionally acurate and complete) copies of itself. (This also drastically pulls in the time to a two-molecule solution.)
- A molecule that makes inaccurate copies but with string of typical errors that occasionally loops back to an accurate and compl
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