A magenta swan with turquoise spots
How fascinating is this new bacterium? (I know it’s not new; new to human knowledge; I look forward to your letters.) It’s a black swan!
The finding shows just how little scientists know about the variety of life forms on Earth, and may greatly expand where they should be looking for life on other planets and moons, the NASA-funded team said.
…
“Life is mostly composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur and phosphorus,” the researchers write in Science.
These six elements make up the nucleic acids — the A, C, T and G of DNA — as well as proteins and lipids. But there is no reason in theory why other elements should not be used. It is just that science never found anything alive that used them.
See? Total black swan! Seriously exciting.
…it does suggest that astrobiologists looking for life on other planets do not need to look only for planets with the same balance of elements as Earth has.”Our findings are a reminder that life-as-we-know-it could be much more flexible than we generally assume or can imagine,” said Wolfe-Simon.
“If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven’t seen yet? Now is the time to find out.”
The age of wonder ain’t over yet.
Life is wonderful indeed.
And another one in the eye for the Fine Tuners.
Don’t be so sure — the ability of the religious to spin is unbounded. I’ve already seen comments along the lines of “this shows that Intelligent Design is true”.
A ‘black swan’? Perhaps for terrestrial life, but not, I’d think, for extra-terrestrial. Were there really any biologists who said “life in the universe must always include phosphorus”? Or assumed that was so obvious that they never even bothered saying it?
In fairness, this is exactly the type of evidence one would want to amass if one were going to engage in the quixotic endeavor of disproving common descent. Of course it does nothing of the kind… but think of it this way: If this wasn’t a black swan event, if every day we discovered bacteria that used different molecular building blocks to encode their genes… or even better, if each individual species drew uniquely from a palette of possible molecular building blocks, with no cladistic correlations whatsoever… that would be a real challenge for any theory of evolution, wouldn’t it now? How would you explain that in terms of common descent?
Of course, in reality, this species of bacteria is “the exception that proves the rule” in the original and valid sense of the cliche, i.e. it is an apparent exception which puts the generality of the rule to the test. It is easy to see how a bacteria could have descended from a totally “ordinary” phosphorous-only-using species to have the ability to use either phosphorous or arsenic — the fact that it still retains the ancestral ability to use phosphorous only bolsters the case.
But I must admit, if I were one of those tools who denied common descent, I’d be jizzing in my pants over this. “See!” I would say. “God really is free to construct each organism in an ad hoc manner! Evolution is disproven!”
One day people will realize that it is the environment that shapes the organism not the organism that shapes the environment – except of course for humans and there all bets are off. What’s next? silicon-based life-forms? copper-based blood? Oh wait…..
I watched the rather cringeworthy and poorly presented news conference, which had at one point two scientists bickering. The discovery has potential to be very exciting, but the writer of the paper and discoverer of this organism, had to make do with only describing this organism as ‘substituting’ arsenic for phosphorus, and claiming that there is some phosphorus within it’s DNA makeup. However, the actual experiments done suggest something different, that no substitution was taking place, but that it’s chemistry was completely different, that effectively this organism was not part of the evolutionary tree of life but from a different tree altogether. Basically, that this organism was not a new species of life, but a newly formed type of life separate from phosphorus based DNA.
But the news conference appeared rushed and disorganized, as if this research was pushed into the public domain for political reasons (funding for NASA) rather than executing a detailed and comprehensive amount of research and experimentation.
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@Egbert,
“However, the actual experiments done suggest something different, that no substitution was taking place, but that it’s chemistry was completely different, that effectively this organism was not part of the evolutionary tree of life but from a different tree altogether. Basically, that this organism was not a new species of life, but a newly formed type of life separate from phosphorus based DNA.”
Are you sure? PZ Myers says, after reading the Science article,
@Barney,
Yes, I’m afraid the press conference (or presentation) by NASA was over-egging the pudding somewhat. I am left feeling more than disappointed. I am very disappointed with NASA’s PR department.
This is the problem with how science is “sold” nowadays. Perfectly legitimate and quite interesting research is blown up into something 2000 times bigger, and people who figure out what’s really going on end up being disappointed by something that’s actually kind of cool (but not revolutionary).
What Barney (and PZ) said. This bug did not evolve to use arsenic in place of phosphorus. it evolved to tolerate arsenic to an unusual degree. As a consequence, if you deprive it of phosphorus, you find that it will actually incorporate arsenate where you would expect to find phosphate. That is an extraordinary thing, and worthy of our amazement, but it is not some new kind of biochemistry. Wolfe-Simon:
True that.
I teach some courses in molecular genetics and know that the idea of a non DNA (or non-RNA) based lifeform is intriguing and certainly not outside the bounds of possibility but that is NOT what they found here. The trouble with NASA based research is that they are highly aware of the political need to publicise their research so they tend to overhype things to the extreme – particularly in the area of astrobiology. There is also the confounding factor that non-biologists like Phil Plait will pick up the story and get it wrong (as he did yesterday) – and he was far from the only one. PZ got the story correct. Its an interesting biochemical result but not the sort of “totally new form of life” that some have hilariously claimed.
And did I manage to remember that science stories are often over-hyped when I read the first reports? I did not.
Imbecile!
Like with the mandlebrot equation, there can be limitless variety within a fixed and unchanging framework.
When a child, I used to watch the developement of frost on my bedroom window with fascination. Every last feathery spine that grew was different from all the others, and yet each one conformed to the outlines of the same basic and immutable pattern, design.
And those observations of frost prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, an immutable and unchanging truth, and it is this:
Canada is a very boring place in winter.