Philosophy shouldn't stem from the theories of others or from a collection of convenient facts, but from a careful evaluation of the widest range of experience. — Carol Hay, cited in "The Reading Cure", The Wall Street Journal, 8-9 Oct 2016.

...As if the only difference between the world views of science and religion is taste, because the believers of neither feel a need to test it. — Kevin Padian, "Evolution: Doing the locomotion", Nature, 25 Feb 2016.

Replies to Cosmic Ancestry, 2016

Some links may be of interest... Susan Mazur and Carl Zimmer despite the source. Seasons Greetings.... Marty
Why the Royal Society Meeting Mattered, in a Nutshell, Evolution News (ID site), 05 Dec 2019.
Neo-Darwinism: The Current Paradigm is the related local webpage.

Dear Gil [Levin], As you may recall in 1998 Roland Paepe and I published papers In SPIE papers and our NATO Volume on Permafrost describing the significance of the double-rimmed polygons I observed in Siberia and in the MOC images of similar polygons on Mars as indicating the freeze/thaw cycle of present day water ice and liquid water. I think the [linked] most interesting paper is directly relevant to our conclusions as well as to your Viking LR data regarding the possible existence of modern day microbial life on Mars.
SHARAD detection and characterization of subsurface water ice deposits in Utopia Planitia, Mars by C. M. Stuurman et al., doi:10.1002/2016GL070138, Geophysical Research Letters, 28 Sep 2016.
Life On Mars! is the related local webpage.

Astronomy Magazine: Could an astronaut's corpse bring new life to another world?
The fascination with seeding life is spiraling out of control. It is case in point to what we were discussing earlier.


Still NASA won't admit their Galileo team got Europa wrong, Greenberg was right
http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-hubble-spots-possible-water-plumes-erupting-on-jupiters-moon-europa
It's taken NASA years to admit that 100-km plumes seen in 2012 by a SWRI team (Hubble images, Lorenz Roth et al.) are probably water vapour emitted from an ocean below the outer ice crust. Richard Greenberg long ago argued that NASA's Galileo spacecraft images ~ yr 2000 imply an ice shell thin enough (few km) to enable the ocean to penetrate the major cracks maintained by tidal flexing. But this contradicted the project's assumption of a thick crust entombing a deep internal ocean, and Greenberg was ostracised by NASA's team leaders.  The new announcement fails to acknowledge Greenberg as being correct, showing NASA maintains their feud with him for severe criticism of the 'thick ice' cabal in Unmasking Europa: The Search for Life on Jupiter's Ocean Moon.  

Though the book has been reviewed on ASB's site http://astrobiologysociety.org/unmasking-europa-the-search-for-life-on-jupiters-ocean-moon-by-richard-greenberg/ (Lewis Dartnell 2014), the Astrobiology Mag review of 2008 http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/unmasking-europa/ by Michael Shirber is more informative.

The ice on Europa may be 20 (or 10?) kilometers ...thick has the beginings of the story, posted Oct 2002.
Life on Europa, Other Moons, Other Planets? is the related local webpage.


Hi Brig, thanks for the notice. Actually, I was not aware of directed panspermia (DPS) before writing the Genesis article.

Of course I do like the idea of spreading life in a controlled way. DPS is however mostely about bacteria and mostely about non-photosynthesizing bacteria. I do adhere to the mainstream opinion, that simple (bacteria-like) life is probably common in the universe. To me this would imply that DPS would not change this. The success rate, e.g. with commets, is also very (exponentially) low. Interestingly, also, ethical considerations are rarely discussed in the context of panspermian (e.g. not at all in the lengthly wikipedia article).

That said, there are of course quite a few common points. The Genesis project is all about to give a planet the optimal conditions for complex life evenutally to evolve. I hope that this notion may be attractive to the panspermia community too.

With many regards, Claudius Gros | http://itp.uni-frankfurt.de/~gros
Complex and Adaptive Dynamical Systems, A Primer (A graduate-level textbook, Springer (2008/10/13/15))

The Genesis Project, 26 Sep 2016.

The Venus Hypothesis by A. Cartwright, Cardiff University, pdf on arxiv.org, 10 Aug 2011.
Was Venus the First Habitable World of our Solar System? 15 Aug 2016.

New Results from Stardust Mission Paint Chaotic Picture of Early Solar System by Nancy Atkinson, Universe Today, 26 Apr 2016.

...These results [linked above] show the scientific community is completely misunderstanding the data due to a faulty hypothesis. The widely accepted hypothesis is that comets (and carbonaceous meteorites) are pristine protosolar nebula material that formed some 4.6 or 4.7 billion years ago as the solar system was being formed.

This is wrong!

Comets do not have a force field type shield that protects them from contamination as they travel from the outer solar system into the inner solar system.

Hence these comets must accrete into their snow and ice material that collides with them that was previously ejected by ice geysers from Saturn's moon Enceladus or from impacts of asteroids and comets with Mars, Earth, Moon, Europa and other icy moons, planets, asteroids or comets. Cross-contamination happens on space and generate meteorites and the host of diverse cosmic dust particles and IDP that continually enter the Atmosphere of Earth and rain down on every other Solar System Body. This process easily explains how the Stardust samples from comet Wild-2 could have been found to contain high temperature minerals from the inner regions of the Solar System. It also explains how carbonaceous meteorites could have have minerals such are found in the Stardust samples as well as microfossils of microbes. This also explains why these microbes can be essentially identical to ancient and extinct microorganisms in Earth rocks as well as recent and living microbes found in the icy polar regions of planet Earth.

Yours, Richard B. Hoover

Comets: The Delivery System is a related webpage.


Hi Brig, I don`t know what has happened to the hours of the day - never enough.
OK, looked again and I am still of the same opinion as I gave previously. 'look-alikes' is not enough evidence. You need context photos, context environment, context mineralogy and geochemistry. Crinoids grew on a fully marine aerobic Earth. Mars, when it had a reasonable amount of water, did not have oxygen.... Best wishes, Frances
A fossil on Mars resembles one on Earth: the related What'sNEW article, 28 Oct 2015.

Hi Brig, your two latest posts in "What's New" today are great, both of them seem to me to be compelling evidence against the traditional paradigms. It doesn't seem very likely that molecular handedness would be selected for in space; surely this is evidence for the pervasiveness and antiquity of life in the universe. (Of course, I'm often wrong.)

The transposon and the black moth, now, how did that work? By some means other than random insertion? If it was a random event, then such transposons must be jumping around all the time, perhaps producing phenotypic alterations that then get selected for, or against? Or is it possible that some more directed process led to this adaptation? If the first case is true, then jumping genes are assuming the role ascribed in modern Darwinism to nucleotide point mutations, if I understand correctly. But, a crucial difference might be that, while constructive evolution can't result from such point mutations (for reasons you've explained on your website), jumping genes might be able to greatly influence the expression of genes already present. Am I on the right track with this thinking?

Thanks again for maintaining your website. I visit it at least daily. ...Sincerely, Ted Rigley

from Brig / 9:14 AM: Dear Ted -- Thanks to you as well. Your first point, I completely agree. There are some ad hoc proposals, like synchrotron radiation, to chiralize molecules in space. But the d-sugars and l-amino acids would have to come from opposite ends of the source, separated by lightyears? Anyway, I agree with you.

Transposons are "jumping around all the time" but not often enough to test every possibility - the math is just as bad as with single nucleotide mutations. However, there is persistent evidence, pretty well accepted now, that mutations of all types can be enhanced by stress ("adaptive mutation"), and that mutations can be concentrated in specific locations ("directed mutation"). Also, introns can insert themselves in the exactly right place by "homing". Capabilities like these could help the transposon become active and find the right insertion point.

If the transposon was already present in the subject genome, the phenomenon still requires powerful, installed software management systems, with adaptive mutation, directed mutation, homing, etc. This phenomenon, by itself, does not entirely upset the Darwinian applecart.

However, if the transposon, almost 22kb long, contains programmatic meaning that requires it to be so long, no theory can explain its "origin". What programmatic meaning this transposon contains is not clear from the research report. But, in general, genes or exons with lengthy programs cannot "originate" within the consensus big-bang universe. Their acquisition, and subsequent deployment with proper insertion, as above, would support cosmic ancestry. (Their mere existence, to me, totals the Darwinian applecart.)

Thanks for your interest! ...Brig Klyce

01 Jun 2016: ...The insertion of a ...transposable element.... is our article related to most of the discussion above.
03 Jun 2016: is our article about a recent report on molecular handedness in meteorites.


...Read for your amusement the Anders spun theory about a Farmer deciding to help out a scientist by glueing a broken meteorite back together!!! What a fraud!
Hoax and Meteorite Both Come Unglued, The Milwaukee Journal, 27 Nov 1964.

The farmer also accidentally stuck in a piece of coal and a seed from the reed Juncus conglomeratus so that at Scientific Meetings a century later Anders could ridicule the Claus and Nagy discoveries in Orgueil by calling them "conglomerated junk". Brig, you may want to post a link to this old newspaper clipping. It sheds interesting light on the way the debate about microfossils in meteorites was sabotaged by scientific skullduggery over half a century ago. Anders won the debate by his "contaminated meteorite" paper in Science [in 1964] and he stifled research for over 40 years until the Mars meteorite ALH84001 revived it by triggering the studies Academician Rozanov and I have been conducting. Biomolecules and microfossils are present in Carbonaceous meteorites and they are not the result of a hoax or post arrival biological contamination of the stones---therefore extraterrestrial life exists. That is the major theme of all of my Lectures over the next month in Russia.

In a single stroke Anders answered ridiculed the Nagy Organized Element discovery and put to bed all questions about Amino acids, kerogen, and microfossils in Orgueil---they were all a hoax making the study of microfossils in meteorites as taboo as research on the Piltdown man! This article provides more evidence that the planted seeds and glued fusion crust were done by Anders himself, who was reported to be furious with Nagy .... Yours, Richard B. Hoover

Contaminated Meteorite by Edward Anders, Eugene R. DuFresne, Ryoichi Hayatsu, Albert Cavaillé, Ann DuFresne, Frank W. Fitch, doi:10.1126/science.146.3648.1157, p 1157-1161 v 146, Science, 27 Nov 1964.
Fossilized bacteria in meteorites are obvious reports on Hoover's online paper of March 2011.
Fossilized Magnetotactic Bacterium in the Orgueil Meteorite is a related local webpage.

from Hoover | 19 May: Great Brig. I thought you would find that half century old newspaper clipping interesting. I just made an entry on Richard Gordon's Blog challenging him or any other scientist to explain how it would be possible:
1. To contaminate a carbonaceous meteorite with living or recently dead bacteria
And not also at the same time contaminate the stone with
2. All 20 standard protein Amino Acids, All 5 nucleobases, the sugars ribose and deoxyribose, and the host of other life critical biomolecules present in all living and recently dead organisms.

As Mike Engel pointed out years ago, these missing biomolecules prove the contamination hypothesis is simply not valid. Therefore, the microfossils that Nagy, Palik, VanLandingham, and Academician Rozanov and I have detected in hundreds of samples of many different carbonaceous chondrites are both indigenous and extraterrestrial. Anders and Fitch were wrong in the early 1960's and they did a great disservice to Science with their "contaminated meteorite" paper in Science, which is still used by a host of scientists who are unable to address the two questions posed above, and follow that answer to the logical conclusion---

The meteorite microfossils are both indigenous to the stones and extraterrestrial in nature. ...Yours, Richard B. Hoover

Klyce replies | 1:59PM: Richard -- I agree completely that Anders and Fitch did a great disservice to science. But the pollen fraudulently contaminating Orgueil, yes, would contain all 20 a-a's, all 5 nucleobases, plenty of Nitrogen, etc. Conversely, the numerous microfossil such as you have reported, lacking much or most of the full complement of biomolecules, they cannot be contaminants. Because it takes millenia to lose the missing ones.

Life Outside Earth Stirs Controversy, by Ronald Kotulak, Chicago Tribune, 8 Mar 1964.
Thanks Thanks, Kevin Keogh, for mentioning this earlier article.

03 Jun 2016: ...In multiple meteorites, we demonstrate that ...sugar acids contain large excesses of the d enantiomer.
Meteorite Contamination and "The Dog that Didn't Bark" [docx | pdf], by Richard Hoover, 13 Jun 2016.



The origin of life, panspermia and a proposal to seed the Universe, Article in Plant Science 175(6):756-760 · December 2008 with 22 Reads, Impact Factor: 3.61 · DOI: 10.1016/j.plantsci.2008.08.007 [by David Tepfer]

Abstract
"Although the origin of life is experimentally elusive, the commonality of the genetic code is well established, as is the presence of life on Earth early in the planet's history. Spontaneous generation of life has not been documented, but life's ability to travel through space (at least for short distances) is clear from human exploration of the solar system, which has carried men to Earth's moon and microbial stowaways to exoenvironments, such as Mars. Direct evidence for panspermia (the universality of life) is thus limited to exospermia (the exportation of life from Earth). The hypothesis of general panspermia as the source of life on Earth is difficult to test, but microbes appeared during the first billion years of Earth's existence, and all species investigated so far use a similar genetic code, indicating a common origin. General panspermia requires that life survive transfer through the space. Thus, the plausibility of panserpmia can be evaluated by examining life forms on Earth for their capacity to survive in space. This approach has mostly concentrated on bacterial spores. In this essay, plant seeds are proposed as model panspermia vehicles, and directed exospermia (the deliberate dispersal of life away from the Earth) is suggested, using plant seeds and bundled, endophytic microorganisms."


Brig, I noticed this just out of Space Daily:
Mars Express finds water supersaturation in the Martian atmosphere [MarsDaily, 30 Sep 2011]. The mars atmosphere, at times, is supersaturated with water. Remembering this article about aeromicrobology: Aeromicrobiology [MicrobeWiki] It seems to me that there is no reason why mars cannot have an active biological atmosphere. Regards, Ron
Life On Mars! is the related local webpage.


Sir Patrick Bateson Dear Suzan – I think the key sentence [from her interview with Patrick Bateson, pictured] is In organizing the meeting we are focused on a discussion about evolution with our colleagues in the social sciences and the humanities, and we don't want to blind them with all the details of the sciences. The London meeting will not come close to the paradigm shift that is needed for evolution. It might be interesting to ask Bateson if he would be interested in pursuing the question proposed by his great uncle William, in 1914, as President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science: ...We must begin seriously to consider whether the course of Evolution can at all reasonably be represented as an unpacking of an original complex which contained within itself the whole range of diversity which living things present.
Thanks Thanks, Suzan, for your interest and persistence and alerts. Best regards, Brig
12 Mar 2016: A quotation from Mazur's interview with Patrick Bateson, prompting this exchange.
19 Mar 2012: Reference and links for the quotation from William Bateson.


Dear Richard and Chandra – I was combing through things and found this photo from San Diego. Either of you remember which year? (2013). PS Richard – I'll give you $2 for that necktie!! Best regards, Brig
8:45 PM: Dear Brig, Good photo! ...Chandra
Brig Klyce, Richard Hoover, Chandra Wickramasinghe at the SPIE Convention, 28 Aug 2013. Date was in my cellphone!

Dear Prof. Klyce,
maybe you still remember me. I think we are in the final lap now. Its not quite home strait, but we are getting there fast. With great interest i took notice of the work of scientists like James A. Shapiro and many others. Paradigm change is now a very real possibility. With great interest i have read the interview of John Dupré about the upcoming Royal Society meeting on evolution paradigm shift. We are not quite there yet but breaking through slowly, one step at a time. I don't see this as a contradiction of Darwin's work on natural selection, such as Einstein is not a contradiction of newtonian physics. We are simply ready to expand into more detail of the underlying mechanics of evlution. There is always room for more principles if we only focus on the details, isn't it? This is long overdue. We have been slumbering along in our self-righteous percived omniscient position that has been taken for garanted ever since. We have been lazy.

The way i see it, and i am a mere amateur, there are three very good reasons to argue for cosmic ancestry:
1. If you are confronted with the rise of a complex system of self replication during the habitable window of a planet's lifetime you really should not expect the emergenge of such systems as early as possible. This is highly suspicious and has been voiced by Prof. Hawking initially. This strenghtens our case because of the improbability involved for such systems to arise. Simply put its implausible.

2. It has been argued before that, by the use of estimating evolutionary progress over time that the planet is not old enough to provide sufficent time for such a development. This is controversal, of course, as there is much debate going on about the proper use of molecular clocks in genetics. This being said, recently a paper was published tracking the origin of multicellular synthesis to the change of a single protein. The Last Universal Common Ancestor was, following genetic reverse-engineering already a full fleged cellular organism with all the complexity of transcription and translation mechanisms that goes along with that. Considering its apperance some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago and the age of the planet itself (4.54 by) this is a lot of complexity packed in such a short period, including planet formation itself. Its a bit comparing apples and oranges, but the point is complexity we are talking about here, so in my opinion that is fair game. It took a billion years after that for the first cyanobacteria to form multicellular colonies (the change of a single protein in the machinery). Under normal circumstances, which is overall the case if you look at the tree of life, efficiency should increase with adaption. It seems to have decrased serveral orders of magnitude in this case, which is very strange, as well.

3. There is the notion, if you look at the root of the tree of life, dominated by hyperthermophiles, that LUCA itself was a hyperthermophile. This has been called in question and is of course debatable, but the environment, certainly during the planet's early formation was a violent one (moon formation to pick one example). This calls for a robust system and not a delicate, unoptimized fresh one to colonizze the planet. And a robust one it seems to be. The problem here is that hyperthermophiles are already an optimization in themselves with thick proteins to hold together under thermal molecular vibration. This is contrary against every rule of evolution as we understand it under both paradigms.

This brings us around full face to the Fermi Paradox. I am taking my estimates from the paper "Aliens can watch I Love Lucy" from Lou Scheffer. It turns out this is indeed possible if you got a reciver with a diameter of the distance from sun to earth. Thats one big reciever. The real question should be if we can recive signals from another civilization. It turns out we couldn't detect a civilization equivalent to our own at the range of a mere lightyear. We do not have such a reciver and in all likeliness will not for a very long time. This is an errorenous assumption. It would require an incredible stroke of luck to be hit by a point source by a sufficiently strong and focused signal and even then we wouldn't know what happened, probably never being able to locate the signal again (we already had such signals). There is no evidence for backing this notion.

I think Dr. Frank J. Tipler struck gold with his argument with Sagan and Newman about Von Neumann Probes. He argued that such machines (or organisms for this case) should already populate the galaxy at this time. I think he is right and at the same time mistaken. I think something very similar happened and is happening. These "probes" weren't neccesarily built. This kind of approach, considering the timescale, is not really compatible with calling home, nor is this a neccesary requirement, nor is even a concious builder really an requirement. It is far simpler to perform a task fully independantly and for a very long time, especially if the task is replication and adaption. Or, to put it bluntly: it is possible to argue the Fermi Paradox does not exist because we are here.

The problem isn't so much a Paradox which hasn't even sufficient data to back its existance, i am thinking interstellar transfer is really the point where this idea stands or falls. Maybe there is exchange between Oort clouds, exchanging material and sending comets into the inner systems as stars pass close to each other. In any case these organisms have to have the capability to remain dormant for a very long time in space. Radiation isn't so much a problem as it could be shielded biofilms or simply accumulating dust (comets do have an electromagnetic field?/the "singing comet"?), the problem is atomic decay of cell components at these timescales. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightes if there was a mechanism, be it semi-active or passive to deal with that also, after all i have read about protection mechanisms for genetic information in dormant microbes. The data from the Rosetta comet mission was very interesting, indeed. Such a huge concentration of organics came as a big surprise for some - others expected, even predicted it for decades.
...Best regards, Sascha Wageringel

02 Feb 2016: Does the Gaian bottleneck solve Fermi's paradox?


Suzan, the Altenberg conclusions were timid, at least partly, because Pigliucci, for one, was afraid to give the creationists an opening. The London conclusions will also be far less than what's needed, because everyone is still asking the wrong question: How did [x] originate? They are trying to explain phenomena – origins – that have never been observed. A better question is: Where did [x] come from? Perhaps not immediately answerable, but fully scientific. Best regards. ...Brig

> Philosopher of science John Dupré comments about the upcoming London meeting, posted 8 Feb 2016.


Dear Brig: Dr Ken Augustyn of SRI International, Ann Arbor has suggested I contact you and bring your attention to a paper Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and I have just published about origin of Zika and Evolution in the Journal of Astrobiology & Outreach [
10-page local PDF]. We are both of the view that objective scientists who have evaluated the accumulated evidence would arrive at similar conclusions. Many thanks, Ted Steele
-----
Edward J Steele PhD | CYO Honorary Research Fellow | CY O'Connor ERADE Village Foundation
PO Box 5100 | Canning Vale South 6155, WA | AUSTRALIA | https://independent.academia.edu/EdwardJSteele

Dear Richard, You may find interesting the paper attached. The first author is a Professor of Archaeoastronomy from Tbilisu Ilia University. Marina

Dear Marina, Thank you very much. I will study this interesting new paper with great care. Comets may not only be producing these nano-dust particle clouds, but comets should also accrete particulates from them as they pass through them during their orbit around the Sun. The astonishing difference in elemental composition and minerals on the nano-meter to micro-meter size scale revealed in SEM spot analysis and 2-D x-Ray map studies of the Alais, Orgueil, Murchison and Polonnaruwa carbonaceous stones (thought to be cometary in origin) may provide direct observational evidence in support of the major hypothesis concerning the existence of comet produced nano-dust clouds such as was proposed in the Simonia et al. paper. Yours, Richard B. Hoover

Nano-metric Dust Particles as a Hardly Detectable Component of the Interplanetary Dust Cloud, by I. Simonia and Sh. Nabiyev, doi:10.1007/s12036-015-9347-8, v 36 p 409-419, Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy (full text: ResearchGate +ReadCube), Sep 2015.
> Comets... and >...Interstellar Dust are related local webpages.
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