Could Life Be Older Than Earth Itself?

[n2doc]

Applying a maxim from computer science to biology raises the intriguing possibility that life existed before Earth did and may have originated outside our solar system, scientists say.

Moore's Law is the observation that computers increase exponentially in complexity, at a rate of about double the transistors per integrated circuit every two years. If you apply Moore's Law to just the last few years' rate of computational complexity and work backward, you'll get back to the 1960s, when the first microchip was, indeed, invented.

Now, two geneticists have applied Moore's Law to the rate at which life on Earth grows in complexity — and the results suggest organic life first came into existence long before Earth itself.

Staff Scientist Alexei Sharov of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, and Theoretical Biologist Richard Gordon of the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida, took Moore's Law, replaced the transistors with nucleotides — the building blocks of DNA and RNA — and the circuits with genetic material, and did the math.

The results suggest life first appeared about 10 billion years ago, far older than the Earth's projected age of 4.5 billion years.

more
http://news.yahoo.com/could-life-older-earth-itself-175255318.html

[dipsydoodle]

1. I took it for granted it is so.

We've only got water because of asteroids. Was prolly in the water as bacteria.

[Agnosticsherbet]

2. The newly discovered kepler planets are from a system over two billion years older...

So it would not surpise me to discover that, if live exists there, it is also much older.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/04/new-kepler-discovery-three-earth-size-planets-in-habitable-zone.html

[darkangel218]

3. So we're basically aliens..

Okays, works for me.

[pnwmom]

20. So Tom Cruz is right?

Oh, no.

[darkangel218]

21. I know right?

[libodem]

4. hmmmm?

Makes one wonder.

[ladjf]

5. In all probability, there is life all over the Universe, much of would probably be older than

Earth.

[Lint Head]

6. The variance of intelligence in all animals could be an indication that life evolved

long ago in different ways. This is fascinating. Also the spiritual aspect of wondering where we came from and the meaning of life could be an innate longing for our source of origin because our minds are more evolved than others. But that's a hard question to answer because we cannot know what other terrestrial lifeforms think. At least for now.

[Wounded Bear]

7. I certainly would not be surprised if this is so....

It just makes sense. Much of the universe is older than our solar system, we've already sort of proven that. So the idea that life is older than here aligns with that.

It doesn't mean that life didn't spontaneously spring up here. It might have, or it might have come here on asteroids and/or comets.

Of course, we'll probably never really know, until we get out there.

[Victor_c3]

8. How long will be it before we can send a probe to some of those exoplanets?

I'd love to know what is on those planets that they just announced discovering yesterday. Wouldn't it be something if there was life that we were somehow distantly related to? Talk about mind boggling and making you feel insignificant

[FiveGoodMen]

9. For anyone interested in a counter argument...

PZ Myers:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/18/graaarh-physicists-biologists/

[Victor_c3]

10. bahhhh!

A good argument about cherry-picked data takes the fun out of it all.

Isn't it more fun to check your brain at the door and watch stuff like "ancient aliens" and wonder sometimes?

[Posteritatis]

11. Hee, just that URL alone. (nt)

[JimDandy]

12. Handwavey physics

Is that like hamstring theory?

[Jim__]

13. Myers is not offering anything that can seriously be called a counter-argument.

Last edited Sat Apr 20, 2013, 06:28 AM - Edit history (1)

From Myers blog:

Life originated 9.7 billion years ago, huh? Maybe 13 billion plus years ago? I didn’t even have to read the paper: I predicted that there would be a certain graph in it, opened it up, scanned to Figure 1, and there it was.

So, he didn't even read the paper? It's a 26 page paper that takes 15 minutes to read. Myers publicly criticizes the paper without taking the few minutes to bother to even read it. He goes on:

They cherrypicked their data points. They didn’t include lungfish, ferns, onions, or some protists because that would totally undermine their premise; those are contemporary organisms with much larger genomes than mammals’, and their shallow, stupid exercise in curve-fitting would have flopped miserably. It’s a great example of garbage in, garbage out.

...

That graph, though, just kills it. At least try to respect the larger data set, will ya, guys?

This was published in archiv, probably to escape the restrictions of peer review (i.e., slip some bullshit under the door), and really, I read that and thought, “physicists, again?” But then I looked closer at the authors. I am so ashamed.

Cherry-picked, non-peer reviewed data? Well, not the data that's in the graph he's referring to. The data used in that graph is taken directly from a 2006 peer reviewed paper, Genome increase as a clock for the origin and evolution of life.

If Myers wants to go public with his criticism, he needs to spend the time it takes to form an honest opinion.

[DreamGypsy]

16. When you got out into an orchard where you have picked cherries before...

...it is likely that you will pick cherries again.

The author of the 2006 peer reviewed paper you cite, Alexei A Sharov, is one of the authors of the Life Before Earth paper which simply reuses the graph from 2006.

The first (peer) reviewer of the 2006 paper writes (on page 6 of that paper):

I am not at all a priori prejudiced against the panspermia hypothesis and actually agree with the author's concluding sentence in that panspermia should be considered "on equal basis with alternative hypotheses of de-novo life origin on earth". However, I think that the approach used in this work provides no support for an early date of life's origin. The main problem, as I see it, lies with the fact that the key plot in Fig. 1 combines two worlds with very different evolutionary trends, the prokaryotes and the eukaryotes (especially, complex, multicellular eukaryotes). The exponential law very well might hold for the portion of the curve that corresponds to complex eukaryotes (or, possibly, eukaryotes in general), and the reasons why this is so would be interesting to discuss in some depth (more data points would be required, though). The problem is, however, that, for the first 1.5–2 billion years of life's evolution on this planet, all existing life forms were prokaryotes. There is just one point corresponding to prokaryotes in Fig. 1, and there is, indeed, an excellent reason for that: we have no evidence whatsoever that the maximum genome size of prokaryotes increased during that enormous time span or in the time elapsed since.

The paper author Sharov provides a response to this reviewer.

The second reviewer writes:

In this contribution, the author attempts to characterize the functional form of the relationship between the sizes of the functional genome of organisms and their appearance in the fossil record. Using five data points (prokaryotes, eukaryotes, worms, fish, and mammals), the author deduces an exponential increase in functional size with time. He then uses this functional relationship to hypothesize an origin of life that exceeds the age of the Earth by a factor of two. From this he concludes that the origin of life cannot have taken place on Earth, but points towards hypotheses of the panspermia type.

This paper is an example of how not to analyze data. First, there is no doubt that a much more sophisticated analysis of whole genome data can be performed. For example, the author claims that 1/3 of the Fugu rubripes genome is functional (this is one of his datapoints), but the original publication only states that "gene loci occupy about one-third of the genome". There is some evidence that noncoding but functional (likely regulatory) DNA increases with the complexity of the organism (see, e.g., [1]), so that taking just the gene loci into account is very likely to be misleading, more so for complex metazoans.

Again there is a reply to these criticisms.

The third review writes:

I agree with the Author on the following:
1. If there is evidence supporting panspermy, it should be considered seriously.

2. Panspermy, if it occurred, should not prevent us from attempting to reconstruct ancestral genomes, using com-
parative genomics and the knowledge of planetary chemistry.

3. Early stages of evolution of Life seem to have been overloaded with evolutionary innovation, which asks for
explanations. Panspermy may be one such explanation; periods of accelerated evolution, prompted in part by
Lynch-Conery considerations of Ne, is another.

Having said that, I do not see any striking arguments for panspermy in this work. The "genome size as a clock"
approach is, in my opinion, qualitatively correct, and it shows what we already knew, i.e., that the earliest stages
of life appear to have had precious little time to progress to what are currently our best estimates of genome size
and the number of protein-coding genes (on the latter, see also below). Whether the dependency is of the exponential form, however, remains to be seen.

My take on the hypothesis by Sharov and Gordon is that we are witnessing exactly what should be happening with an hypothesis of this nature. A discuss ensues among the scientifically knowledgeable community; when there are objectives to the methodology or data analysis, the proposers should respond exploring addition techniques (unclear to me whether this has happened...after all it is the same graph as 7 years ago), and there should be a lengthy discussion about what experiments or findings could be done to find actual supporting evidence for the hypothesis.

Seems like there is much more solid information to look forward to...

Science is fun!!

[Jim__]

18. Yes, I read the paper including the reviewers comments and the author's replies.

I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the hypothesis. I am objecting to Myers clear implication that the data has not been peer reviewed. It has. There are a number of legitimate objections Myers could have made, however, by his own claim, he didn't read the paper; and the claim he made about the data is wrong.

[DreamGypsy]

19. Yeah, I understand...

The 'counter argument' blog was the first time I have encountered PZ Meyers and I found the style very abrasive. However, when you pointed out that there was a 2006 paper, I got a better idea of the origin of the punchline:

I predicted that there would be a certain graph in it, opened it up, scanned to Figure 1, and there it was.

Obviously, these guys have some history with each other and there is an ongoing feud. Meyers was overjoyed to find the premise unmodified from 2006 and decided that was sufficient for a knockout.

Thanks for your post and reply.

[htuttle]

14. It's an inappropriate application of Moore's Law

Moore's Law describes a profit-driven, directed process. Natural selection allows, and produces, far more diversity in a shorter amount of time. If life evolved using the same principles as the microchip industry, there would never have been a duckbill platypus.

[jberryhill]

17. +1

Moore's law is a large scale observation of conscious, directed activity. Was my first reaction too.

[DetlefK]

22. Their mistake is what separates amateurs from professional scientists.

Moore's Law depends on the productivity of scientists/engineers/human society, not some chemical reaction kinetics or other laws of nature.

You can fit nice functions to almost everything and make nice predictions, forward and backward in time.
The fit can be perfect and still absolutely bullshit. Why?
Because the parameters of your function represent real-life attributes of the system.
You have to ask yourself the question: Are the parameter-values my fit yielded realistic?
If not, then your fit is absolutely meaningless.
Fitting a function with realistic parameter-values might yield uglier diagrams, but at least they are believable.

There is no a priori-reason to believe that the number of nucleotides would double every two years. (What about the viruses and bacteria that evolved during the last decades???) If that rate is not credible, why should their extrapolation be?

[sofa king]

26. Moore's law is also mostly bullshit.

Its definition is constantly being juggled and re-defined. Moore said transistor counts double every two years. An associate of his claimed that performance doubles every eighteen months. The rest of the world conflates the two.

But in fact over the past ten years, neither of those observations have worked very well. While some chips have continued to increase in transistor count, it's the crap-ass ARM chips, with their low transistor count and abysmal performance, that are taking over. The number of computers continues to increase; but their performance per unit has regressed significantly.

There are CPUs headed to market now with eight cores, but are they eight times faster than the single-core chip you had ten years ago? Hell, no! The real driving force of CPU performance, clock speeds, ran aground at 3 GHz ten years ago (on April 14, 2003, to be precise, when the P4 3.0 came out, though overclockers like me got there early). What's the clock speed of a $1000 Intel chip today? 3.5 GHz.

Parallel computing is a huge pain in the ass to program, not nearly perfected, and not additive among cores but rather only providing a small and diminishing percentage of increased performance per additional core. This is why you still don't have a computer that can run Crysis at an acceptable frame-rate.

So it doesn't surprise me to see PZ Myers call bullshit on the idea, because the original idea is bullshit, too.

Edit: oh, yeah, and they also use the same cherry-picking and shitty graphs to justify it:



ARM chips don't even show up on the graph, because if they did they would sit somewhere below the Intel Atom, which is also a shitty chip.

[Coyotl]

15. Life is a property of matter

so yes, of course.

[Heather MC]

23. I think it's funny to assume life began on earth, I blame religion

[tclambert]

24. Um, Polychaos dubium, a single-celled microbe, has over 200 times as much DNA as humans.

I did not make up that name. Honest. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_dubia

So, we may have DEvolved considerably over time. Which by Sharov's argument may mean that life originates in the future.

[Jim__]

25. The paper does explicitly state that complexity does not refer to total DNA length.

From the paper:

... Segments of DNA with non-genetic functions are mostly not conserved and include various transposing elements as well as tandem repeats. While the ENCODE project has uncovered many functions for 80% noncoding DNA in humans (Pennisi, 2012), it has not yet addressed the C-value paradox. Thus 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). ...