Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes
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Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes
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Re: Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes
#2> For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling today’s bacteria
I've often used this "fact" as an argument against complex extraterrestrial life. Glad to see it might be wrong after all.
Re: Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes
#3> For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling today’s bacteria I've often used this "fact" as an argument against complex extraterrestrial life. Glad to see it might be wrong after all.
Single-celled life is complex. It has the same length of evolutionary time as multicellular life.
We know very little about modes of sentience with N=1. Perhaps life is generally mutualistic.
Re: Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes
#4How the children inherited the swallowed organism?
Re: Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes
#5> For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling today’s bacteria I've often used this "fact" as an argument against complex extraterrestrial life. Glad to see it might be wrong after all.
This is Nick Lane's argument - that complex cell happend only once on Earth (no convergent evolution) via this symbiotic accident and hence it's highly improbable if not almost impossible.
As usual, people always seem to foreget that in this universe, what happened once, happens all the time and we are not special.
Re: Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes
#6A neat fairy-tale but, with all due respect, scientist don't know anything that happened a billion+ years ago.
This is a little more than a tabloid article.
Re: Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes
#7How the children inherited the swallowed organism?
Bacterial division would get some mitos on either side of the dividing cell. Mitos then proliferate on its own.
Re: Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes
#8How the children inherited the swallowed organism?
Presumably like we do - (I'm heavily simplifying the complex regulation involved) the mitochondria have their own DNA which gets duplicated when the cell prepares to undergo mitosis, then the two new cells split the results.
Re: Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes
#9> For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling today’s bacteria I've often used this "fact" as an argument against complex extraterrestrial life. Glad to see it might be wrong after all.
It’s not wrong, at least I don’t think this article is arguing that multi cellular life evolved any earlier than we thought. Just that the mechanisms were different than we expected.
Re: Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes
#10If they find cells lacking some organelle, it will be hard to say whether it was never acquired, or was later abandoned.
One clue would be leftover genes from when it was there. Eukaryotes often find it hard to prune out excess DNA, vs. just turning it off.