Cells divide and make new cells, is all life on Earth rooted in one super ancestor cell? Or are there parallel paths to cell creation?
Cells divide and make new cells, is all life on Earth rooted in one super ancestor cell? Or are there parallel paths to cell creation?
That’s an open question, so nobody knows the right answer. We weren’t there to witness it happen, and any evidence we do have is very indirect at best.
This leads to many possibilities, and it’s difficult to figure out how likely they are.
Homicide detectives don’t need to have been there to figure out whodunit. There’s tons of “indirect evidence” to help biologists put the pieces together, and while we may not yet have a single conclusive or concise answer, the fact is that some hypotheses have been elevated to theories, and some theories have risen above and proved to be stronger than others.
Not that long ago, people thought humans were put here, fully formed, by gods. We gathered evidence which led to the conclusion that that scenario is factually untrue. Eventually, we may do the same for figuring out the exact origins of life on Earth (and there’s some good theories).
We’re talking about several orders of magnitude more time than the evolution of man. Short of a time machine, the answer to this question is impossible to know.
I think what you mean to say is that it’s not currently possible to know with 100% certainty. Science doesn’t deal in absolutes, because it needs to be open to change should new facts change our understanding. What if we do invent time travel one day and are able to go back in time?
But that doesn’t mean we can’t make strong cases with rich bodies of evidence to reasonably infer what the history of life is.
But if you’re doing serious science, it can be really hard to rule out all the other possibilities and narrow it down to just one, most probable cause.
For example, did the first cell form here on earth, or was it carried here by an asteroid? How would you rule either of these out?
No, I said what I meant. There’s no possible way to know with any certainty if life on earth came from a solitary cell, or if multiple single cells formed over the globe without actually traveling through time to find out.
Alright. I invite you to justify your claim. That’s an interesting position to take.
Because you’d need microscopic physical evidence of something that happened nearly 4 billion years ago. And you’d need a fuck ton of it to definitively say that it was one super cell and not several separate instances of it.
And on a geological time scale, that evidence has almost certainly been erased.
We might be able to figure out the conditions that caused life to form, but to know whether it was a singular event or not requires an extremely high burden of proof.
Homicide detectives have lots of evidence to work with, and they’re all reasonably fresh.
The case of Ötzi (the iceman) is really tricky to solve, since there’s very little evidence to work with. We know what happened to him, but everything else about the case is a subject of much speculation. I would argue that solving the origin of life is even harder to solve.