Cells divide and make new cells, is all life on Earth rooted in one super ancestor cell? Or are there parallel paths to cell creation?
Cells divide and make new cells, is all life on Earth rooted in one super ancestor cell? Or are there parallel paths to cell creation?
That’s an open question, so nobody knows the right answer. We weren’t there to witness it happen, and any evidence we do have is very indirect at best.
This leads to many possibilities, and it’s difficult to figure out how likely they are.
Homicide detectives don’t need to have been there to figure out whodunit. There’s tons of “indirect evidence” to help biologists put the pieces together, and while we may not yet have a single conclusive or concise answer, the fact is that some hypotheses have been elevated to theories, and some theories have risen above and proved to be stronger than others.
Not that long ago, people thought humans were put here, fully formed, by gods. We gathered evidence which led to the conclusion that that scenario is factually untrue. Eventually, we may do the same for figuring out the exact origins of life on Earth (and there’s some good theories).
Homicide detectives have lots of evidence to work with, and they’re all reasonably fresh.
The case of Ötzi (the iceman) is really tricky to solve, since there’s very little evidence to work with. We know what happened to him, but everything else about the case is a subject of much speculation. I would argue that solving the origin of life is even harder to solve.
I agree with you. It was just an analogy used to convey a core idea.
There are definitely many similarities, and the basic principle is the same.
You use evidence to rule out possibilities, and adjust the probabilities of anything remaining on your list. You may be left with just a few options, and you might be able to test them, to narrow it down even further. Hopefully, that’s enough to come to some conclusions.
We’re talking about several orders of magnitude more time than the evolution of man. Short of a time machine, the answer to this question is impossible to know.
I think what you mean to say is that it’s not currently possible to know with 100% certainty. Science doesn’t deal in absolutes, because it needs to be open to change should new facts change our understanding. What if we do invent time travel one day and are able to go back in time?
But that doesn’t mean we can’t make strong cases with rich bodies of evidence to reasonably infer what the history of life is.
No, I said what I meant. There’s no possible way to know with any certainty if life on earth came from a solitary cell, or if multiple single cells formed over the globe without actually traveling through time to find out.
Alright. I invite you to justify your claim. That’s an interesting position to take.
Because you’d need microscopic physical evidence of something that happened nearly 4 billion years ago. And you’d need a fuck ton of it to definitively say that it was one super cell and not several separate instances of it.
And on a geological time scale, that evidence has almost certainly been erased.
We might be able to figure out the conditions that caused life to form, but to know whether it was a singular event or not requires an extremely high burden of proof.
Even with a time machine it would be extremely difficult to get that level of evidence. Even if we could recreate the conditions that led to life forming and create a cell out of a soup of amino acids, that still wouldn’t answer the question.
Sure. I agree that it’s a very hard proposition, but I’m sure scientists thought going to space was a hard proposition before we did it. Photographing the black hole at the center of our galaxy was a hard proposition until we did it.
Our collective incredulity doesn’t seem to have prevented science from overcoming seemingly impossible feats, thus far, and it’s that relentless desire to explore and discover that leaves me thinking it’s more likely that we just don’t know these things yet.
There’s a difference between a hard proposition and something being within the realm of possibility. There are some things that we will never be able to know for certain, and this is one of those.
Hell, the cells that we all evolved from might not even be the first life to form on the planet.
It’s not a subject like astronomy that better instruments will be able to improve our knowledge. This is a history question, not a scientific question, and you can’t answer those questions if evidence doesn’t exist.
But if you’re doing serious science, it can be really hard to rule out all the other possibilities and narrow it down to just one, most probable cause.
For example, did the first cell form here on Earth, or was it carried here by an asteroid? How would you rule either of these out?
Absolutely, it’s a hard thing to figure out. Scientists have been working their whole lives to figure that out. My point is just that hard ≠ impossible.
How would I? No clue. But I agree that there is still debate whether panspermia brought life (or the components for life) or whether some other chain of events led to life originating here. I’ve heard cases for both, and I don’t think there’s enough evidence to conclude which it was. Maybe it’s some third option that people disregarded; maybe it will be the definitive proof that theists have been searching for.
Perhaps one day we’ll have a better idea. I’m okay living in the uncertainty in the meantime.