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Re:Metagenomics

By: Cactus Flower in ALEA | Recommend this post (0)
Mon, 07 Jul 14 12:55 AM | 23 view(s)
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Msg. 15821 of 54959
(This msg. is a reply to 15819 by DigSpace)

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By organic, I intended to mean things that have had a life rather than things that have a carbon atom in them.

We are a carbon form of life, I believe. My original thought was that the first form of life cannot have had other forms of life to consume. Unless by some miracle, two kinds of preliminary life introduced themselves at the same time.

So they must have been consuming something else. And that something else is the organic (meaning carbon-rich in this case) molecular soup.

But I think you are saying that's probably the wrong way of seeing things.

Instead.

Within the waves and eddies of the molecular world, perhaps inorganic (meaning lifeless but including carbon in this case) processes evolved gradually over time so that the notion of a leap between an inorganic environment and an organic one is the wrong kind of image.

Instead chemical processes gradually evolved around carbon molecules. Perhaps amino acids appeared. Perhaps prototypical double helix shapes formed and swirled around as well. Perhaps there were extreme inputs such as asteroid strikes and volcanic eruptions. And the soup gradually morphed from something randomly chemical into something in which bits and pieces coalesced. And some of these bits and pieces eventually involved replication.

Relational activity leads to coalescence. Coalescence leads to replication. Replication leads to co-option and absorption. Or something like this. Something that starts as a soup gradually converts into a biomass with no single step representing the critical change.

In the end, the chemical soup has become or supports some sort of primitive cellular lattice. Et voila. Life emerges as a carpet of single cells and builds from there.

So essentially cellular forms from soup and multicellular life forms from the coalescence of unique cells. We are colonies.




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The above is a reply to the following message:
Re:Metagenomics
By: DigSpace
in ALEA
Mon, 07 Jul 14 12:18 AM
Msg. 15819 of 54959

That is what I tended to assume, that lithoautotrophs were first so to speak. But that is not the prevailing hypothesis. The prevailing hypothesis is that organic molecules were present in considerable abundance, massive amounts. Given this soup rich in organic molecules derived from the basic chemistry of what was there then: heat, ammonia, methane, sulfur, lightning, water, solid catalysts (clays such as kaolite etc can drive nearly solid state chemistry) ... a rich soup was formed. The food for heterotrophic (chemoorganotrophic if you will) life was already there. No reason to go with the lithotrophic model, the energentics of which are considerably less favorable.

So one has a soup of organic molecules, they stumble into one another for a billion years, and some of the stumbling makes more of self. Substrate is not limiting in this model. One need not evoke anything particular tricky, any single event that makes more of itself will become dominant. Take any bucket of things, if there are things in there that make mroe of themselves, they will overpopulate compared to the things that do not.

On the hurdle to life bit, it seems likely from the prevailing hypothesis that first life derived energy from eating organic food that was available in abundance.


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