Thunderbolts Forum v3.0

"Driving this reaction between CO2 and H at the origin of life requires an electrical charge on a membrane, and so electrically charged membranes go right back to the beginning, and it's the only way really of integrating the cell as an entity in relation to it's environment."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBiIDwBOqQA&t=425s

What cannot be avoided in these discussions is that individual cells require
between a million and a billion electrons a second to function,
or as Albert Szent-Györgyi (1968) put it, life is “bioelectronics”

Maximum mass-specific metabolic rates displayed by growing bacteria are close to the record tissue-specific metabolic rates of insects, amphibia, birds and mammals. Minimum mass-specific metabolic rates of prokaryotes coincide with those of larger organisms in various energy-saving regimes: sit-and-wait strategists in arthropods, poikilotherms surviving anoxia, hibernating mammals. These observations suggest a size-independent value around which the mass-specific metabolic rates vary bounded by universal upper and lower limits in all body size intervals.

Glass spherules have been documented in many geologic deposits and are formed during high-temperature processes that include cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, volcanic eruptions of low-viscosity magmas, and meteorite impacts.

jackokie wrote: ↑Mon May 02, 2022 7:04 pm @jacmac Thank you for your reply and the reference to Franklin Harrold’s book In Search of Cell History. I posted my interim thoughts/conclusions while still exploring microbiology because I hoped people would point me in helpful directions, which seems to have paid off.

Re your specific points:

• You say “They might be the oldest and simplest but their complexity is how they are now, not Gazillions of years ago.” Exactly. That’s why I proposed a less complex predecessor. Current thinking is that birds evolved from certain dinosaurs, and it is plausible that over “Gazillions of years” birds resulted from that evolution. However, a bird is not a dinosaur, a Bengal tiger is not a Saber tooth tiger, and an Archaeal microbe is not its hypothetical ancestor.
• Archaea come in many forms, some which can tolerate high temperatures (Thermophiles), and at the other extreme some can tolerate temperatures as cold as -20°C (Psychrophiles). The first Thermophiles were found around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, with a remarkable biochemistry based on chemosynthesis; these microbes are the base of support for complex ecosystems. The Archaea contain thousands of genera, with vastly different properties; for example, from the linked article below: “...animals at hydrothermal vents have special biochemical adaptations that protect them from hydrogen sulfide.”. Here is a good article about the Thermophiles.
  
  https://ocean.si.edu/ecosystems/deep-s ... ts-pumping

• While most casual discussions of microbes seem to center around their biochemistry, the research literature I’ve read to date has mostly focused on the cell cycle, because that’s where the complexity is revealed and many questions remain. The link below provides details of the cell cycle of Sulfolobus acidocaldariu, the most widely explored archaeon. Here is just one of many examples of how involved and finely orchestrated s. acidocaldari’s cell cycle is: “Several DNA repair genes displayed cyclic induction…”
  
  https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0611333104

In summary,

• The presence of dedicated structures to synthesize proteins (ribosome) or move the organism (archaellum) ,
• The vast number of genera displaying widely varying chemistries,
• The existence of “special biochemical adaptations” in Thermophiles.
• The presence of biochemical messengers to inhibit fission,
• The activity of DNA repair genes,
• The variety of different biochemicals used for the same purpose in different archaeons’ cell cycle steps, and
• The orchestrated steps of the cell cycle that have fall-backs in case a key substance is missing

are evidence of evolutionary responses to conditions encountered by simpler predecessors and are among the reasons to call Archaea “highly evolved”

To repeat, in my opinion it is beyond reasonable that something so complex and dependent on such organized behavior could be the result of a happy accident. Or to put it another way, it is beyond reasonable that the very first cell to exhibit life, i.e., replicate itself, was a fully formed archaeon with all of the structures, DNA, and fault-tolerant cell cycles that the domain exhibits. YMMV.

Thanks again for the reference to Franklin Harrold’s work. That will be the next thing I look at.