Secular Pinoy

While rummaging through the Amazon website looking for a decent book on geology, I chanced upon this book: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1884981011" target="_blank">Originations of Life from Volcanoes and Petroleum</a>. The book description given at the webpage says: Has anyone read this book or encountered any argument resembling this (I myself have not read it)? The author seems to be arguing that life originated in a lot of places and are distinct from (though similar to) each other. Sort of like the multiregionalism theory of human origins. What do you guys think of his hypothesis?

tgamble

How the hell does multiple origins of life disprove evolution? What does it even have to do with evolution?

ps418

Never heard of the book, or the author. The amazon page says that the author is a Mayo-trained, board certified urologist, so maybe that explains it.

Principia

The closest thing to this line of argument that I have recently read about is Carl Woese's <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=961850 2&dopt=Abstract" target="_blank">paper</a> or rather the misinterpretation of it.

EDIT: oops, wrong link.

Actually, <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=120773 05&dopt=Abstract" target="_blank">here</a> is Woese's latest PNAS paper.

[ December 16, 2002: Message edited by: Principia ]</p>

Rancid

Um... Isn't petroleum formed from organic materials in the first place? So what was alive before the first life forms?

lpetrich

Seems like an attempt to revive the old notion that organisms are continually spontaneously generated from nonliving material. Some centuries ago, it used to be thought self-evident that rotting meat spontaneously generates maggots, that river mud spontaneously generates mice, etc. The first test of this hypothesis was Francesco Redi's famous 1668 experiments; keeping flies from rotting meat kept maggots from appearing in it. This was followed by others, and the notion of present-day spontaneous generation was eventually discredited.

However, the concepts of "abiogenesis" and "chemical evolution" are essentially revivals of the notion, though placed in the Earth's distant past. This is reasonable, since

(1) Even the "simplest" of present-day Earth organisms is formidably complex, requiring a lot of evolution to form them.

(2) Structural similarities grossly outweigh what is functionally necessary (homology), pointing to common ancestry rather than independent formation.

(3) Charles Darwin had noted that some present-day organisms would readily eat any prebiotic-chemistry "primordial soup" that formed.

A favorite hypothesis of what very early organisms had been like is the "RNA world", where RNA both replicated itself and functioned as enzymes; this was later elaborated into the present-day DNA-to-RNA-to-protein-enzyme system. However, no present-day RNA-world organisms are known to exist, which is what would be necessary if spontaneous generation is continually happening.

So it's safe to dismiss that book as pure crackpottery, even though it might point out some interesting features of volcanoes and oil deposits.

lpetrich

Organic != biogenic.

Petroleum is a mixture of a variety of hydrocarbons, a mixture which includes such molecules as hopanes, pristine, phytane, steranes, and certain porphyrins. These are considered clear indicators of biological origin, presumably because they are more abundant than one might expect from Fischer-Tropsch (purely nonbiological) syntheses. I recall from somewhere that petroleum has a bias toward odd numbers of carbons in straight-chain hydrocarbons; this is a result of the decomposition of biological fatty acids, which universally have even numbers of carbons, and which have single carboxyl groups which split off as carbon dioxide.

[ December 16, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

Secular Pinoy

It's like this. If life gets spontaneously generated around the world, then common descent is disproved. The similarity of species can be attributed from their common habitat.

Elaborate

Strictly speaking, evolution wouldn't require all creatures to be of common ancestry. Evolution would be disproven only if each and every species was shown to have an idependent origin. The creatures of different origin would still have evolution selecting for and against traits, leading to the change of populations, and thus evolution. Or so I understand.

Skeptical

Not really. Even if there were multiple instances of life arising on Earth more or less simultaneously, that doesn't mean that these lines of descent did not converge rather early. It could also be very well that only one line survived to produce modern life forms.

In any case, the bottom line is that the genetic evidence for common descent is so strong the only possible rational conclusions are that common descent is a fact or somone went to an awful lot of trouble to make it look like it occured. "Common habitat" cannot account for the genetic similarities that are found, for example, between human chromosome 2 and those of two chimp chromosomes as found <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=001238&p=" target="_blank">here</a> or the obvious DNA copying errors as found <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=001356&p=" target="_blank">here</a>

[ December 16, 2002: Message edited by: Skeptical ]</p>