The picture painted by Russell and Martin is striking indeed. The last common ancestor of all life was not a free-living cell at all, but a porous rock riddled with bubbly iron-sulphur membranes that catalysed primordial biochemical reactions. Powered by hydrogen and proton gradients, this natural flow reactor filled up with organic chemicals, giving rise to proto-life that eventually broke out as the first living cells - not once but twice, giving rise to the bacteria and the archaea.
Many details have yet to be filled in, and it may never be possible to prove beyond any doubt that life evolved by this mechanism. The evidence, however, is growing. This scenario matches the known properties of all life on Earth, is energetically plausible - and returns Mitchell's great theory to its rightful place at the very centre of biology.
See also Ten Steps To The First Cells.
7 comments:
No one can yet create a bacterium artificially in a laboratory, so it seems premature to speculate about how it could happen spontaneously.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3214/01.html
I apologize for bringing this jackass' very name up, but, assuming these quotes from MacDonald's reference are accurate, Kevin MacDonald has been lying about the history of Jews and immigration policy (read the entry carefully):
http://guywhite.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/scholarship-or-propaganda/
An inherently unprovable hypothesis - how iis it different from religion?
An inherently unprovable hypothesis - how iis it different from religion?
Nobody's raising their kids to believe that this is The Truth.
Nobody's going to the lab once a week to pray to the proton-powered-rock.
No supernatural entities are involved.
Need I go on?
JA, while it's true that those of the proto-rock religion don't worship the same objects in the same way as those of traditional religions, on a more fundamental level, the form of their beliefs are very similar.
hey Jewish Atheist, this is maybe a long-shot but I was wondering if you are contactable via email (in other words: not on a public forum) because I have some questions, general inquiries, etc and feel like a dialogue could be potentially beneficial (for me personally, not in a broader sense). Anyway, my email is sherman.aubrey@gmail.com, so you don't need to post yours on here. Hope to hear from you.
thejewishatheist@yahoo.com
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