Life before Earth: Biological Timeline May Reach Back 9.7 Billion Years

Originally posted by GoochMon
What if black holes lead to other universes, that would be cool, then it wouldn't matter how old ours is. And maybe if its possible the life in those other universes had a way to travel through black holes into ours.

physicsworld.com...

There was this finding a short while ago (well educated guess) that black holes do not rip things apart like we would assume, the information is held in layers across the entire black hole.
This runs true with this new idea that the universe is a computer simulation. Me personally, I don't believe we live in a computer - but given that physics in this plane of existence has to be very well set out, it may appear that way. If rules of physics were not so strict then there wouldn't be anything in existence at all.

Now consider that there is evidence to suggest a 'big crunch'. It may take an unthinkable amount of time, but what if eventually all matter is swallowed up onto black holes which act like storage banks, and them atoms of matter themselves acts a little like a byte of information and has a memory (like string theory/entanglement seems to indicate.) Then once again, after an unthinkable length of time, these black holes merge together at the central universal point where when every single spec of matter in the universe comes together it reaches a critical mass and starts the process all over again.

All the memory from those molecules, including life, will then carry out the same linear pattern, again and again. We have then essentially read this thread on this forum an infinite amount of times, only we are completely unaware of it, and whilst this may throw up some philosophical questions about free-will, I don't necessarily see it as effecting it. Our free-will after all is effected by past events and the random ebbing and flowing of chance.

My theory might be a bit mad, but I'm trying to tie up how life can appear to be generated from nothing. Experiments have only every turned basic molecules into amino acids, but it has never had that spark which began DNA off.
en.wikipedia.org...

So this theory of particles acting like tiny bytes of memory and being a part of a larger memory bank may also coincide with the dimensional physics which say that time is not really real. If after all there was ever only one linear line the universe can go, we ourselves wouldn't notice if time suddenly went backwards or stopped and started.

Life then may be literally ingrained on to the surface of the universe like a disk-drive, along with everything else, which again, ties in with the holographic universe theory that actually everything is happening on an incredibly thin film of a bubble and our senses project this 3D version of events out.....

Ok..too deep. I'm stopping now.

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by jeep3r

 

The real difficulty is explaining why anyone thinks applying Moore's Law to biological evolution makes any sense at all. What is the justification for that? Does anyone here know the answer?

On a side note, I'd like to know what this 'macroevolution' you keep mentioning is. Isn't it a term of abuse popular with creationists?

Hmmm ... I was wondering about that, too, and I think they just noticed a similar development. They probably discovered exponential growth in genome complexity before even realizing that the principle is comparable to Moore's Law. Then they probably drew that comparison because Moore's Law is a rather well known concept.

Their findings are obviously derived from observations concerning the structure and size of genomes in organisms as far as we can trace it back today (including some assumptions and hypothesis regarding the period of time where data is missing).

With macroevolution they seem to refer to a grand scheme of devolopment that's pretty much similar to the development of species on a smaller scale. What I think is interesting is their observation that genome size obviously doubles approximately every 376 million years, but this apparently doesn't always happen 100% on time, you can't calculate the exact point in time when this doubling takes place. Some organisms remain unaltered for some time, but then a giant leap sets in and genome complexity increases drastically.

What it comes down to is that, in the grand scheme of evolution, the general trend of exponential growth in genome size, always seems to be predictable quite precisely (as is the case in information technology). In other words: you can't predict single events (there may be failures as well as huge progress on a regular basis) but in the end, the exponential function seems to be applicable.

Staphylococci never come singly.

I assume you threw that in to question how they could possibly trace evolution back to a single base pair? If so, there are obviously some unknowns involved here and the paper doesn't really answer the question of how life could have reached a stage at which selfreplication with exponential growth in genome complexity sets in.

Ultimately, I don't know if they can hold up their theory. But I think it's an interesting approach with a couple of good ideas and the science regarding their main argument seems quite reasonable to me ...

reply to post by jeep3r

Their findings are obviously derived from observations concerning the structure and size of genomes in organisms...

Structure, perhaps (though I understand all genomes are structured more or less the same way) but not size. The second-largest genome on the planet belongs to the marbled lungfish, an ancient and primitive organism. And I point-blank refuse to believe that any random sampling method would make any sense at all, given how few species' genomes have been sequenced and the fact that we don't even know how many species there are on the planet.

Call me obstreperous, but I can't see any merit to this publication at all.

Staphylococci never come singly.

I assume you threw that in to question how they could possibly trace evolution back to a single base pair?

No, it's just some gibberish I chucked in to replace an inadvertent double post.

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by jeep3r

 

Structure, perhaps (though I understand all genomes are structured more or less the same way) but not size. The second-largest genome on the planet belongs to the marbled lungfish, an ancient and primitive organism.

Good pointer and I'm not sure how that relates to the validity of their findings. Anyhow, based on their definitions they went about as follows:

We stick to the suggestion to measure genetic complexity by the length of functional and non-redundant DNA sequence rather than by total DNA length (Adami, et al., 2000; Sharov, 2006) (...)

If we plot genome complexity of major phylogenetic lineages on a logarithmic scale against the time of origin, the points appear to fit well to a straight line (Sharov, 2006) (Fig. 1). This indicates that genome complexity increased exponentially and doubled about every 376 millionyears.

With those assumptions Sharov and Gordon obviously expose themselves to a larger scientific community and expect to be peer-reviewed. Accordingly, I assume they will have evaluated the risk of publishing something like this (including the risk of potential damage to their reputation). So I think they might actually be onto something ...

Call me obstreperous, but I can't see any merit to this publication at all.

Oh no, that's OK and critical voices are neccesary ...

As far as I'm concerned: I think the paper is interesting but I'm not a genetecist nor a biologist, so I'm having a difficult time looking into this. It's probably going to be people like you who are either going to approve what they say or who'll be tearing their theory to shreds ...

reply to post by jeep3r

It's probably going to be people like you who are either going to approve what they say or who'll be tearing their theory to shreds.

You do me too much honour. I'm no biologist either, just an interested observer.

I will confess, moreover, to some animus against the habit of regarding physical processes as simply the movement of data. Information theory is a powerful instrument but it seems that people who appeal to it sometimes confuse the abstract with the concrete. Why Moore's law, for heaven's sake?

It is not hard to believe that speciation or increasing organic complexity follow some kind of exponential growth curve. It seems to follow intuitively from the fact that population growth within species is exponential. But that growth, as Malthus pointed out, is exponential only within limits. At one end, as he showed, are the limits imposed by resources. At the other, we may surmise, is a possible multiplication of the exponent due to abundance of resources and range; perhaps RNA world represents something analogous to the cosmic inflation that occurred at the beginning of the universe, a sudden explosion of genetic diversity and growing complexity. That would put paid to the 9.7-billion-year extrapolation.

I fail to see, moreover, how a constant rate of acceleration in biological complexity could be fairly extrapolated beyond the beginnings of life on Earth. If life arrived on our planet from elsewhere, the effects of arriving in a new environment and adapting to it should, on their own, be more than enough to put a massive kink in the curve.

reply to post by Astyanax


Well...humans tend to relate new information to prior information. It is how we find a context for the recently discovered.

Since there was a predictable cycle to the doubling of genetic information, it is a logical and reasonable approach to relate it to Moore's Law.

It isn't like they started with the concept and then shoe horned the observations. It was the observations that led them to their conclusions. That is as scientific as it gets, even if those conclusions are flawed.

Originally posted by Astyanax
This is sophistry, not science, on a par with mediaeval schoolmen trying to work out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I fail to see the justification for performing the exercise in the first place. Anyone care to fill me in?

As sophistry is related to Sophia the goddess of wisdom don't take this post as negative OP.
Sophistry is knowledge. It's where we get all of our Sophs from
Like say..Philosophy (love of wisdom or mankinds wisdom)
So I for one am quite glad to head down these trains of thought.

Oh and the answer is Seven of course.
Seven angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Since it took the universe 5 or 6 billion years to process a universe made up of mostly hydrogen into the other 91 natural elements this timeline sounds about right. Since life in general started very early on Earth then it is a safe assumption that life also started very early on the first true planets around the first G type stars too.

Originally posted by jeep3r

Further they state that this might also explain the Fermi-Paradox (where are all the ETs given the amount of stars in the universe?): If it takes our species 10 billion years to develop (and the universe is about 13.8 billion years old), then we might as well be one of just a few intelligent species that have emerged up to now ...

Their findings are currently being reviewed, but I think their thought-experiment is quite mind-boggling ...

edit on 17-4-2013 by jeep3r because: formatting

A few things most do not think about.

1. Earth has had life very early in its existence, and after trillions of different life one has emerged that might go into space. Not good odds for ET...

2. Life is hard to kill, but species come and go all the time. In fact it is the natural order of things for a advance species to last about 2 million years. The chances of a billion year old civilization is zero... Humans will come and go like all other life before and after us.

3. The more advance life becomes the easier it is to kill it off to restart all over again as simple life.

4. The smartest creature in the universe might be a sponge deep in some alien ocean. It takes much more than brains to get into space...

5. Even if we are still here in a million years we will not be humans anymore for evolution never stops.

6. To say life exists is a great generalized statement and so life must exists throughout the universe, To say advance, intelligent, physically able, space fairing life we start to add many quantifiers that with each one dwindles the chances less and less.

7. Just think, if we died out like many other homi and homo have done then the earth would most likely hit the next life reset before another intelligent species came along. It's like winning the lotto 3 times in a row for humans to reach this stage...hehe

reply to post by sealing

As sophistry is related to Sophia the goddess of wisdom

The Classical Greeks personified wisdom but did not worship the personification as a goddess. Their goddess of wisdom was Athena. The idea that there is a divinity named Sophia is Gnostic and probably no older than the Christian era.

Sophistry is knowledge.

No it isn't. 'Sophistry' is derived from 'sophist' and means something very unlike wisdom; the sophists were a Greek philosophical school of much earlier date, going back to the fifth century BC. Sophistry existed before Sophia. The only connexion between them is that they are derived from the same linguistic root, ςοφíα—the Greek word for wisdom.

Oh and the answer is Seven of course.
Seven angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Judging by your track record of accuracy, I'll be wanting a reference for that.

Originally posted by Xtrozero

 

6. To say life exists is a great generalized statement and so life must exists throughout the universe, To say advance, intelligent, physically able, space fairing life we start to add many quantifiers that with each one dwindles the chances less and less.

That's one way of putting it and perhaps all those steps are really rare occurences in evolution.

But there's another way of looking at it:

Let's imagine that early bio-chemical entities at one point reached a stage where they were suddenly capable of selfreplication and developed a kind of genetic memory that could transfer important properties (heritable functions).

Now, since the authors assume (and provide some evidence) that these organisms are likely to have evolved exponentially in terms of their functional complexity, I could imagine that there might have been an underlying determining law inherent to those organisms.

Could it be that these very early entities have developed a genetic code that forces them to continuously strive for a higher biological form of organization with more functionality? In dependence of the available resources, of course, but perhaps they were essentially already adapted to the palette of possible ressources they can work with (resources which are predominant/abundant in the universe). They could then easily adapt to their environment and use a wide range of resources to develop, and, in the best case to even evolve exponentially.

If the above were true, then such a hard-wired law to evolve at maximum speed would have been inside each of these lifeforms as early as about 10 billion years ago (in accordance with what's been said in the paper). They then probably spread out to other galaxies, solar systems, planets etc. (via Panspermia) and were able to proceed with their evolution, at least in some places where they ended up. In case of Earth, the conditions were in a way ideal, but perhaps other planetary candidates offered similar conditions (or vastly different ones, which were still OK for them, yet in another way). In that sense, the universe could be full of life at different stages, whereas intelligent life (such as ours) would indeed require the right conditions. And it would still take a certain minimum amount of time for intelligence to develop. But it's not impossible to assume that such intelligent life has just begun emerging in our universe (with us not necessarily being the only ones).

Again, I'm just freestyling and probably I'm not even using the correct terminology, but it's an idea I couldn't resist posting

P.S.: If such a law were indeed hard-wired within organisms since that time, it should be found somewhere in our own DNA as well, I suppose ...

Originally posted by sealing

Originally posted by Astyanax

This is sophistry, not science, on a par with mediaeval schoolmen trying to work out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Oh and the answer is Seven of course.
Seven angels can dance on the head of a pin.

LOL ... thanks for the answer, my guess was 'six' so I wasn't too far from the truth!

Originally posted by jeep3r

P.S.: If such a law were indeed hard-wired within organisms since that time, it should be found somewhere in our own DNA as well, I suppose ...

Could be, but why a hard wire scenario? Evolution is basically chaos in action. We also must realize that life continually resets over and over and has done it numerous of times on earth.

Also if life spontaneously started 10 billion years ago it could do it again 4 billion years ago, again and again over and over. To be honest I don't think the universe has been around long enough for life to travel through it. It must have spontaneously started every where the conditions were right.

reply to post by jeep3r

Let's imagine that early bio-chemical entities at one point reached a stage where they were suddenly capable of selfreplication and developed a kind of genetic memory that could transfer important properties (heritable functions).

Not so fast.

What is this 'genetic memory' possessed by replicating entities? It is simply an arrangment of organic molecules strung together to form a mould or template which, when dipped in a solution of the right ingredients under the right conditions, makes a copy of itself.

I could imagine that there might have been an underlying determining law inherent to those organisms.

There is, or rather, there are. They are the laws that govern chemical reactions. They do not automatically predispose towards complexity of phenotype; their outcome depends on the available conditions and ingredients.

Could it be that these very early entities have developed a genetic code that forces them to continuously strive for a higher biological form of organization with more functionality?

No, for reasons that should be obvious in the light of the above.

This is even worse than invoking spurious 'laws' from the world of computer manufacturing to justify a hypothesis of panspermia. You are claiming that evolution is a teleological process.

If such a law were indeed hard-wired within organisms since that time, it should be found somewhere in our own DNA as well, I suppose.

You are suggesting that DNA is somehow predisposed to evolve towards greater complexity in terms of the ultimate results of gene expression. Can you explain how such tendency would increase, and not (as seems obvious) reduce the selective fitness of an organism? Any such non-selective considerations should predispose its carriers toward extinction by making them less effective in the struggle to survive and reproduce.

What I find interesting about this is not that life may reach back 10 billion years but that evolution is exponential. This means at some stage (probably soon) we will reach a singularity in the same way technology will.

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by jeep3r

 

You are claiming that evolution is a teleological process.

Thanks for your comments, though I'm not referring to a completely predesigned template that was put into place by somebody or something. If that was the message conveyed, I need to outline the idea more in detail (see below).

You are suggesting that DNA is somehow predisposed to evolve towards greater complexity in terms of the ultimate results of gene expression. Can you explain how such tendency would increase, and not (as seems obvious) reduce the selective fitness of an organism?

Any such non-selective considerations should predispose its carriers toward extinction by making them less effective in the struggle to survive and reproduce.

Based on the hypothesis in this paper, I was thinking about the phase prior to the start of a constant evolution with functional genome complexity doubling about every 376 million years (provided this were indeed true).

Regarding this early stage, obviously nobody can tell just how the first base-pair would have come into being. Which were the exact chemical or biochemical processes leading up to a primitive organism? An organism that is capable of evolving into prokaryotes, worms, mammals etc? Of course, all of it could have happened by chance, but what if these early chemical processes led to the development of some kind of (very) basic biological algorithm determining the further general course of evolution?


Such an algorithm could have determined basic priorities such as:
- adapt to the resources you find
- develop functions for maximum exploitation of the niche you occupy
- strive for maximum growth and functional capabilities (best case: doubling, like in reproduction)
- increase your abilities to interact with the environment
(...)


And as a result you might get:
- a variety of different approaches/species to fulfil the above
- all resources & ecological niches are exploited by organisms
- the initial adaptation of organisms to their specific environment leads to a temporary balance & coexistence
- some will do better than others and develop more functional complexity (ocassionally at the cost of the others)
- all lifeforms that evolved in one eco-system (eg. Earth) would depend on eachother to a certain extent
- some species will reach their maximum state of development faster than others with fewer opportunities to change (depending on their niche and available resources)
- yet, these same organisms remain in their niche and play an important role in the food-chain, thus supporting others
- the most advanced organisms in terms of functional genome complexity would fulfil the algorithm's ultimate goal
(...)


In a way, I was just referring to a very basic set of determining parameters that must have somehow been inherent to early primitive organisms. A short biochemical or genetic program (call it what you like) that evolved within these entities under conditions found in the early universe. With this short and simple code onboard, they could have spread out via Panspermia and occupied various worlds with different rates of success while still finding their niches and using different resources within the chaotic environments throughout the universe.

This wouldn't necessarily contradict other evolutionary paradigms ... and, of course, it's just a thought (that somehow helps me interpreting the potential implications indicated by this paper). But I may as well be completely wrong, no question, you'll be the judge!

P.S.: I might run into great difficulties if I had to explain any of the above more in detail!

Originally posted by Eonnn
What I find interesting about this is not that life may reach back 10 billion years but that evolution is exponential. This means at some stage (probably soon) we will reach a singularity in the same way technology will.

We probably already are in the steep part of the (exponential) curve ... it would explain why progress was so slow over the millennia and all of a sudden it seems to be taking off, both biologically and technologically!

With regards to evolution, the above would only apply if the hypothesis outlined in the paper were indeed true. And even then, the biological 'doubling of functional genome complexity' would still take a lot longer with about 376 million years for the turnover.

But I, too, find the pure thought of all this quite intriguing ...

I read this paper through a few days ago. I doubt it will pass peer-review. It's just so flawed and ignorant. Let's have a look at the graph for example. Five data points in total! Wow! One data point is called Eukaryotes, but then they have 'worms', 'fish' and 'mammals' separately. Umm, ok? Why they omitted e.g. 'plants'? Because they wouldn't fit on their line at all?

Originally posted by rhinoceros

 

I read this paper through a few days ago. I doubt it will pass peer-review. It's just so flawed and ignorant.

Let's have a look at the graph for example. Five data points in total! Wow! One data point is called Eukaryotes, but then they have 'worms', 'fish' and 'mammals' separately. Umm, ok? Why they omitted e.g. 'plants'? Because they wouldn't fit on their line at all?

In case it vanishes in the vast jungle of other scientific papers and we never hear about this story again, then you were probably right!

Originally posted by buddha
At the start of the universe space dust slowly
Comes together and makes comets and asteroids.
They are slowly pulled together by gravity.

Where did the dust come from?
where did the gravity come from? Laws just don't come from no where. Everything else that you states that follows now starts from the dust. Is it organic or inorganic? and it has attached to this dust the law of gravity or maybe it is the law of attraction. In order for there to be dust and gravity there had to be a cause for their actions and interactions.

Eventuality they make a star.
Then the star goes Nova.
This makes other elements & chemicals.


the elements & chemicals are the base for life.
the dust from a Nova is drawn back to make a star and planets.

But microbial life starts in asteroids from a Nova.
the asteroids travel in a very big egg type orbit around the sun.
as it passes the sun it warms up deep in its core.

Over tens of billions of years or more.
the chemicals interact and make microbial life.
they eventually hit a planet that can sustain life.

And they evolve.
Next they make up conspiracies.

So buddah what your are saying is, your great great great great great great great great X10,000,000,000 grandfather was a dust bunny in space.