Mysterious groups of archaea stir debate about the origin of complex creatures
nature.com
nature.com
Why do they say every thing came from a single origin cell?
Seems like I'd it happened once, it can happen again!
It would be an amazing discovery to find a second tree of life though!
If life coming to be is already rare enough that we don't see any evidence of it elsewhere in the universe, how much more rare should one expect for it to be under these circumstances?
Why is opposite chirality DNA not a thing?
It may even be the case that this isn’t possible to know, at least given the evidence at hand. Theories should simply take note of this ambiguity, by qualifying with “if X is the case, that means theory Y is true”
Psst, I think you meant "canon" :)
If you're interested in stuff like that, google 'rna world'. It is likely that dna-based life evolved out of rna-based life and outcompeted it.
Dna life evolved out of rna life.
~Charles Darwin, in a letter to Joseph Hooker (1871)
I heard researcher Bruce Damer explain how Darwin was likely correct in this letter. As we understand it today, enzymes and oxygen would prevent a second biological genesis. Also, there is less "feed stock" of star dust falling on our present warm little ponds. https://www.mindpodnetwork.com/future-fossils-109/
Adolf Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe "(1818-1884), a German organic chemist described as one of the greatest of that time" denied that molecules as we know them today existed. "The French chemist Pierre-Eugéne Marcellin Berthelot (1827-1907)" "exerted his considerable power as a government official to prohibit the teaching of atomic theory." "Austrian physicist Ernst Mach (1838-1916), and German physical chemist Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932)" "preferred the consideration of perceived data to that of hypothetical atoms."
Only much later "in 1908 Ostwald became convinced that experiments had finally given proofs of the discrete or particulate nature of matter. In 1912 Poincaré declared that "[A]toms are no longer a useful fiction … The atom of the chemist is now a reality.""
Sources: https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/science-magazines/histo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokiarchaeota
"Specific sediment horizons, previously shown to contain high abundances of novel archaeal lineages[2][3] were subjected to metagenomic analysis. Due to the low density of cells in the sediment, the resulting genetic sequence does not come from an isolated cell, as would be the case in conventional analysis, but is rather a combination of genetic fragments.[4] The result was a 92% complete, 1.4 fold-redundant composite genome named Lokiarchaeum.[1]
The metagenomic analysis determined the presence of an organism's genome in the sample. However, the organism itself has not been cultured.[1]"
Now knowing that, the end of the article is what is the point:
"But analyses of the Asgard archaea, including the Lokis, remain limited. “What people are really waiting for is the isolation of a member of these lineages,” says evolutionary microbiologist Simonetta Gribaldo at the Pasteur Institute."
The other point is:
"Other scientists are reserving judgement: “Trees change,” is a common refrain."
Exactly.
It seems some editors or the article writers think that when they cover something as a "debate" there's a "win" somewhere for them (1). "Mysterious" too. But it's confusing the causal readers who then miss to understand how amazing is what we already know and how fine these details are that still aren't known.
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1) It's also worth noting that there are some rich entities which pay a lot of money to "promote doubt" in the successes of natural sciences. Maybe even the non-biased editors "pick the signal" generated by the public addressed by such groups and then think that they just "reached more readers" with such titles or approaches in the articles. I would have expected from "Nature" not to, however.
Except that, in this particular area of uncertainity there has been debate, heated opinion and entrenched positions. Nature is reflecting the messy, human business of the process of advancing science.
“Other scientists are reserving judgement: “Trees change,” is a common refrain."
Which is a correct approach to the topic: it’s easy to blow something up out of proportions when the scale is ignored.
To be clear... the scientific method is literally a debate club.
To be clear... it's literally like a game of chess, only without the two dices:
https://books.google.at/books?id=AWhFAAAAcAAJ&printsec=front...
Worth reading how the science already looked like in 1683. Please don't try to dumb it down.