25 March 2010
The closer we look, the more water and ice we discover beyond Earth. In a special issue about water, National Geographic includes a page comparing the amount of water on water-bearing planets and moons in our solar system. Some have little or none, but four moons are estimated to have several times more water than Earth has. Those four, and their multiples of are Earth's water volume, are — Jupiter's Europa=2.9x, Callisto=27x, and Ganymede=36x; and Saturn's Titan=29x. Some of this water is frozen, but not all; about half of Titan's water may be liquid. The story mentions that more water is stored as ice in comets and other bodies, farther out in the solar system.

Water is the only unalterable requirement for life as we know it. Where there's water, there may well be life.

"Water's Out There," page c.28, National Geographic [

20 March 2010
Molecular Midwives? One problem for the RNA World origin-of-life theory is that incipient strands of RNA nucleotides tend to join at their ends, forming small loops. These cannot grow into the long chains that might carry genetic instructions or fold to become catalysts. Now biochemists from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University propose that "molecular midwives" can prevent this end-joining.

In the RNA World, end-joining is only one of many issues in the hardware aspect of the origin-of-life problem. (The even more difficult software aspect goes unmentioned nowadays, in all scenarios.) While we admire the imagination of the Georgia team, this proposal introduces another step into the RNA World's hardware solution. We are reminded of Ptolemaic astronomy that required epicycles within epicycles.

11 March 2010
Tanpopo will collect particles in space to test panspermia, according to a Japanese team promoting the mission. They plan to place aerogel, like that used by Stardust, on the Japanese Experimental Module on the International Space Station (pictured). For a year there, it will capture impacting particles. Then the aerogel will be sealed and returned to laboratories for study. The possibility that some particles may be viable or dead microorganisms will be the focus of the mission, which may begin by 2012. The plan will be presented at the upcoming Astrobiology Science Conference. "Tanpopo" is Japanese for "dandelion".

5 March 2010
Genes in the microbes in our guts are 150 times more numerous than human genes. This news comes from the Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract Consortium, the name of a collaboration of Chinese and European scientists who sequenced 3.3 million genes found in stool samples from 124 people. The study should lead to benefits for public health, and it reinforces our view that opportunities for horizontal gene transfer (HGT) are not rare. Nature calls the intesinal gene pool "Our Other Genome".

18 February 2010
Extraterrestrial chemodiversity is high compared to terrestrial relevant biological- and biogeochemical-driven chemical space. This observation comes from a European science consortium that identified 14,000 different compounds in the Murchison meteorite. The analysts believe that many more different kinds of molecules, possibly even millions, are present in it. Several hundred organic compounds have been already identified in space, but this variety surprises almost everyone.

Today, scientists agree that space contains organic compounds that could serve as starter-ingredients for the origin of life in a prebiotic soup. However, in non-sterile environments these origin-of-life scenarios are questionable because there are too many possible reactions that would contaminate and ruin the process. The new analysis from Europe shows the severity of this problem, at least for Murchison's parent body.

But if life is already well-distributed in space, as we believe, the European analysis is less surprising. Perhaps the mixture in Murchison includes ancient life's degradation products that have been occasionally agitated by radiation or impacts for billions of years. If so, like petroleum or coal, the meteorite would be necessarily contain a wide variety of organic compounds.

17 February 2010
In cosmic ancestry, major evolutionary steps depend on pre-existing genetic programs that were originally acquired by some form of horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Biologists agree that even whole bacteria were once imported to become eukaryotic organelles; we have characterized this endosymbiosis as "wholesale" HGT. The mitochondria that produce energy in eukaryotic cells are a prime example.

But this endosymbiosis would not be automatic. Many of the details are not clear. For example, mitochondria must import host proteins across a membrane via some mechanism. How did that mechanism arise? Now biochemists and molecular biologists at Monash University suggest that those genetic programs were also pre-existing:

We suggest that both the TOM complex in the outer membrane and the transporter in the inner membrane (TIM complex) were derived from ancestral bacterial proteins—that is, proteins originally encoded by the bacterial endosymbiont's genome.

HGT dominates prokaryotic evolution. Examples of HGT in eukaryotic evolution have become too numerous to list. We think the evidence supports our opening supposition — major evolutionary steps depend on pre-existing genetic programs. On the other hand, if major evolutionary steps can arise from genetic programs that are composed de novo by trial and error, where's the supporting evidence? Seriously.

8 February 2010
Such lateral gene transfers between bacteria and animals could be an important source of evolutionary innovation. This comment comes from a deep genomic study of parasitic wasps by an international, interdisciplinary team of more than a hundred scientists. Recent gene transfers from bacteria into these wasps have been previously identified, but ancient transfers are more difficult to detect. Using phylogenetic analysis, this research group constructed a maximum-likelihood tree that links certain proteins among the wasps, bacteria and Pox viruses. These links reveal likely ancient gene transfer.

4 February 2010
Our results imply that natural selection has favored both the movement and fixation of these exceptional invasive alleles. These words come from a study of the threat that foreign genes may pose to an endangered species, because the genes can quickly become widespread and fixed. We note that the study also illustrates again the power of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in evolution.

16 January 2010
The chimpanzee and human Y chromosomes have undergone wholesale renovation since the species diverged, according to an international team sequencing the chimp one. The two genomes differ elsewhere by less than 2%, but each of their Y chromosomes contains 30% that has no match in the other. This surprises darwinists because, "Given that primate sex chromosomes are hundreds of millions of years old, theories of decelerating decay would predict that the chimpanzee and human MSYs should have changed little since the separation of these two lineages just 6 million years ago."

The chromosomal differences are various, but one is an endogenous retrovirus acquired by chimps and expanded to 23 copies since the split. Retroviruses are efficient means of horizontal gene transfer (HGT), able to deliver new genetic programs as must happen in cosmic ancestry. After delivery, software management systems would be needed to relocate, retain, reassemble, copy, test, optimize, silence or delete the new programs. If so, the details remain to be discovered, but the phenomenon of "wholesale renovation" does not surprise us.

13 January 2010
A sea slug acquired photosynthesis from algae. So reports Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa, at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, 7 January.

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body.... Even unhatched sea slugs, which have never encountered algae, carry 'algal' photosynthetic genes.

Evolutionary advances depend on the availability of new genetic programs. In cosmic ancestry, these are acquired by various forms of horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Photosynthesis in sea slugs would be a spectacular example of this phenomenon.

12 January 2010
Comets and the Origin of Life examines deeply and thoroughly the case for cometary panspermia. Topics include extremophiles, cosmic dust, cometary dust, the Oort cloud, galactic tides, impact craters, liquid water in comets, fossils in carbonaceous meteorites, and many others. The authors apply the relevant science and mathematics to the growing bodies of data to ask if a coherent theory can be sustained. The work could well serve as a college textbook, but any interested reader will be rewarded.

7 January 2010
A gene from a non-retroviral virus has been integrated into various mammalian genomes, including our own. These integrations were separate events, at times ranging from 40 million years ago in anthropoid primates to less than 10 million years ago in squirrels. After installation, this gene was preserved by darwinian natural selection; it contains an open reading frame that is transcribed. (Darwinian natural selection can also deactivate useless or harmful acquired genes, as illustrated.)

Most viruses that become endogenized are retroviruses — they constitute ~8% of the human genome. But this gene came from a different kind of RNA virus. It exemplifies another way for species to acquire genes from viruses.

6 January 2010
It doesn't accord with what we would expect theoretically or logically — Garth Illingworth, University of California, Santa Cruz, a member of an international team of astronomers making observations with the new wide field infrared camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. This team found tentative evidence of three galaxies with redshifts [z] of around 10. These would have existed when the Universe was just 3-4% of its current age, and would be among the oldest objects ever seen.

Closer looks at the farthest stars, as often as not, furnish data that do not neatly fit with the standard big bang theory. Therefore we think that cosmology still lacks the authority to place boundaries around the rest of science. That authority has been the basis for assuming that everything must "originate". We think it may be fruitful to question that assumption.

4 January 2010
Local, national, and even international polls show that many people--often the majority of people surveyed--believe in creationism or believe that evolution is not well supported by evidence. So says a yearend news summary from the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), the anti-creationism lobbying organization.

We are not surprised if most people have doubts about the modern theory of evolution. We strongly question its claim that new genetic programs can be composed from old ones by the accumulation of mistakes. This implausible claim could be made plausible by direct supporting evidence, but there is virtually none for it. Therefore we think alternatives should be considered. For example, could new genetic programs actually be existing ones, delivered by various forms of horizontal gene transfer? Would NCSE consider acknowledging this scientific alternative?