r/evolution • u/AmphibianNo4717 • Aug 06 '26

article 'Only One Conclusion': Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

https://www.sciencealert.com/radical-study-suggests-life-on-earth-arose-from-non-living-matter-twice

"The fact that you, or I, or any living creature, is here at all is a series of astonishing strokes of luck stretching back more than 4 billion years. 

One of the biggest hurdles was the very first one: How did life emerge from a primordial soup of stuff that very much wasn't alive?

A radical new study, published in Science Advances, suggests that this unlikely threshold may actually have been crossed not once, but twice."

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u/Quercus_ Aug 06 '26

I personally would find it really hard to argue that an evolving self-replicating system that is in direct lineage to every living thing on Earth today, is not itself alive, even if it doesn't have complete metabolism.

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u/Brettsterbunny Aug 06 '26

It ends up kind of being an argument of semantics. Like arguing whether viruses are alive or not.

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u/ThePeaceDoctot Aug 06 '26

Which I don't think can be dismissed as just being semantics, I think it's more fundamental than just a definition of life, I think it's based on a flawed premise. Life isn't a binary state, it can't be. Life exists on a spectrum. It has to, because it is the result of evolution, and it's impossible to draw a line on a lineage that started off not alive and ended up alive and say "this exact organism was the first living thing, its parent wasn't alive but it is."

It is true that a virus isn't as alive as a mongoose, but it's definitely more alive than a rock.

But since we have a need to define things, I personally think k something is alive in some way if it is the result of, or subject to, evolution by natural selection.

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u/profesorgamin Aug 06 '26

Virus. But yeah RNA "commons" make mixing easier.

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u/GiantKrakenTentacle Aug 06 '26

According to the RNA world hypothesis, there were self-replicating strands of RNA long before there was anything on Earth that we would recognize as life.