
Mysterious groups of archaea stir debate about the origin of complex creatures - pseudolus
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01496-w
======
yeahitslikethat
Why can't it be that new organisms are bubbling up from the thermal vents or
bubbling hot springs all the time?

Why do they say every thing came from a _single_ origin cell?

Seems like I'd it happened once, it can happen again!

~~~
jonmc12
"It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living
organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh
what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of
ammonia & phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc present, that a
protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex
changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured, or
absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were
formed"

~Charles Darwin, in a letter to Joseph Hooker (1871)

I heard researcher Bruce Damer explain how Darwin was likely correct in this
letter. As we understand it today, enzymes and oxygen would prevent a second
biological genesis. Also, there is less "feed stock" of star dust falling on
our present warm little ponds. [https://www.mindpodnetwork.com/future-
fossils-109/](https://www.mindpodnetwork.com/future-fossils-109/)

~~~
acqq
A truly very impressive quote, given what was available to Darwin in 1871. At
that time many scientists didn't want to accept that atoms exist:

Adolf Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe "(1818-1884), a German organic chemist described
as one of the greatest of that time" denied that molecules as we know them
today existed. "The French chemist Pierre-Eugéne Marcellin Berthelot
(1827-1907)" "exerted his considerable power as a government official to
prohibit the teaching of atomic theory." "Austrian physicist Ernst Mach
(1838-1916), and German physical chemist Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald
(1853-1932)" "preferred the consideration of perceived data to that of
hypothetical atoms."

Only much later "in 1908 Ostwald became convinced that experiments had finally
given proofs of the discrete or particulate nature of matter. In 1912 Poincaré
declared that "[A]toms are no longer a useful fiction … The atom of the
chemist is now a reality.""

Sources: [https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/science-
magazines/histo...](https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/science-
magazines/historic-dispute-are-atoms-real)

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acqq
It's science, not a "debate club." It's simply about trying to reconstruct
something based on the samples which are still incomplete (and will remain
very hard to improve):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokiarchaeota](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokiarchaeota)

"Specific sediment horizons, previously shown to contain high abundances of
novel archaeal lineages[2][3] were subjected to metagenomic analysis. Due to
the low density of cells in the sediment, the resulting genetic sequence does
not come from an isolated cell, as would be the case in conventional analysis,
but is rather a combination of genetic fragments.[4] The result was a 92%
complete, 1.4 fold-redundant composite genome named Lokiarchaeum.[1]

The metagenomic analysis determined the presence of an organism's genome in
the sample. However, the organism itself has not been cultured.[1]"

Now knowing that, the end of the article is what is the point:

"But analyses of the Asgard archaea, including the Lokis, remain limited.
“What people are really waiting for is the isolation of a member of these
lineages,” says evolutionary microbiologist Simonetta Gribaldo at the Pasteur
Institute."

The other point is:

"Other scientists are reserving judgement: “Trees change,” is a common
refrain."

Exactly.

It seems some editors or the article writers think that when they cover
something as a "debate" there's a "win" somewhere for them (1). "Mysterious"
too. But it's confusing the causal readers who then miss to understand how
amazing is what we already know and how fine these details are that still
aren't known.

\----

1) It's also worth noting that there are some rich entities which pay a lot of
money to "promote doubt" in the successes of natural sciences. Maybe even the
non-biased editors "pick the signal" generated by the public addressed by such
groups and then think that they just "reached more readers" with such titles
or approaches in the articles. I would have expected from "Nature" not to,
however.

~~~
Angostura
> It seems some editors or the article writers think that when they cover
> something as a "debate" there's a "win" somewhere for them

Except that, in this particular area of uncertainity there _has_ been debate,
heated opinion and entrenched positions. Nature is reflecting the messy, human
business of the process of advancing science.

~~~
acqq
It is messy but as I’ve quoted, the majority of scientist had the following
view:

“Other scientists are reserving judgement: “Trees change,” is a common
refrain."

Which is a correct approach to the topic: it’s easy to blow something up out
of proportions when the scale is ignored.

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pazimzadeh
Seems odd that the article doesn't mention Horizontal Gene Transfer at all.
This phenomenon could explain why some archaea encode genes that are common in
eukaryotes.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28189637](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28189637)

