Tyson on abiogenesis

Please note that he does not talk about evolution *at all* until after life has formed. That’s because, as Neil de Grasse Tyson put it, abiogenesis is chemistry, not biology, and only becomes biology after the chain reaction starts. Yes, abiogenesis was once called chemical evolution (as chemicals do have a process by which they will become altered given certain specific catalysts), but just as stellar evolution is a wholly different use of the word evolution, so too is chemical evolution a total misuse of the word which means (and ONLY means) the process by which life has diversified over time.

https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=27DA63FC8AB8DFD9

An interesting addendum on the Miller experiments is that years later, when scientists figured out the initial conditions of life were much different than Miller anticipated, the experiment was redone with even better results, indicating that abiogenesis can occur in a variety of conditions. And the results from the original experiment were revisited fifty years later, and some totally brand new and wholly unexpected amino acids were discovered. Isn’t that fascinating? Don’t the implications boggle your mind?

Tyson on abiogenesis
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Compelling evidence of life on Mars

This is incredible. Apparently, that Mars meteorite that hit us some 13,000 years ago contains biogenic magnetite crystals, which are almost certainly due to ancient bacterial life forms.

The team says that microscopic crystals found in the rock are almost certainly fossilised bacteria that have many characteristics in common with bacteria found on Earth.

“The evidence supporting the possibility of past life on Mars has been slowly building up during the past decade,” said David McKay, Nasa chief scientist for exploration and astrobiology.

“This evidence includes signs of past surface water including remains of rivers, lakes and possibly oceans and signs of current water near or at the surface.”

Studies in 1996 originally suggested this, but the debate was pretty hot at the time — new evidence coming from the most recent round of studies refute critics’ claims that this form of crystal could form due to thermal decomposition.

So, now the question is, did life from Earth get seeded up to Mars, vice versa, or did abiogenesis happen on two planets in our solar system? If the third option, then there goes the egocentrism around which most personal-god theism is based — that some divine creator created life on Earth uniquely and life is some kind of rarity that could never happen by itself (no matter how long it was given or how favorable conditions were to such an event). This won’t stop deists and people who worship nature itself but call it “God”, mind you — but such people are far less of a threat to rationality than those that believe in the supernatural.

Compelling evidence of life on Mars

So now we know RNA nucleotides can be spontaneously formed!

Good news everyone! </farnsworth>

For the last 20 years, scientists have been trying to puzzle out whether or not it was even possible for RNA to spontaneously self-arrange, thus sparking the beginnings of the chain reaction we call “life”, and have come up empty. One group of scientists decided to take every molecule involved in the creation of RNA nucleotydes and arrange them in different orders and expose them to different catalysts, and have just stumbled upon a way for ribocytidine phosphate to form naturally out of constituent chemicals, chemicals that we already know can be synthesized naturally in the pre-biotic environment Earth once had.

The building blocks of RNA, known as nucleotides, each consist of a chemical base, a sugar molecule called ribose and a phosphate group. Chemists quickly found plausible natural ways for each of these constituents to form from natural chemicals. But there was no natural way for them all to join together.

[…] Dr. Sutherland and his colleagues Matthew W. Powner and Béatrice Gerland report that they have taken the same starting chemicals used by others but have caused them to react in a different order and in different combinations than in previous experiments. they discovered their recipe, which is far from intuitive, after 10 years of working through every possible combination of starting chemicals.

Instead of making the starting chemicals form a sugar and a base, they mixed them in a different order, in which the chemicals naturally formed a compound that is half-sugar and half-base. When another half-sugar and half-base are added, the RNA nucleotide called ribocytidine phosphate emerges.

There’s no telling whether or not this is how those bits of pre-life actually arranged themselves to kick this whole life thing off, but the mere fact that it’s possible, suggests that, in the vast amount of time since the formation of the Earth and the vast amount of time during which the planet’s environment contained the chemicals necessary to arrange life in this manner, it may have been inevitable. Since we keep finding ways that certain links in the proposed chain of abiogenesis events *could* happen, and since we know that it *did* happen, then we know abiogenesis from no initial guiding force or intelligent spark is itself, as a theory, plausible! The chemicals necessary for life can be created and seeded onto planets from supernovas elsewhere in the galaxy, then life can, and under the right circumstances, *will* emerge from those seeds.

This heartens me, and it probably gives me the same sense of rapture that religious folks get by looking at the vastness of the universe and saying “goddidit”. It means that, as Carl Sagan once said, we are indeed “star stuff” — and we are indeed the universe’s way of knowing itself.

What I’d love to see turn up is new ways to arrange or spontaneously generate life that *didn’t* happen here, suggesting that there may be more than one self-sustaining chemical chain reaction that we could call “life” in this universe, possibly playing by vastly different rules and with vastly different constituent components (e.g., silicon!). Now that would be super-cool.

So now we know RNA nucleotides can be spontaneously formed!

Evolution in a lab, yet again

Jason Pickles just sent me a great article on a series of experiments involving two lab-created strains of self-replicating RNA competing for five types of food resources and as a result evolving to use different resources and different competition strategies. Remember, creationists and evolution deniers, this differs from adaptation greatly. These RNA strands are little more than a sequence of chemicals that happen to catalyze differently from one another, much the same as how DNA works, only writ small. This sequence of chemicals is in effect a code of sorts, however its code only provides the basest building blocks for self-replication via each link bonding with a specific “food particle”, these being components in its own code. At this scale, RNA, the precursor to DNA, is merely a runaway chain reaction. Since the “RNA World” abiogenesis theory seems most likely in my mind, it helps to think of all life as one long chain reaction, wherein life takes nutrients and energy from the environment and converts them as it sees fit to survive, grow and reproduce. (So to those of you that are vegetarian, if you’re consuming ANY biomass whatsoever, then you’re eating your cousin in munching on a carrot just as much as someone eating a rabbit.)

Adaptation implies that an extant life form, within the span of its life, changes its strategy to account for conditions around it. Evolution involves each successive generation doing something slightly differently by virtue of being “coded” differently, due to RNA transcription errors. Because the process of catalyzing happens imperfectly, like getting a scribe to copy texts for you, each successive generation has a chance of being coded to do things differently, and therefore evolve toward a particular endpoint, if the errors in transcription accidentally confer an ability or featureset that causes this individual to somehow be able to pass on its genetic structure to the next successive generation. Nothing really “drives” this evolution to happen in such a way that each “best-fit” individual is given a higher chance of surviving — individuals with beneficial mutations can and do die before getting the chance to pass on those genes. Speciation on the RNA scale happens when groups of individuals gain enough changes that they can no longer be considered part of the same species as other groups within the population. This is as opposed to, on the macro scale, speciation being defined as when two entities can no longer procreate and produce a non-sterile offspring. Because at the RNA scale everything is merely a chemical reaction between naturally occurring amino acids, it’s really difficult to determine what’s a “species” in a given population until you start to look at the individual’s survival tactics as a whole.

You’d think this would be a nail in the anti-evolutionist’s coffin, but sadly, it won’t be. They will ignore this and pretend it didn’t happen, claiming repeatedly that evolution has never happened in a lab, I guess because one has never observed a dog giving birth to a cat or a goldfish growing legs and stepping out of its bowl in realtime. Or worse, they will say this was a one-time fluke and can’t be duplicated (pro-tip: it’s not).

Evolution in a lab, yet again

The mystery of New Scientist’s gradual tabloidization

I’m interrupting my regularly scheduled Cosmos on Youtube marathon to post briefly about something I thought was really deserving of more exposure. Granted, the big bloggers have already covered this, but I have a teeny tiny sphere of influence comprised of my friends, family and those few people drawn here by pingbacks from all the blogs I link (promoting other blogs has its advantages on the interwebs!), so I figure I should say something too. Every voice in the crowd is just a voice, but in aggregate, we can make a lot of noise.

New Scientist has been over the past few months increasingly irritated those of us who fight on the side of science education and proliferation. First, they publish an article explaining how Darwin’s theory of evolution has itself had to evolve over the years, which is correct in and of itself, but they hand the creationists a shit-ton of grist for their ever-churning mill in their cover in the process: “Darwin Was Wrong“. Okay, he was wrong in that the tree of life isn’t really shaped like a tree. More like a scraggly bush, maybe a spheroid, expanding in every direction from the centre point (being abiogenesis, however it happened). And he didn’t have the benefit of genetics or the vast fossil record we have today in creating the theory. Regardless, New Scientist, in publishing this, has handed religious anti-science zealots support for a talking point that will take years to refute, if we ever can — that science has lost “faith” (if you’ll pardon the pun) in evolution.

Later, they rubbed salt in the wound, by including the specific controversial cover in an advertisement intended to attract subscribers. It kind of seems at this point that the new scientists they intend to attract as subscribers are “Creation Scientists”, doesn’t it? (By the way — you too can get a state-recognized degree in Creation Science if you move to Texas and a certain law passes!)

Then Amanda Gefter wrote an article for New Scientist that might have acted as a bit of an olive branch to those poor scientists on the front lines of the neverending debate of Science and Reality vs. Imaginationland, entitled “How to Spot a Hidden Religious Agenda“. Nearly immediately after being posted on the New Scientist website, it was pulled due to a “legal complaint”.

My question is, WHY? Why is New Scientist such a shrinking violet that the mere exposure of the fact that the Intelligent Design movement might have an agenda, and a known one at that, is pulled after the first hint of a legal action? And who the hell (out of the three possible suspects mentioned in the article — my money’s on Ben Stein) actually threatened them? Additionally, why the hell didn’t they hire Something Awful’s crack legal staff to defend themselves against these spurious threats? Seriously, those guys are the shit. Or maybe just shit. I can’t tell.

Mysteries abound!

The mystery of New Scientist’s gradual tabloidization

How to cheat at Youtube

If there’s one thing I hate in this world, it’s a cheater. No, I’m not talking about using a cheat code so you can blow through the last stage of Doom 3 to beat the end boss and see the ending sequence after a long weekend of slagging your way through demons the old fashioned way — I mean, cheating where it counts, where cheating affects another human being negatively.  And where those internet-keyboard-brigade creationists are concerned, while all of their actions are objectively negative, those actions that can safely be described as “cheating” are especially deplorable.  This is the story of how those same creationists are cheating at Youtube.

Continue reading “How to cheat at Youtube”

How to cheat at Youtube

I see Martian people… ALL THE TIME.

I don’t think I’ve ever fully elucidated my thoughts on the possible existence of extraterrestrial life, have I?  Well, I’ll put off my Python evolution project a little longer, and write about it now — no time like the present.

Assume first, as I do, that the abiogenesis (or “primordial ooze”) theory is correct.  For those of you not in the know, this theory suggests that life on Earth began when certain organic chemicals organized through known means into amino acids, which in turn self-organized into proteins, which in turn used lipids to form the first cell barriers, and gained the ability to pull the components necessary to catalyze RNA from their surroundings.  These became the first proto-cells, which populated the world (in the RNA-world theory at least), and competed with one another for these organic molecules and in self-replication naturally selected for structures that would be better equipped at obtaining these molecules before their competitors.

Continue reading “I see Martian people… ALL THE TIME.”

I see Martian people… ALL THE TIME.

HOLY SHIT, LIFE ON MARS!?

no srsly guyz

I don’t care that it’s going to be difficult to dig deep enough to verify if this is the case, given Mars’ harsh climate.  We NEED to verify or falsify this.  We can’t go around for the next twenty years saying “well, there’s MAYBE life on Mars”, we need to know for sure, ASAP, because it changes everything.  If life evolved (or was germinated, for those of you who believe in panspermia) right in our backyard, then that’s proof positive it’s gotta be out in the rest of the galaxy, and the rest of the universe as well, because there’s a shitload of stars out there, and chances are a shitload of them can support life.  We may well be one amongst thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of sentient life-forms in this galaxy — remember, there are two hundred billion stars in our own galaxy alone, and we’re finding exoplanets daily.

Recent experiments in creating chemicals that self-replicate, compete for resources, and are subject to natural selection, have proven that a critical step in the evolutionary abiogenesis theory (or the “primordial ooze” theory for laymen, and that theory that people mistake for the Theory of Evolution all too often) is quite possible.  Proof that pre-biotic life even managed to form on Mars, if verified, would suggest that this universe may well be teeming with instances of life having grown from “nothing” (by which I mean, having grown from chemicals with the potential to become self-replicating if arranged correctly by chance — not really “nothing” as the creationists suggest), and the only thing that makes this planet unique amongst our neighbors is not only that we had the right chemical soup to start the endless chain reaction that is biology, but that we’ve also had long enough for life to fester on this planet to get to the point where we’re sentient and curious about the nature of the universe.

For those who say science strips away all the wonder of the universe, by removing magical sky-men who made us in his evidently flawed image, they’re missing the bigger picture.  And that bigger picture is the universe itself, in all its splendour.  There’s only one way to find the truth behind this universe — and that’s empirically.

HOLY SHIT, LIFE ON MARS!?

Critical thinking, evolution, and how to not be dismissed as a total idiot

As you’ll likely recall, I had planned a post about Darwin pareidolia.  I have about twenty tabs open in my Firefox right now, most of which having something or other to do with this, but the remainder are actually sort-of related to this, to pareidolia in general, and to the creationism v. evolution debate.  To make matters worse for my ability to focus on this topic, the other day, a co-worker and potential lurker messaged me on instant messenger regarding the Large Hadron Collider.  The gist of this conversation went something like:

<him> hey, have you heard of the LHC?  sounds like a bad idea to me.

<me> *rants for 30 mins about how stupid people are for thinking it’s a bad idea, barely letting him get a word in edgewise*

There’s definitely going to be another blog post in the future about the LHC, especially specifically about the doomsday sayers and the impossibility of their hypothesized scenarios (none of which have any basis in science outside of the fact that the doomsday scenarios themselves have a kernel of scientific truth — like, say, making a black hole, which the LHC is completely incapable of doing outside of micro black holes that evaporate instantly).  But for now, I’m going to point out that the funny thing about this is that there’s a common thread in these topics — people’s inability to perform simple feats of critical thinking.

Continue reading “Critical thinking, evolution, and how to not be dismissed as a total idiot”

Critical thinking, evolution, and how to not be dismissed as a total idiot