Genome complexity puts origin of life 9.7B years ago | Hacker News Reader

Genome complexity puts origin of life 9.7B years ago

science.slashdot.org

20 pointsnine_k14 comments

P.Z.Myers criticized this rather severely[0] a couple days back. "They cherrypicked their data points. They didn’t include lungfish, ferns, onions, or some protists because that would totally undermine their premise; those are contemporary organisms with much larger genomes than mammals’, and their shallow, stupid exercise in curve-fitting would have flopped miserably. It’s a great example of garbage in, garbage out."

[0]http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/18/graaarh-ph...

The striking thing about this prediction if true is that it didn't evolve on the Earth.

Either that, or our methods for dating geological strata are flawed.

Or that article is simply crap as pointed in the top comment.

Indeed, also possible.

I am a postdoc working on planetary habitability. This arxiv paper is a mesh sieve masquerading as a boat.

Complexity's rise is a messy business [1]. There's some evidence for steady progress, easy steps [2]. At the other extreme, the machinery of oxygenic photosynthesis came together once after an inexplicable billion-year delay and completely reset the biosphere. No oxygen, no complex-eukaryotes-with-twisty-genomes like you and me. Inference: that was an very improbable, difficult step, and we got lucky. Survivorship (as conscious, therefore complex creatures) biases everything we see on Earth. Nobody knows whether the origin of life was an easy or a difficult step. We don't have a geologic record of the origin of life. But the existence of even one difficult step is enough to prevent you from playing Moore's Law games.

There ARE good papers in this field that get traction out of very little data [3].

There are also reasons to think that Earth life may have originated on Mars. Joe Kirschvink (Caltech) is the big advocate of this [4]. Continued Mars exploration could test this.

Interstellar panspermia, on the other hand, is vastly improbable.

[1] good (2001) review: http://wwworm.biology.uh.edu/evodevo/lecture26/carroll02.pdf

[2] opinionated summary by Simon Conway Morris: http://www.amazon.com/Lifes-Solution-Inevitable-Humans-Unive...)

[3] my favorite is Brandon Carter's argument about the number of difficult steps in our evolution: http://www.jstor.org/stable/37419

[4] Kirschvink's argument: http://www.gps.caltech.edu/users/jkirschvink/pdfs/MarsOrigin...

Origin of life may be anywhere, but this particular paper is pseudoscientific bullshit.

This thesis obviously relies on some ad hoc assumptions about mutation rate and species diversity. Higher mutation rates and more species running in parallel equals shorter evolution time.

This is pure conjecture masquerading as science.

Its almost as absurd as thinking Moore's Law will last forever.

s/M/B/g

Done

self monitoring of blood glucose?

So, Boore's Law?

Yeah, you want to down vote an attempt at deciphering someone's meaning.

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