Panspermia? (Introduction)

by David Turell @, Sunday, April 10, 2011, 21:54 (4955 days ago)

Thre may well be life on Mars:-http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2011/04/10/et_and_the_strange_behavior_of_dr_jekyll_and_mr_hyde_--_part_1.thtml

Panspermia?

by dhw, Monday, April 11, 2011, 14:11 (4954 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: There may well be life on Mars:-http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2011/04/10/et_and_the_strange_behavior_of_dr_jekyll_...-Thank you for this extraordinary article. Assuming it's true ... and the author can look forward to paying out a nice fat sum for libel if it's not ... yet again one can only gasp at the egotism and ethical corruption at the heart of so many human institutions. -However, I was also struck by a very different issue. For some reason, the author thinks that life on Mars would be an embarrassment to the Darwinists and a triumph for the Designers. Why? From my position on the fence, life in outer space proves absolutely nothing either way. Even if they found advanced forms, one could still argue that (a) God would naturally have conducted more than one experiment, or (b) if life and evolution arose by chance here, life and evolution could arise by chance elsewhere. The Panspermia theory just spreads the argument across a wider field.

Panspermia?

by xeno6696 @, Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, May 03, 2011, 00:59 (4932 days ago) @ David Turell

Thre may well be life on Mars:
> 
> http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2011/04/10/et_and_the_strange_behavior_of_dr_jekyll_... amazing that these critters survied THAT. -WaterBears are another critter that can survive extreme conditions...

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"

Panspermia?

by David Turell @, Tuesday, October 16, 2012, 01:23 (4400 days ago) @ David Turell

Another viewpoint: -http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/2012/10/15/the-panspermia-paradox/?WT_mc_id=SA_DD_20121015

Panspermia?

by David Turell @, Tuesday, March 12, 2013, 17:40 (4253 days ago) @ David Turell

Another attempt at panspermia theory: Critics have huge doubts about 'space' algae:-http://phys.org/news/2013-03-astrobiologists-meteorite-space-algae.html

Panspermia? a cause of the octopus?

by David Turell @, Tuesday, April 24, 2018, 18:04 (2384 days ago) @ David Turell

We've discussed panspermia before. The theory simply removes the problen of the origin of life on Earth to its origin elsewhere in the universe. The long article gives reasons for considering it seriously, but the most interesting discussion to me is the origin of the octopus section with its conclusions:

https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/viruses-et-and-the-octopus-from-space-the-return-of-...

"Cephalopods (the group comprising squid, cuttlefish, nautilus and octopus) have a somewhat confusing evolutionary tree, first appearing in the late Cambrian period and seemingly descending from an ancestral primitive nautiloid.

"Of these, the octopus is the most striking, with features, such as a complex nervous system, sophisticated eyes and a capacity for camouflage, that appear quite suddenly in its evolution. The genes necessary for this transformation, the authors suggest, are not present in its ancestry. Thus, they hold that “it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant ‘future’ in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large.”

"Interestingly, the octopus has some real and pervasive biochemical differences from the nautilus, presumably the closest living relative of the former’s ancestor. In particular, there is evidence of extensive changes in the RNA, and thus proteins, found in the neural structures of cephalopods.

"These changes have been evolutionarily preserved and are not found to this extent elsewhere in nature, not even in the nautilus. This indicates that a qualitative evolutionary transformation occurred relatively recently and abruptly in behaviourally complex cephalopods. The sheer scale of these changes leads the authors to conclude that it cannot be explained by normal neo-Darwinian processes. Or even Lamarckian processes. And they may have a point.

"But here things get weird. “One plausible explanation, in our view, is that the new genes are likely new extraterrestrial imports to Earth – most plausibly as an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilised octopus eggs,” write the authors. This would “be a parsimonious cosmic explanation for the octopus' sudden emergence on Earth [about] 270 million years ago.'”

Comment: this reasoning leads to Darwin's discomfort about the Cambrian Explosion. It is too sudden and without the required complex precursors to be explained by any form of gradual evolution. It is best explained as a saltation and I would choose as evidence for a planning mind, God.

Panspermia? causes life here?

by David Turell @, Wednesday, May 30, 2018, 19:56 (2348 days ago) @ David Turell

A new article arguing for it:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300798

"We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is multifactorial. One particular focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex retroviruses of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian Explosion of ∼500 Ma. Such viruses are known to be plausibly associated with major evolutionary genomic processes. We believe this coincidence is not fortuitous but is consistent with a key prediction of H-W theory whereby major extinction-diversification evolutionary boundaries coincide with virus-bearing cometary-bolide bombardment events. A second focus is the remarkable evolution of intelligent complexity (Cephalopods) culminating in the emergence of the Octopus. A third focus concerns the micro-organism fossil evidence contained within meteorites as well as the detection in the upper atmosphere of apparent incoming life-bearing particles from space. In our view the totality of the multifactorial data and critical analyses assembled by Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe and their many colleagues since the 1960s leads to a very plausible conclusion – life may have been seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to flourish (about or just before 4.1 Billion years ago); and living organisms such as space-resistant and space-hardy bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells, fertilised ova and seeds have been continuously delivered ever since to Earth so being one important driver of further terrestrial evolution which has resulted in considerable genetic diversity and which has led to the emergence of mankind."

***

"And the origin of new genetic information? It comes from viruses, which they call “among the most information-rich natural systems in the known Universe,” having, again, been transported to Earth from space:

"We should then plausibly view viruses as among the most information-rich natural systems in the known Universe (Fig. 4). Their size dictates they are very small targets minimizing the probability of destruction by flash heating or ionizing radiation, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe (1979) e.g. Chapter 1. Their nanometer dimensions plausibly allow easy transport and dispersal by micrometer sized dust grains and other protective physical matrices of similar size. They are then nanoparticle-sized genetic vectors which contain all the essential information to take over and drive the physiology of any given target cell within which they mesh. Their replicative growth means they are produced, and exist, in huge numbers on cosmic scales; so that they (and to a lesser quantitative extent their cellular reservoirs) can suffer huge losses by inactivation while still leaving a residue of millions of surviving particles potentially still infective. A virus then is a type of compressed module in touch with the whole of the cell’s very ability to grow and divide to produce progeny cells and thus to evolve.

"So they argue that the information needed to build complex life arrived on Earth before complex life arose:
In other words, we can now make the plausible scientific argument that a key feature of information-dense genetic systems to make more complex organisms was already here on Earth before the actual emergence of subsequent greater terrestrial complexity."

Comment: Still pushes the origin of life out into space. The paper recognizes the importance of information, from where or whom?

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