How life on Earth began, according to science

David Nield, ScienceAlert via msn.com, 3/4/24; Skeptic Central, Wisdom Quarterly

In the beginning, the Vesicle Blob. Like it or lump it, but thou shalt not question it (ScienceAlert)

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We may finally know how the first cells on Earth formed

In the beginning, rebirth ad infinitum.

The story of how life started on Earth [called the Agganna Sutra in Buddhism and Genesis or the Garden of Eden in the Abrahamic faiths] is one that scientists are eager to learn.

Researchers may have uncovered an important detail in the plot of Chapter One: an explanation of how bubbles of fat came to form the membranes of the very first cells.

A key part of the new findings, made by a team from The Scripps Research Institute in California, is that a chemical process called phosphorylation may have happened earlier than previously thought.

This process adds groups of atoms that include phosphorus to a molecule, bringing extra functions with it -- functions that can turn spherical collections of fats called protocells into more advanced versions of themselves, able to be more versatile, stable, and chemically active.

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  Diagram of life beginning on Earth

  We howl with laughter at religion for believing in fairytales but bow in solemn obedience to the inerrant utterances of white lab coat-clad priests in their lab-temples doing their lab stuff and coming out with papers about it. The sacred word, peer reviewed by fellow priests, spins a yarn and we all say, "Well, that's the way it has to be because Science don't make no junk." The figurative and metaphorical language a visionary (rishi) like the Buddha, Mahavira, Shankara, Moses, or Mohammed might have used, hah, that's of no use to us. It's fine if we want to throw out ancient written texts for new, but to ignore that Science tries to get away with explaining the universe by saying, "If you allow us just one unexplained miracle, the Big Bang, we can explain everything after that" is pitiful. Then anything observed as happening now is used to say, "This must have been what happened the first time, originating from nothing to everything we see now with no miracle at all and no anything before the something we now live and enjoy." Go on, Science, what else happened?

These protocells are widely thought to have been vital building blocks for biochemistry more than 3.5 billion years ago, perhaps emerging from hot springs under the ocean along the way to the evolution of more complex biological structures.

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  WTH? Science claims to know how life started?

  Science observer Lloyd Pye says we have examples of microevolution but not a single example of macroevolution. Along with Michael "The Forbidden Archeologist" Cremo we are getting quite an alternative view to world history and biological origins. Yet, no one notices how Science behaves like storytellers around the campfire, making "reasonable" speculations from data like shamans spinning origin myths based on whatever is at hand to comment on? A vat of skepticism is in order and perhaps an eyeroll. Was it a good idea to trade in one set of priests for another? "God is dead" was a really good slogan if people understood what it meant, so how about we launch, "Data interpreters, get stuffed"? The first laments the loss of a guide, the latter echoes the Who's "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" lyric. To think we're going to base our lives on what some blanketyblank opines from an ivory tower, as we grovel before the feet of impersonal objectivity and total rationality, unquestioned assumptions and men with mental defilements in charge of what we are allowed to believe? It's untenable.

Ehem, our sacred garments are now blue

"At some point, we all wonder where we came from," says chemist Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, from The Scripps Research Institute. "This finding helps us better understand the chemical environments of early Earth so we can uncover the origins of life and how life can evolve on early Earth."

• Scripps Research scientists reveal how first cells could have formed on Earth (Scripps Research)

Krishnamurthy and his colleagues hypothesized that because the process is so widespread in the body's biological functions, phosphorylation ought to have been involved in early stages of protocell formation.

Replicating conditions likely to match Earth's early days in the lab, the team combined chemicals such as fatty acids and glycerol to try and create more complex vesicles -- bubble-like structures similar to protocells that facilitate cellular processes.

With some tweaking of temperature and acidity, the researchers were able to get the chemical reactions they were looking for, proving that phosphorylation may have been at work as protocells developed in the primordial ooze.

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  Agganna Sutra and science

  The "Discourse on Beginnings" (Aggañña Sutta, DN 27) is neither satire nor parody, claims author Dr. Sugunasiri, Ph.D., as viewed by Buddhist scholars. Drawing on cosmology, Darwinism, psychology, and linguistics, this sutra paints a historically and scientifically accurate picture of Devolution and Evolution, going beyond the Big Bang. Sentient beings emerge with defilements, such as passion and craving, physically nourished with greater and greater difficulty by devolving plant life. Compatible with Western science, Dr. S, had an insight, a breakthrough in his understanding of this origin myth. What if the "beings" that first came to this earth, the âbhassara brahmas (or "supremos," a class of devas, lit. "shining ones") are understood to be PHOTONS? Why? This is true if we take the term âbhassara in its literal etymological sense of "hither-come-shining-arrow," described as "self-luminous" and "moving through the air" (akasha, "space"), "glorious" (streaming), "feeding on delight," where they remain for a very long time, "mind-made" (spontaneous), floating above and around earth before the appearance of moon and sun, before night and day. However, as accurate as this picture may be, the Buddha’s point is that knowledge of Dhamma overrides it all, explaining the title [of Dr. S's book]. More

"The vesicles were able to transition from a fatty acid environment to a phospholipid environment during our experiments, suggesting a similar chemical environment could have existed four billion years ago," says chemist Sunil Pulletikurti, from The Scripps Research Institute.

The team describes it as a "plausible pathway" for the creation of phospholipids, the more complex type of vesicle membrane. However, there's lots more study to do before we can be sure about how life came to be on Earth, [science's favorite sentence].

Looking back billions of years isn't easy, of course, but scientists continue to make discoveries...

• [Do they, with their time machines or mystic powers? They see something now and project it back, neither understanding what they're seeing nor gaining evidence for what actually happened then.]

[And these "discoveries" are] about what happened right after Earth formed, and it all plays into our investigations into life on other planets, too.

• [Q: Oh, are we now allowed to believe in life on other planets, according to our gatekeepers? A: "It's out there, it just doesn't come here and has never been here in any way whatsoever" is the official word. So obey and repeat this mantra until told otherwise, and never mind those pesky tardigrades on the moon.]

"It's exciting to uncover how early chemistries may have transitioned to allow for life on Earth," says biophysicist Ashok Deniz, from The Scripps Research Institute.

"Our findings also hint at a wealth of intriguing physics that may have played key functional roles along the way to modern cells."

The research has been published in Chem. Source