In cosmic ancestry, genetic programs precede the phenotypic expression of themselves. Therefore, we are not surprised by another example of a genetic program that was apparently available before there was any opportunity on Earth for mutation-and-natural-selection to affect it. But how does darwinism account for "pre-adaptation"?

In cosmic ancestry, life can neither originate from nonlife, nor compose genetic programs for higher life forms. Therefore, life must come from the eternal past. In the standard big bang theory, of course, the past is finite, not eternal. Logically, therefore, we must question this limitation of the big bang theory. Fortunately, we are not the only ones with questions about the standard big bang.

The authors of the new CCC scenario do not specify how life could persist through a big bang. But they are well-credentialed cosmologists, challenging the prevailing belief that there was only one big bang, with nothing before it. Good.

V.G.Gurzadyan and R.Penrose, "Concentric circles in WMAP data may provide evidence of violent pre-Big-Bang activity" [

Others are apparently startled also. For example, Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate said, "The definition of life has just expanded." Indeed, lots of hype accompanies the news, released at a NASA press conference in Washington DC at 2PM EST today. Felisa Wolfe-Simon (pictured) of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey was the principle researcher for the project, which also included scientists from Arizona State University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Duquesne University, and the Stanford Synchroton Radiation Lightsource.

We are curious to know several things not explained in the Science article or press releases. For example, can this species survive with absolutely no phosphorus? If not, which biomolecules do, and don't, need phosphorus? How widespread among species is this capability? If phosphorus becomes newly available, do the bacteria revert to it? We will update this news article for a few hours, and post followups. Meanwhile, we now see that some bacteria have another, surprising survival capability.

Tiny salt crystal with sealed inclusions [no scale]

Of course, bacteria that become spores may remain viable indefinitely, and the revival of bacteria trapped in Costa Rican amber at least 25 million years old has already been reported. Now, their apparent capability to actually conduct metabolism in such tiny "time capsules" adds to our amazement. The hardiness of these microbes leads the team to suggest that similar long-survivors may well be found on Mars.

Biologist Lum also remarks, "The things that aren't alive in there, their DNA is still preserved." If their genes have no expiration date, could they remain suitable for installation forever? All of this would be consistent with cosmic ancestry.

"It has been known for a long while that random chemical interactions cannot produce the genetic information of the organisms we currently see on Earth.... For example, in a model of the prebiotic Earth with an appropriate complement of amino acids, random molecular interactions over a period of 500 x 10^6 yr would produce only about 194 bits of information.... This is... tiny compared to the 6 x 10^6 bits in a bacterium like E. Coli. The low gain in information I from N trials is because the two things are related by I = log₂ N."

The writer, astrophysicist Paul S. Wesson of the University of Waterloo, therefore considers panspermia, by logic much like ours: "There are in principle two ways to circumvent this problem. One is that life in fact evolved solely on the Earth, but by some non-random, directed molecular process. The other is that life evolved on the Earth and other planets because they were seeded by biological molecules which already had a large information content. Both of these hypotheses have objections; but in view of the near-inevitability of this process shown above, the second appears to be the more plausible. ...Natural processes do not account for the genomes of observed organisms, basically because of the slow accumulation of genetic information. By contrast, the hypothesis that some information was present at the outset, while it does not solve the problem, certainly alleviates it."

He proposes a new name, necropanspermia, for the delivery of valid genetic programs by fragmented or dead cells or viruses: "The version of the standard theory wherein life restarts from technically dead but information-carrying material may be dubbed necropanspermia. It avoids the problem that random chemical processes cannot account for the information encoded in the genomes of even simple Earthly organisms."

We have a few technical quibbles with him, for example, when he writes: "The potato spindle tuber viroid is among the smallest, self-replicating pathogens known...." But viruses require whole cells to carry out their replication. Also, "Life is a process that generates information, whereas many other processes generate entropy (misinformation)." Because almost anything can be called "information", the term is often misleading. We would say instead: Life is a phenomenon that requires a special kind of information, encoded programs. No natural process has been clearly shown to generate these. Wesson observes this clearly.

Our quibbles are minor compared to our gratitude for his giving panspermia a probing and imaginative analysis. We especially welcome the suggestion that "some information [encoded in the genomes] was present at the outset," a radical idea to almost everyone but us. And he assigns to viruses an even greater role than we do; we thought no one did that! He also discusses in depth the survivability of viable cells, viruses and genomic fragments in space. The complete article is available online.