[ExI] Chemical Origins of Life (was Re: Panbiogenesis)

[Kelly Anderson]

2012/2/4 Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>

> On 4 February 2012 01:47, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 2012/2/3 Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>:
>
> > I was however impressed by Dawkins's Ancestor's Tale contention in that
>> what
>> > is really hard is not to go from mineral to procaryotes, but from
>> > procaryotes to eukaryotes.
>>
>> If you measure the times involved, then clearly Dawkins is correct.
>> From chemicals to prokaryotes took somewhere between 100 and 150
>> million years.... and to get from prokaryotes to eukaryotes took from
>> 400 to 900 million years (depending on who's dates you use).
>>
>
> In principle, since there is no real reason why one philogenesis should be
> similar to another, it could also be a peculiar direction of terrestrial
> biology, much more so than marsupials for Australia.
>
> In other words, some kind or another of procaryotes could in be pretty
> frequent in the universe, while  eucaryotes may just not be "required".
>

Eukaryotes are not themselves required... however, to get the kind of
reproductive fidelity required for large multicellular organisms, you do
need to protect the replicating molecules in a nucleus from the bombardment
of atoms whizzing about inside the cell. There may be processes similarly
protected within the mitochondria and other cellular organelles. Anyway,
for large creatures, organelles at least are probably a requirement, for
our kind of life anyway.

This, irrespective of how much procaryotes species can be diverse and
> interesting and evolutionary successful, would be a quite boring and bleak
> scenario from our own perspective... :-/
>
> A universe full of prokaryotes would not be worth exploring, if that's
what you mean. :-)

-Kelly
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