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It seems quite likely that this isn't actually fundamentally true, because the real story was a mess. If you look at bacteria even, there's a lot of genetic tr
by kadoban 1y ago
It seems quite likely that this isn't actually fundamentally true, because the real story was a mess.
If you look at bacteria even, there's a lot of genetic transfer beyond just strict parent/child relationships either just directly or via viruses or other things I'm sure I've never heard of.
The earliest life was probably more like some kind of soup of self-replicating things, closer to a chemical reaction than biological, and then it would have been kind of a sliding scale over a long period of time before we get to anything that really looks that much like "<this> organism begat <that> organism".
The entire concept of organisms themselves are an abstraction over the truth, that kind of works for today's world, but probably less worked when things were new and interesting and messy.
- xwolfi 1y ago"biological" and "chemical reaction" are the same things :p There's probably nothing special about life and it's everywhere where water is warm.
- pessimizer 1y agoLife is probably the name of the process that happens on the surface of an extremely hot iron ball covered with carbon and water as it cools. First it starts to stink, then it gets fuzzy, then it starts to stink worse as the irregular fuzziness in the surface is replaced by geometric patterns spitting light and clouds of smoke. Eventually the surface is suddenly awash in fire and burnt black.
- mock-possum 1y agoWe’ll see…
- kadoban 1y agoBiology is an abstraction on top of chemistry (which is an abstraction on top of physics, etc.). It's all really the same thing, just a real world we're attempting to make sense out of, but we draw our little dividing lines where it helps us make sense of things a little easier. I just mean: at some point there was a pool (or ocean, or ocean with hotspots, or a beach with chemical goo, or etc.) of stuff doing weird chemical or physical things that we would not call biology, and over a period it moved way more towards something that we _would_ call bioloy. But it was not a hard and fast cut off, where <here> is the first living thing, one cell and then it grew and replicated. It was likely a stew of goo all intermixed at various concentrations and states that what we'd call life messily transitioned out of over such a period that there _was_ really no first living thing that you could realistically point to, because life is not well defined enough for that to make sense.
- 725686 1y agoI'm pretty sure there is a consensus among experts that every living organism has a single ancestor "organism". Life, as far as we know, originated only once on planet Earth.