
Moore's Law and the Origin of Life - kafkaesq
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/
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dalke
Where are the error bars?

Fish, worm, and mammals are all eukaryotes. There's no way the 'Eukaryotes'
spot can be so small.

To figure out it out, you have to read the paper it cites, which is by one of
the co-authors, at
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1526419/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1526419/)
.

The smallest known genomes for a given class were used as a proxy for the
putative ancestral genome.

But what's lovely about the publication is _you get to see the reviewers
comments_.

First reviewer: " I think that the approach used in this work provides no
support for an early date of life's origin."

Second reviewer: "This paper is an example of how not to analyze data."

Third reviewer: " I do not see any striking arguments for panspermy in this
work ... Third and most important, all this is not relevant to Author's own
argument: the genome to discuss is not minimal one, but that of LUCA (last
universal common ancestor)."

