Molecule of life emerges from laboratory slime

[anon]

CREATING life in the primordial soup may have been easier than we thought. Two essential elements of RNA have finally been made from scratch, under conditions similar to those that likely prevailed during the dawn of life.

The question of how a molecule capable of storing genetic information - even DNA's simpler cousin RNA - could ever have arisen spontaneously in the primordial cooking pot has perplexed scientists for decades. RNA consists of a long chain composed of four different types of ribonucleotides, which each consist of a nitrogenous base, a sugar and a phosphate.

Most people assumed that these three components first formed separately, and then combined to make the ribonucleotides. The only trouble was that it seemed impossible that two of the four bases with particularly unwieldy chemistry ever reacted spontaneously with the sugar.

To tackle this problem, John Sutherland from the University of Manchester, UK, tried to work out a new recipe for RNA that gets by without forcing isolated bases and sugar molecules to react. His team experimented by cooking up ribonucleotides from five small molecules thought to be present in the primordial soup. "We started with the same building blocks as others, but take a different route," Sutherland says.

Molecule of life emerges from laboratory slime - life - 13 May 2009 - New Scientist

[slikrapid]

could ever have arisen spontaneously in the primordial cooking pot has perplexed scientists for decades

the answer to this question might be quite simple: it couldn't , at least not spontaneously, i'm inclined to believe it was made by accident or on purpose by some alien lab technology

if you take a look at today's animals on Earth you will see they are way too similar to each other in the terms of appearance and DNA similarity/compatibility, which suggests artificial tampering, imo if all this life started spontaneously then there would have been many more variations and DNA-like biological structures, because i would say that evolution should take many routes, and not just the 'tree of life' we are taught at school

[100%]

if you take a look at today's animals on Earth you will see they are way too similar to each other in the terms of appearance and DNA similarity/compatibility, which suggests artificial tampering, imo if all this life started spontaneously then there would have been many more variations and DNA-like biological structures, because i would say that evolution should take many routes, and not just the 'tree of life' we are taught at school

At the end of the Permian, 245 million years ago, huge numbers of animals became extinct. About 96% of all marine animal species and 52% of the families disappeared in the greatest mass extinction the world has ever known. Recent data shows that 8 of 27 orders of insects, 21 of 27 families of reptiles, 6 of 9 families of amphibians and most of the terrestrial plant life disappeared at this time. This happened over a remarkably short period - about one million years.

That was the "mother of all mass extinctions", but this planet has seen many more... Say we can put together today all the species that ever lived and just take a look at them... And what would have happened if all of them had survived? The variety and multi directions you are talking about are not visible because evolution is a long process and we have very short lifespan, but you have to look at the big picture one way or another. In other words, time is something evolution has in abundance and we don't, hence often our distorted representation. Remember natural selection or "survival of the fittest"? It's not just about DNA, it's also about interaction of mutations, environment and many other factors. Evolution is all about potential utilized at a given moment and given conditions. And over time there have been lesser and lesser of those we call "the fittest". Of all the species that have existed on Earth, 99.9% are now extinct. To be honest, I am surprised we have so much species and diversity of life today. So yes, it's quite possible that life started spontaneously... in fact, I'm sure it did...

[slikrapid]

At the end of the Permian, 245 million years ago, huge numbers of animals became extinct.

man, do you really believe they know what happened a few tens of thousands years ago, let alone millions of years ago

all these things are speculations & theories, with a small amount of questionable evidence derived from geological layers, already compromised during time through weather/pressure/tectonic/chemical/biological effects

if so many species got extinct millions of years ago, how do scientists know they were even living, and don't tell me scientists found fossils of all of these species, the truth is: all they could do is estimate using today's techniques; and one more thing - these fossil sites are rare (they have to be intact to a certain degree) and have gaps estimated in millions of years, so again its speculation time

afaik not even the link between humans & apes has been proven, so lets not go further in time as it is pointless to argue on such assumptions

also today's science has become (or was it always like that) an elitist place, a place where questioning (the essence of science btw.) of existing theories is not welcomed, in fact there were cases of scientists getting banned from universities for presenting evidence contrary to 'established' theories (actually in this field, considering darwinism & evolution, and i'm not talking about religious evidence here); there are also practices of removing/hiding such problematic evidence and limiting access for further research

Remember natural selection or "survival of the fittest"?

there is no natural selection, at least not without specific conditions, a more appropriate term would be natural dynamic equilibrium

survival of the fittest is also just a borderline phrase which applies again on specific conditions, and as we all know there are many variations in reality so they can't be generalized with such a statement