Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose From Non-Living Matter TWICE - ScienceAlert
A new study published in Science Advances suggests that life on Earth may have originated twice independently through different metabolic processes in bacteria and archaea. This challenges the traditional view of a single common origin for all living organisms.
Why it matters
This discovery could fundamentally reshape our understanding of evolutionary biology and the criteria used to define life.
Add ScienceAlert on Google (witsawat sananrum/iStock/Getty Images Plus) 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 .
Two of the main lineages of life – bacteria and archaea – may have independently figured out the secrets of metabolism that upgraded them from non-living to living, according to the new study, which focused on the most rudimentary set of chemical reactions thought to enable this transformation.
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