Scientists Say We May Have Been Wrong About the Origin of Life

Comments

• porcoesphino@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Downvoted.

  This article points to another article:

  phys.org/…/2024-12-genetic-code-textbook-version.…

  And this article points to the study:

  www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2410311121

  The phys.org article is decent, unlike the one linked, but it’s also a minor iteration and not huge like the title would suggest. The meat of it is basically these two paragraphs:

  The study revealed that early life preferred smaller amino acid molecules over larger and more complex ones, which were added later, while amino acids that bind to metals joined in much earlier than previously thought. Finally, the team discovered that today’s genetic code likely came after other codes that have since gone extinct.

  The authors argue that the current understanding of how the code evolved is flawed because it relies on misleading laboratory experiments rather than evolutionary evidence

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  • Butterbee@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The title is also weirdly phrased to make it sound like science was wrong. Of course science was wrong. The whole process is based on realizing that our past assumptions were wrong. Every time scientists discover something new, it replaces an old incorrect assumption. These sorts of titles are how you get to the “Mainstream media/science is bogus” track.

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    • JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      The whole process is based on realizing that our past assumptions were wrong.

      Well… or simply improving the understanding. AFAIK good science doesn’t actually assert “rightness” or “wrongness;” rather, it proposes ‘this theory seems the best working fit,’ with the understanding and open-endedness that it can always be improved, tweaked, or even completely replaced by a better theory.

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  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The paper and the phys.org article are a year old—any guess why Popular Mechanics is reporting on it now?

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    • porcoesphino@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I could guess that either the author at popular mechanics just found it / just dug it out of their reading list or one of the authors of the paper reached out as part of promoting their research?

      I think a year ago as someone learning biology from Khan Academy and reading about endosymbiosis and reading what I could about LUCA theories with some chemistry background then whats written here just seems like a likely possibility. The paper doesn’t seem like strong evidence and it seems like there is a lot of guess work for early life. The teams making artificial cells are doing interesting, scary work there.

      But I’m no expert here, I was just pointing out the source material and a summary

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