(July 30, 2015 at 9:02 am)Chuck Wrote:Always nice to learn something new. Thanks.(July 30, 2015 at 8:38 am)mh.brewer Wrote: Haven't we identified a few already? Deep sea vents, sea methane mats, extremophiles come to mind.
No. But the story is complicated. Extremophile archea organisms appear to have cellular chemistry incompatible to familiar bacteria! although the inheritance mechanism appears compatible. But this nonetheless has led to the suggestion procaryotes may not have all had the same origin, thus abiogenesis may have happened at least twice, once with common bacteria and another with archea. But even if that was the case, higher eukaryotes organisms including you and me show evidence of having inherited the organism chemistry from both archea and bacteria. So even if there had been two different roots to the biological family tree, the separate trunks intertwined and merged when the complex eukaryotic cell evolved.
A few years ago there was a peer reviewed study which suggested that the DNA of some rare extremophile bacterial incorporated a different base pair from every other organism on earth. This led to the suggestion these bacteria were more fundamentally different from other life on earth than the difference between archea and bacteria. Thus these bacterial form a truly distinct biological lineage. But both the technique and conclusion of that study have since been discredited.
Being told you're delusional does not necessarily mean you're mental.
