7 ms·

Was the Cause of Cambrian Explosion Terrestrial or Cosmic?

58 points by georgecmu 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tim333 8y ago
One thing that bugs me a about the discussion of evolution in general is it tends to get treated as a smooth process influence mostly by the environment but DNA is essentially digital code for building bodies and probably the Cambrian was kicked off by some mutation a bit like a code refactor that allowed a lot of body variation subsequently by the changing of a few base pairs. A bit like, in a loose analogy the old code was print "protein"; print "protein" and the new code was for i=1 to 2 {print "protein"} so that in the second case a single mutation in the "2" could result in a wide variety of body sizes.
- ak39 8y ago
  The reason why the Cambrian was considered special and was often referenced as an "evolutionary explosion" was because the pace/rate of speciation is abnormally high during that period only. If you take your hypothesis for example, it may explain the explosion (rapidity) of the evolution of new species but it still doesn't offer viable reasons why the explosion was isolated to that period only. (Just an amusing side note: my God-believing and evolution-denying BIL uses the evidence of the Cambrian explosion to suggest that no scientist can explain why there was an explosion of diverse species is such a short time - it had to be "God's hand". "Only a creator can do such a thing". I must admit, until the arrival of my BIL, the Cambrian period was of mild interest to me. I now read about it with "special interest". Cheers!
  - sgt101 8y ago
    If he believes the the Cambrian explosion is due to God then he believes in the fact of the event, but has a different causal agent (vs don't know)
    - ak39 8y ago
      Correctly assessed. He uses the very same evidence of the existence of the explosion and the absence of evidence to explain the explosion part of the evidence as reason to believe that "it is God". I usually end the dinner conversation when I keep asking "how?". On some very rare but weaker moments he might trip and admit "I don't know". At which point I end it by saying, that's a very scientific thing to say. :-) He adds colour to our lives.
      - BetaCygni 8y ago
        To be honest, we don't know either, so the agnostic viewpoint (compared to atheistic) would be that it is equally valid. Either you believe in random chance or you believe in God. I'm always perfectly happy when someone calls the big bang the moment of creation. It could have been.
        Nursie 8y ago
        >Either you believe in random chance or you believe in God Not really true. "We don't know exactly how the Cambrian explosion came about, but have a lot of good evidence on how evolution works, which allows us to probe deeper into theories about what happened" is not equivalent to "it's all random chance!"
        BetaCygni 8y ago
        Isn't evolution random chance + selection? That's how I've always seen it.
        ak39 8y ago
        Not sure the point you're making. I do not differentiate between agnostic and atheistic thought. They are both the same thinking/belief systems in my view. An agnostic believes there could be a "god/creator" (but does not pursue this thought any further than "maybe"). An agnostic also believes there may not be a God/Creator given the absence of evidence to justify such a belief. An atheist believes that there is NO god/creator given the absence of evidence to prove the existence of such a being. If evidence had to exist then the atheist will believe the existence of such a being based on such evidence. That sounds exactly the same. As to your point about "we don't know" - well, not knowing is perfectly fine in science. We cannot ascribe to or embellish and fabricate imagined facts and agents to any unknown phenomenon without evidence.
  - Insanity 8y ago
    Brother in-law?
    - ak39 8y ago
      Yip. He insists on hammering the vast wonders and myriad colours of life through the same blunt instrumentation of non-sequiturs and other horrendous logical fallacies. He simply cannot accept the removal of a "God's hand" in any conversation of scientific import. Conversations with him can get comical only if you insist on ignoring that he is a medical doctor to boot.
      - fsloth 8y ago
        "He insists on hammering the vast wonders and myriad colours of life through the same blunt instrumentation" That's how human brains generally work. He's been conditioned to particular pattern matching and filtering. It's not a rational choice.
      - Angostura 8y ago
        How does he cope with the obvious evolution of antibiotic resistance through natural selection of bacteria? Or is he one of those 'micro-evolution' exists, but not 'macro-evolution'.?
  - lugg 8y ago
    Would that not just be a tipping point in genetic diversity? Once you reach a certain level of complexity in one lineage you get exponentially more variation possible. Likewise, compound that from earlier lineage break aways that are now also reaching a tipping point in their own complexity. In other words, it's just an exponential situation under prime conditions for new species to emerge.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    I always liked the "Radiological explanation" regarding the Cambrian explosion. Higher-than-normal levels of radiation would provide the mutagenic effects on all life. Many things would die because of dead-end deviations. I look at the area around Chernobyl at what radiation can do for evolution. Of course, it's pretty terrible for suffering on a whole, but we're talking about evolution. Life gets messy.
  - tim333 8y ago
    Maybe in my analogy evolution was able to run through the different mutations of "2" and then had tried them all hence it finishing?
- zaphirplane 8y ago
  What I don’t get about evolution is why humans haven’t evolved in the last 5000 years probably 10,000 years
  - Insanity 8y ago
    Evolution is a slow process. Plus humans are complex, so the small changes might be relatively invisible
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    It’s not like obvious evolutionary change typically happens in the course of just a few generations. But a quick web search turns up various discussions of recent evolution, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html
  - firmgently 8y ago
    The timespan of a generation in humans is about 20 years. So in 5000-10000 years that's 250-500 generations, a tiny amount. For evolution to happen, a genetic mutation has to endow an advantage that makes its carrier more likely to survive and reproduce. Given that the reproductive selection process (which characteristics are attractive to a mate) is largely driven by cultural norms now, it's hard to see what advantages are going to raise a person's chances of reproducing. Fashion tastes change several times in a single generation. Women are often said to like taller men. Well we are getting taller as a species [1]. If men prefer a woman with a certain 'look', maybe women are evolving towards that look (it seems like a much harder thing to quantify). Manipulative, cheating males have more sexual partners - maybe we're evolving towards more of that kind of behaviour. If you're expecting humans to grow extra arms or become super-strong or something, I don't think it's going to happen. Extra limbs is too 'abnormal' and culture doesn't like that. Being physically strong doesn't affect chances of survival in humans any more. Same applies to better vision, hearing... any super-senses. They don't affect our survival. I've heard people posit that maybe we'll lose our little fingers as they don't do anything. Same again though - even if it's true that we don't use them, it doesn't mean that someone born without little fingers is going to have a higher chance of reproducing. Our development happens at a rate much faster than biological evolution now because of culture (meme vs gene). A lot of what constitutes a modern human is external (as a thought experiment just imagine what a human would be like if he'd never spoken to another human, read anything, or absorbed any culture in any other way). From this point of view, cultural evolution could be seen as evolution v2.0 as it happens and spreads much more quickly that genetic evolution. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-we-getting-taller/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-we-gettin...
- slfnflctd 8y ago
  My understanding is that something very much like this is what is theorized to have kicked off a more recent 'explosion', that of angiosperms. Essentially there was some chromosome doubling which set the stage for the huge diversity and abundance of flowering plants which quickly dominated the planet. In the Wikipedia article on angiosperms it states, "The evolution of seed plants and later angiosperms appears to be the result of two distinct rounds of whole genome duplication events." I'm sure something like this is one of the more plausible triggers for the Cambrian.
  - tim333 8y ago
    I was thinking - it's not an area I know much about really - but if something like that happened in the Cambrian you could probably figure out what by looking at the DNA of explosion descendents and species that were not involved and seeing what sequences were in the first group but not the second.
bhouston 8y ago
This is the standard panspermia argument: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia I think one needs clear evidence of life on a comet or another planet. Otherwise it is all circumstantial evidence.
sgt101 8y ago
Other theories: The sun calmed down enough so that large large organisms be near the light without being zapped with radiation, the algeal mat that covered the ocean got eaten by animals and this opened the possibility of ecosystems, the earth unfroze, the chemistry of the oceans changed. Anyone heard others?
jesdjkeujjuju 8y ago
I think it probably went like this: a new feature (hard shells) was discovered by evolution, which gave so much advantage that all sorts of varieties could coexist for a while (even sub-optimal ones, as they still had the advantage over old organisms). Eventually, some winners among the organisms emerge, the advantage disappears and the sub-optimal variations begin to die out. I like to compare it to the evolution of computer games. When they became viable first (home computer revolution), an incredible amount of games was developed. Eventually doom arrived on the scene and every game became a 1st person shooter. (Simplified story, of course). Or the dot com boom maybe - for a while, money was thrown at everything internet related. After a while some winning concepts emerged, and most of the contenders went away again.
- rwnspace 8y ago
  For video-game inspired animal biology/evolution, Tierzoo brings fresh insights with each new video: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHsRtomD4twRf5WVHHk-cMw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHsRtomD4twRf5WVHHk-cMw
- ufo 8y ago
  One thing to keep in mind is that hard shells are much better at producing fossils. We don't have as good of an idea of how animals looked before the Cambrian or how diverse they were because most of them did not fossilize very well.
- douglaswlance 8y ago
  Predation evolved soon before the explosion. That was the FPS of the era.
psergeant 8y ago
I feel like at this point it’s not too far-fetched to say with absolute certainty that earth is in the process of a long-term terraform by some alien species, and that humans represent the final step of that process, by warming the earth and making sure carbon is properly distributed through the atmosphere, as well as collecting and separating the metals that our alien overlords will feast on. When they’re done feasting on us.
- laumars 8y ago
  It's a terraform project for sure, but not for food. We are actually just circuits in a massive supercomputer built by pan-dimensional mice.
- mar77i 8y ago
  The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with the panspermia argument is that space is a very unfriendly place for anything living to reside. Okay, it might be that conditions on Earth were harsh at times, but that by far doesn't seem to match those found in space. At geological time scales, space just doesn't appear very safe for life.
Nursie 8y ago
for a (mildly irreverent) takedown of this piece - http://www.iflscience.com/space/new-study-suggests-evidence-that-octopuses-came-from-outer-space/ http://www.iflscience.com/space/new-study-suggests-evidence-... It seems to be a load of speculation written by people with some sort of agenda and not a lot of actual knowledge.
- gilleain 8y ago
  > including a chap called Chandra Wickramasinghe Ohhhh. Glad I didn't read the paper then. I'm sure he has a lot of knowledge, but he's a bit obsessed by the idea of panspermia.
mrleiter 8y ago
Not saying that I support this, but it gives an interesting touch to the creation of Adam in the Bible. In Genesis 2,7 it says:"Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." [1] In the abstract of the paper it says "living organisms such as space-resistant and space-hardy bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells, fertilised ova and seeds have been continuously delivered ever since to Earth". Besides from skipping lots of evolutionary steps, if those organisms have been delivered to earth by some cosmic object (a hand of God?), then man ultimately formed from that dust. I am by no means religious, but it's an interesting thought experiment. [1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2&versi...
- ak39 8y ago
  It's a thought, that's all. It's not an experiment by any stretch of the meaning of the word experiment.
  - mrleiter 8y ago
    That's exactly what I said.
    - ak39 8y ago
      Uhm no, it is not exactly what you said. You exactly wrote: "...but it's an interesting thought experiment". Your story is not a thought experiment of any kind. It's just an unstructured, unverifiable, lacking in continuity idea. It just a "thought" on its own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment
- redial 8y ago
  It is as interesting as any other vague creation myth that can be made to fit with whatever you want.
- fsloth 8y ago
  "man ultimately formed from that dust" I think this is just poetics, but I don't see how panspermia would make us any more cosmic beings than we already are. All elements heavier than helium were created in the hearts of stars through nuclear fusion. We are all children of supernova remnants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA Is composed of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and phosporus. 4 out of 5 elements there are guaranteed, certified remains of one ancient star or another. Or. Like Carl Sagan said, "We are made of star stuff".
mjfl 8y ago
"We should take the problem of life and PUSH it somewhere else!"
soufron 8y ago
Isnt'it a devil in the box problem ? If life is not from earth, then where is it from, and why there and not here ? In my view the only elegant solution is to consider that life can originate a bit everywhere and cross-polinate everytime conditions are there. On this issue, I think the Vital Question is a great book : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316494-the-vital-question https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316494-the-vital-quest...
merricksb 8y ago
Same study discussed 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110874 (82 points/123 comments)

58 points by georgecmu 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

One thing that bugs me a about the discussion of evolution in general is it tends to get treated as a smooth process influence mostly by the environment but DNA is essentially digital code for building bodies and probably the Cambrian was kicked off by some mutation a bit like a code refactor that allowed a lot of body variation subsequently by the changing of a few base pairs. A bit like, in a loose analogy the old code was print "protein"; print "protein" and the new code was for i=1 to 2 {print "protein"} so that in the second case a single mutation in the "2" could result in a wide variety of body sizes.

ak39 8y ago
The reason why the Cambrian was considered special and was often referenced as an "evolutionary explosion" was because the pace/rate of speciation is abnormally high during that period only. If you take your hypothesis for example, it may explain the explosion (rapidity) of the evolution of new species but it still doesn't offer viable reasons why the explosion was isolated to that period only. (Just an amusing side note: my God-believing and evolution-denying BIL uses the evidence of the Cambrian explosion to suggest that no scientist can explain why there was an explosion of diverse species is such a short time - it had to be "God's hand". "Only a creator can do such a thing". I must admit, until the arrival of my BIL, the Cambrian period was of mild interest to me. I now read about it with "special interest". Cheers!
- sgt101 8y ago
  If he believes the the Cambrian explosion is due to God then he believes in the fact of the event, but has a different causal agent (vs don't know)
  - ak39 8y ago
    Correctly assessed. He uses the very same evidence of the existence of the explosion and the absence of evidence to explain the explosion part of the evidence as reason to believe that "it is God". I usually end the dinner conversation when I keep asking "how?". On some very rare but weaker moments he might trip and admit "I don't know". At which point I end it by saying, that's a very scientific thing to say. :-) He adds colour to our lives.
    - BetaCygni 8y ago
      To be honest, we don't know either, so the agnostic viewpoint (compared to atheistic) would be that it is equally valid. Either you believe in random chance or you believe in God. I'm always perfectly happy when someone calls the big bang the moment of creation. It could have been.
      - Nursie 8y ago
        >Either you believe in random chance or you believe in God Not really true. "We don't know exactly how the Cambrian explosion came about, but have a lot of good evidence on how evolution works, which allows us to probe deeper into theories about what happened" is not equivalent to "it's all random chance!"
        BetaCygni 8y ago
        Isn't evolution random chance + selection? That's how I've always seen it.
      - ak39 8y ago
        Not sure the point you're making. I do not differentiate between agnostic and atheistic thought. They are both the same thinking/belief systems in my view. An agnostic believes there could be a "god/creator" (but does not pursue this thought any further than "maybe"). An agnostic also believes there may not be a God/Creator given the absence of evidence to justify such a belief. An atheist believes that there is NO god/creator given the absence of evidence to prove the existence of such a being. If evidence had to exist then the atheist will believe the existence of such a being based on such evidence. That sounds exactly the same. As to your point about "we don't know" - well, not knowing is perfectly fine in science. We cannot ascribe to or embellish and fabricate imagined facts and agents to any unknown phenomenon without evidence.
- Insanity 8y ago
  Brother in-law?
  - ak39 8y ago
    Yip. He insists on hammering the vast wonders and myriad colours of life through the same blunt instrumentation of non-sequiturs and other horrendous logical fallacies. He simply cannot accept the removal of a "God's hand" in any conversation of scientific import. Conversations with him can get comical only if you insist on ignoring that he is a medical doctor to boot.
    - fsloth 8y ago
      "He insists on hammering the vast wonders and myriad colours of life through the same blunt instrumentation" That's how human brains generally work. He's been conditioned to particular pattern matching and filtering. It's not a rational choice.
    - Angostura 8y ago
      How does he cope with the obvious evolution of antibiotic resistance through natural selection of bacteria? Or is he one of those 'micro-evolution' exists, but not 'macro-evolution'.?
- lugg 8y ago
  Would that not just be a tipping point in genetic diversity? Once you reach a certain level of complexity in one lineage you get exponentially more variation possible. Likewise, compound that from earlier lineage break aways that are now also reaching a tipping point in their own complexity. In other words, it's just an exponential situation under prime conditions for new species to emerge.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  I always liked the "Radiological explanation" regarding the Cambrian explosion. Higher-than-normal levels of radiation would provide the mutagenic effects on all life. Many things would die because of dead-end deviations. I look at the area around Chernobyl at what radiation can do for evolution. Of course, it's pretty terrible for suffering on a whole, but we're talking about evolution. Life gets messy.
- tim333 8y ago
  Maybe in my analogy evolution was able to run through the different mutations of "2" and then had tried them all hence it finishing?
zaphirplane 8y ago
What I don’t get about evolution is why humans haven’t evolved in the last 5000 years probably 10,000 years
- Insanity 8y ago
  Evolution is a slow process. Plus humans are complex, so the small changes might be relatively invisible
- jacobolus 8y ago
  It’s not like obvious evolutionary change typically happens in the course of just a few generations. But a quick web search turns up various discussions of recent evolution, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html
- firmgently 8y ago
  The timespan of a generation in humans is about 20 years. So in 5000-10000 years that's 250-500 generations, a tiny amount. For evolution to happen, a genetic mutation has to endow an advantage that makes its carrier more likely to survive and reproduce. Given that the reproductive selection process (which characteristics are attractive to a mate) is largely driven by cultural norms now, it's hard to see what advantages are going to raise a person's chances of reproducing. Fashion tastes change several times in a single generation. Women are often said to like taller men. Well we are getting taller as a species [1]. If men prefer a woman with a certain 'look', maybe women are evolving towards that look (it seems like a much harder thing to quantify). Manipulative, cheating males have more sexual partners - maybe we're evolving towards more of that kind of behaviour. If you're expecting humans to grow extra arms or become super-strong or something, I don't think it's going to happen. Extra limbs is too 'abnormal' and culture doesn't like that. Being physically strong doesn't affect chances of survival in humans any more. Same applies to better vision, hearing... any super-senses. They don't affect our survival. I've heard people posit that maybe we'll lose our little fingers as they don't do anything. Same again though - even if it's true that we don't use them, it doesn't mean that someone born without little fingers is going to have a higher chance of reproducing. Our development happens at a rate much faster than biological evolution now because of culture (meme vs gene). A lot of what constitutes a modern human is external (as a thought experiment just imagine what a human would be like if he'd never spoken to another human, read anything, or absorbed any culture in any other way). From this point of view, cultural evolution could be seen as evolution v2.0 as it happens and spreads much more quickly that genetic evolution. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-we-getting-taller/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-we-gettin...
slfnflctd 8y ago
My understanding is that something very much like this is what is theorized to have kicked off a more recent 'explosion', that of angiosperms. Essentially there was some chromosome doubling which set the stage for the huge diversity and abundance of flowering plants which quickly dominated the planet. In the Wikipedia article on angiosperms it states, "The evolution of seed plants and later angiosperms appears to be the result of two distinct rounds of whole genome duplication events." I'm sure something like this is one of the more plausible triggers for the Cambrian.
- tim333 8y ago
  I was thinking - it's not an area I know much about really - but if something like that happened in the Cambrian you could probably figure out what by looking at the DNA of explosion descendents and species that were not involved and seeing what sequences were in the first group but not the second.

bhouston 8y ago

This is the standard panspermia argument: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia I think one needs clear evidence of life on a comet or another planet. Otherwise it is all circumstantial evidence.

sgt101 8y ago

Other theories: The sun calmed down enough so that large large organisms be near the light without being zapped with radiation, the algeal mat that covered the ocean got eaten by animals and this opened the possibility of ecosystems, the earth unfroze, the chemistry of the oceans changed. Anyone heard others?

jesdjkeujjuju 8y ago

I think it probably went like this: a new feature (hard shells) was discovered by evolution, which gave so much advantage that all sorts of varieties could coexist for a while (even sub-optimal ones, as they still had the advantage over old organisms). Eventually, some winners among the organisms emerge, the advantage disappears and the sub-optimal variations begin to die out. I like to compare it to the evolution of computer games. When they became viable first (home computer revolution), an incredible amount of games was developed. Eventually doom arrived on the scene and every game became a 1st person shooter. (Simplified story, of course). Or the dot com boom maybe - for a while, money was thrown at everything internet related. After a while some winning concepts emerged, and most of the contenders went away again.

rwnspace 8y ago
For video-game inspired animal biology/evolution, Tierzoo brings fresh insights with each new video: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHsRtomD4twRf5WVHHk-cMw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHsRtomD4twRf5WVHHk-cMw
ufo 8y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that hard shells are much better at producing fossils. We don't have as good of an idea of how animals looked before the Cambrian or how diverse they were because most of them did not fossilize very well.
douglaswlance 8y ago
Predation evolved soon before the explosion. That was the FPS of the era.

psergeant 8y ago

I feel like at this point it’s not too far-fetched to say with absolute certainty that earth is in the process of a long-term terraform by some alien species, and that humans represent the final step of that process, by warming the earth and making sure carbon is properly distributed through the atmosphere, as well as collecting and separating the metals that our alien overlords will feast on. When they’re done feasting on us.

laumars 8y ago
It's a terraform project for sure, but not for food. We are actually just circuits in a massive supercomputer built by pan-dimensional mice.
mar77i 8y ago
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with the panspermia argument is that space is a very unfriendly place for anything living to reside. Okay, it might be that conditions on Earth were harsh at times, but that by far doesn't seem to match those found in space. At geological time scales, space just doesn't appear very safe for life.

Nursie 8y ago

for a (mildly irreverent) takedown of this piece - http://www.iflscience.com/space/new-study-suggests-evidence-that-octopuses-came-from-outer-space/ http://www.iflscience.com/space/new-study-suggests-evidence-... It seems to be a load of speculation written by people with some sort of agenda and not a lot of actual knowledge.

gilleain 8y ago
> including a chap called Chandra Wickramasinghe Ohhhh. Glad I didn't read the paper then. I'm sure he has a lot of knowledge, but he's a bit obsessed by the idea of panspermia.

mrleiter 8y ago

Not saying that I support this, but it gives an interesting touch to the creation of Adam in the Bible. In Genesis 2,7 it says:"Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." [1] In the abstract of the paper it says "living organisms such as space-resistant and space-hardy bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells, fertilised ova and seeds have been continuously delivered ever since to Earth". Besides from skipping lots of evolutionary steps, if those organisms have been delivered to earth by some cosmic object (a hand of God?), then man ultimately formed from that dust. I am by no means religious, but it's an interesting thought experiment. [1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2&versi...

ak39 8y ago
It's a thought, that's all. It's not an experiment by any stretch of the meaning of the word experiment.
- mrleiter 8y ago
  That's exactly what I said.
  - ak39 8y ago
    Uhm no, it is not exactly what you said. You exactly wrote: "...but it's an interesting thought experiment". Your story is not a thought experiment of any kind. It's just an unstructured, unverifiable, lacking in continuity idea. It just a "thought" on its own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment
redial 8y ago
It is as interesting as any other vague creation myth that can be made to fit with whatever you want.
fsloth 8y ago
"man ultimately formed from that dust" I think this is just poetics, but I don't see how panspermia would make us any more cosmic beings than we already are. All elements heavier than helium were created in the hearts of stars through nuclear fusion. We are all children of supernova remnants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA Is composed of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and phosporus. 4 out of 5 elements there are guaranteed, certified remains of one ancient star or another. Or. Like Carl Sagan said, "We are made of star stuff".

mjfl 8y ago

"We should take the problem of life and PUSH it somewhere else!"

soufron 8y ago

Isnt'it a devil in the box problem ? If life is not from earth, then where is it from, and why there and not here ? In my view the only elegant solution is to consider that life can originate a bit everywhere and cross-polinate everytime conditions are there. On this issue, I think the Vital Question is a great book : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316494-the-vital-question https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316494-the-vital-quest...

merricksb 8y ago

Same study discussed 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110874 (82 points/123 comments)