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Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

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Re: Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

#41

Post by photochemsyn »

Mitochondria didn't really become advantageous until free oxygen began to increase... so maybe the chloroplast and oxygenic photosynthesis were the more important developments in terms of the evolution of complex life?

Perhaps mitochondria were a key partner to chloroplasts, but I wonder which came first? Or maybe just the free-living chloroplasts were capable of raising oxygen levels, once they'd figured out how to prevent themselves from being oxidized by their own waste products.

Re: Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

#42

Post by anonymouskimmer »

dav_Oz wrote: post #8

While the new evidence/discovery itself can be quickly summarized: > Within the now-dominant two-domain picture to which the Asgard archaea are contributing, the big story of life on this planet goes something like this. Some 4 billion years ago, life forked into two single-celled branches, the archaea and the bacteria. Genetic evidence implies that the two branches crossed again 2 billion years later when an archaeo…

> What stands out for me the most throughout the article, however, is the hostile environment and over-competitiveness "slowing down" the already painstakingly slow research itself (acknowledged by all parties):

We need monetary awards and recognition for sharing techniques. And we need better structures for credentialing people in the sciences. Students with theses which did not work, but which demonstrated good science, should still be awarded doctorates, and in a timely manner without having to exhaust themselves until nearly impossible tasks are accomplished. This is self-evident. I can only think of chauvinism as a reason to not do it this way. Chauvinism and glory hogging.

Re: Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

#43

Post by kerkeslager »

andrewflnr wrote: post #34
throwaway173738 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you never heard the joke about a million monkeys typing on a million towers eventually producing the complete works of Shakespeare? Little by little variation is accumulated when it’s beneficial, and the organism dies fast when it’s not.

This is also a bad argument. You probably know very well that if a cryptographer can force you to employ infinite monkeys on typewriters to guess their key, they'll declare victory. You need a mechanism that searches and focuses the space of possible chemistry, that forces life into being. If you look at the timeline for the emergence of life, I don't think it's one that supports an infinite monkey type of mechanism.…

> You need a mechanism that searches and focuses the space of possible chemistry, that forces life into being.

That's exactly what the infinite monkeys on a typewriter are a metaphor for.

In literal terms, it's trillions of trillions of protein reactions happening along earth's coastlines.

> If you look at the timeline for the emergence of life, I don't think it's one that supports an infinite monkey type of mechanism. It was too fast.

If it literally was infinite monkeys, we'd expect life to emerge near-instantaneously.

The reality is, of course, that it's not "infinite monkeys" but "a whole f-ing lot of monkeys"--the question is whether it's enough monkeys to produce life in the timeline. There's a lot of research that's been done on this, and we have pretty good data. I'm not an expert in this field, but my outside impression from the research I read is that the open question at this point is actually not why it happened so fast, but why it didn't happen faster. If you're actually interested in the numerical justifications for the timeline, the research is pretty well documented, but given you've ex-nihilo declared that the timeline is too fast, I suspect you aren't actually curious, and are instead leading into an argument you want to make.

Re: Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

#44

Post by kerkeslager »

baremetal wrote: post #18
meindnoch wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It came from the energy that the Sun pumps into the system.

I understand we aren't a closed system. But that still doesn't explain to me where the complexity came from.

> I understand we aren't a closed system.

Just because you can parrot the phrase doesn't mean you understand it. Your statement " everything in the universe degrades or rusts or tends towards decreasing complexity", which simply isn't true for a local subsystem such as the earth, demonstrating that you do not understand what it means for Earth to not be a closed system.

> But that still doesn't explain to me where the complexity came from.

It comes from energy from the sun forcing trillions of trillions of proteins together at random all along the earth's coastlines. The proteins, forced together, are more complex than the previous molecules. Most of them are unstable, but even a one-in-a-billion chance of forming a stable protein is almost guaranteed to happen when there are trillions of trillions of reactions occurring.

Re: Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

#45

Post by ch4s3 »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #37
ch4s3 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while the ancestor of the bacterial lineage came from space. I don't believe this is supported by evidence. Finding a few organic molecules in a meteorite is pretty thin, and as Carl Sagan pointed out the lethal doses of radiation in space make panspermia highly unlikely.

Oh sure, this is all wild speculation. It's fun though.

That seems fair, it is an interesting idea.

Re: Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

#46

Post by baremetal »

causi wrote: post #21
baremetal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand we aren't a closed system. But that still doesn't explain to me where the complexity came from.

Ultimately this question is the question of why the universe isn't completely isotropic in all directions with a completely uniform distribution of matter and energy. To the best of our knowledge this is due to quantum effects at the beginning of time creating a temporary asymmetry whose resulting "sloshing" created everything more complicated than evenly-distributed hydrogen gas. Life on earth is the tiniest swirl o…

That is rather hand wavy and doesn't explain where the complexity in DNA comes from, you just swept that problem under the rug with a blanket explanation that lacks explanatory power.

Re: Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

#47

Post by baremetal »

COGlory wrote: post #23
baremetal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did the entropy in the genome of any species come from? The data man, where did it come from? When everything in the universe degrades or rusts or tends towards decreasing complexity. Edit: When I say entropy the first time I'm referring to algorithmic information theory entropy, whereas the second indirect reference is to physical entropy.

I would encourage you to find a copy of (it's very expensive, but there are methods to acquire it, such as "libraries") Eugene Koonin's "The Logic of Chance", if this is a topic you're interested in. It basically goes through evolution from a molecular biology and information theory standpoint (and culminates in his own theory of "genesis").

Thank you, you are the only person that actually addressed my point in this thread. I just acquired the book.

Re: Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

#48

Post by Qem »

baremetal wrote: post #11
taxerbee1 wrote: post #2

A new study published in the journal Nature sheds light on the evolution of complex life from newly discovered "Asgard Cells"! Go science... love the science of evolution, so fascinating! So it seems like these Asgard Cells are complex cells that evolved on Earth over 1.8 billion years ago. These cells have features similar to both bacteria and eukaryotes, which are the two main types of cellular life on Earth. The d…

Where did the entropy in the genome of any species come from? The data man, where did it come from? When everything in the universe degrades or rusts or tends towards decreasing complexity. Edit: When I say entropy the first time I'm referring to algorithmic information theory entropy, whereas the second indirect reference is to physical entropy.

It comes from Death's sickle, prunning the random noise introduced by mutations to generate useful information. Natural selection. There's a paper where people put bounds in terms of bits/generation a species can acquire over time. Apparently sex developed as a workaround life found to inclease this bandwidth from about 1 bit/generation to much larger values: http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/gene.pdf

Re: Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

#49

Post by tudorw »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #42
dav_Oz wrote: post #8

While the new evidence/discovery itself can be quickly summarized: > Within the now-dominant two-domain picture to which the Asgard archaea are contributing, the big story of life on this planet goes something like this. Some 4 billion years ago, life forked into two single-celled branches, the archaea and the bacteria. Genetic evidence implies that the two branches crossed again 2 billion years later when an archaeo…

> What stands out for me the most throughout the article, however, is the hostile environment and over-competitiveness "slowing down" the already painstakingly slow research itself (acknowledged by all parties): We need monetary awards and recognition for sharing techniques. And we need better structures for credentialing people in the sciences. Students with theses which did not work, but which demonstrated good sci…

That was the biggest takeaway for me too, what a lot of duplicated effort and lost opportunities competition can bring.

Re: Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

#50

Post by DoctorOetker »

COGlory wrote: post #23
baremetal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did the entropy in the genome of any species come from? The data man, where did it come from? When everything in the universe degrades or rusts or tends towards decreasing complexity. Edit: When I say entropy the first time I'm referring to algorithmic information theory entropy, whereas the second indirect reference is to physical entropy.

I would encourage you to find a copy of (it's very expensive, but there are methods to acquire it, such as "libraries") Eugene Koonin's "The Logic of Chance", if this is a topic you're interested in. It basically goes through evolution from a molecular biology and information theory standpoint (and culminates in his own theory of "genesis").

It seems to be available for download for free? 1st or second hit on google:

http://www.evolocus.com/Textbooks/Koonin2011.pdf

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