(October 18, 2015 at 12:49 am)Laika Wrote:(October 18, 2015 at 12:30 am)Chuck Wrote: Not necessarily true, although it does look more and more like we did ultimately come from a rock. Modern origin research does seem find more and more lines of evidence pointing to life on earth with its particularities originated because proper conditions existed on the surfaces of particular rocks.We might have come from substances located on or within rocks, but we did not evolve from the rock itself, because the rock is not alive.
That is not as clear cut or clearly accepted by the origin research community as you might think.
There is one school of thought which argues the basic organic processes that underpin all life which exist today are actually the artifact, or catalytic results, of a wholly different system of inorganic, mineral based life that existed prior to the first organic life, but which habe since gone extinct. So this school would argue that some rocks, or at least clay, which are the ultimate residual of break down of many types of rocks, were able to enfold information about its own configuration and transmit this information to the products of formation of more clay. And the complex inorganic crystalline chemistry that happened in this process formed the catalyst and scaffolding for the basic organic chemistry of that first organic life.
So this school would argue the first life were based on ultimate weathering products of rocks, and we, while not the direct genetic descendants of this inorganic life, did evolve from this inorganic ancester through a different clay chemical catalytic process.
