The Accidental Weblog

So yes, the Neanderthal sequence work announced in this week’s Nature is cool. And what’s gonna come up of fishing for FOXP2 (a gene known to be involved in language processing, and which has some distinct differences between humans and chimpanzees) in the neanderthal genome is somethin’ I know I’m setting news alerts for, anyway.

But there’s another sequencing project underway (or so say my search engines) that’s got me easily as intrigued. If not a lot more so.

Looks from this page here as though someone’s sequenced a Korarchaeota community… tho’ it’s not yet been released into public databases.

Korarchaeota, for you folk who might be wondering, is an as-yet barely known species of Archaea which may be the least diverged known extant organism from the most recent common ancestor of all life. Or so implied some rRNA studies done more than a decade ago.

Yes, this makes me a total gene geek. But this is exciting.

I mean, language genes, pshaw. Hominids are such a self-absorbed bunch…

Bring on the ancient extremophiles.

Speaking of black smokers, there’s an interesting paper out on abiogenesis: Morowitz, Harold, and Eric Smith, Energy flow and the organization of life, Santa Fe Institute Working Papers, (2006) (PDF) contends that life may actually be an inevitable result of the buildup of free energy in an environment like that of the early Earth. From the intro:

Life is universally understood to require a source of free energy and mechanisms with which to harness it. Remarkably, the converse may also be true: the continuous generation of sources of free energy by abiotic processes may have forced life into existence as a means to alleviate the buildup of free energy stresses. This assertion—for which there is precedent in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and growing empirical evidence from chemistry—would imply that life had to emerge on the earth, that at least the early steps would occur in the same way on any similar planet, and that we should be able to predict many of these steps from first principles of chemistry and physics together with an accurate understanding of geochemical conditions on the early earth. A deterministic emergence of life would reflect an essential continuity between physics, chemistry, and biology. It would show that a part of the order we recognize as living is thermodynamic order inherent in the geosphere, and that some aspects of Darwinian selection are expressions of the likely simpler statistical mechanics of physical and chemical self-organization.

—Morowitz, Harold, and Eric Smith, Energy flow and the organization of life, Santa Fe Institute Working Paper, (2006) (PDF)

Good reading, some really interesting thoughts.

Also: it’s not saying much, but the truth is, this is something which really just rings true to me. For all the conviction of folk who’ve always argued how improbable life is, nothing about abiogenesis has ever really struck me as that startling. We know that life as it currently exists is essentially what Morowitz and Smith are succinctly describing, at least at the thermodynamic level: large amounts of energy driving matter into isolated pockets of order (even as the system as a whole drifts to a greater net disorder). We got matter, we got lots of energy (vast amounts available from the sun and radioisotope decay—the only two ultimate drivers¹ on this planet, at least) relative to what life requires. We know matter can be so arranged that it spontaneously perpetuates that same organization… so, somehow, assuming that it could also get to such organization spontaneously given all that energy being available, it’s just never seemed that big a conceptual leap to me… notwithstanding the staggering complexity of the replicators we currently observe. Complexity, given sufficient time and energy, happens. So life happens. I remember thinking much the same thing reading Russell’s stuff on the subject. A lot of this just makes an awful lot of sense.

Anyway. Like I said, that’s not saying much. It’s just intuition, and a lot of intuition turns out, in retrospect, to be nothing more than prejudice. But, for what it’s worth, yes, I think what Morowitz and Smith have here is a quite reasonable supposition, and a pretty good way of putting it.

(Found via The Panda’s Thumb. See also Nature’s brief and their newsblog.)

¹ Oops. Forgot tidal energies. Mea culpe. I meant ‘two of the three’… yeah, you know.