Life on Earth

Earth Naturally Generates Life

As earth cooled, a hard crust formed on the surface and a hydrosphere evolved. Most of the water, which is just one of the diverse assortment of chemicals, accumulated into oceans and still covers 75% of earth’s surface. This ocean is full of chemicals interacting with each other.

The chemicals in the ocean are also interacting with the atmosphere and the soil. Minerals are just a particular kind of chemical. Add in the energy from sunshine and geothermal heat, evaporation, rainfall and lightning, waves stirring things up, rivers of fresh water, loaded with sediment, pouring into the system and the tidal rhythm, all contributing to this incredibly complex, dynamic and evolving chemical hydrosphere.

Chemistry is the important factor. We’ve detected amino acid molecules floating around in clouds of stardust. So, we know that amino acids are fairly common molecules in the chemistry of the Milky Way galaxy.

Earth is made out of the stardust. Amino acids are natural constituents of the stardust, and hence the earth. The chemistry of the ocean naturally includes many of these amino acids.

One possibility is that life began in the inter-tidal zone, the region of the shoreline between low tide and high tide. It’s a favorite hypothesis because of the amount and variety of life associated with coral reefs. However, it is not an essential aspect of the theory.

Life may have begun in the foam floating on the surface of a pond, at the volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean, in the part of the ocean that sunshine penetrates into, which the sun has been microwaving for about 5 billion years now, or anywhere else on earth.

The life beginning at the volcanic vents on the ocean floor hypothesis (Lane 2009) involves plate tectonics, heat and chemicals catalyzing each other, transforming earth’s hydrosphere into a biosphere. This story is also in harmony with all the creation stories, about man coming from the ground and being made out of clay.

In Lane’s hypothesis, when the ocean floor is subducted under the continents in the process of plate tectonics, it pulls water down into the mantle with it. As a result, when the magma cycles around and is erupted in the volcanic vents, it contains small bubbles of chemicals that create pores in the rock formed by the cooling lava.

The volcanic heat cooks the chemicals in the ecosystem in and around the volcanic vent; the Krebs Cycle starts up in the pores in the rocks, and contributes to catalyzing the amino acids present to begin evolving into proteins, and then RNA and DNA.

The Krebs cycle is the biological process that all Eucaryote cells use to transform certain chemicals into, primarily Adenosine Triphosphate [ATP], which the cells use as fuel for biological processes.

Bruce Lipton’s, Biology of Belief (Lipton, 2011) compliments Lane’s story very well. It’s the symbiotic relationship between the DNA and the membrane that constitutes the living cell.

The membrane may have evolved in the pores in the magma, because of the influence that contact with the rock has on the chemistry of the fluid. The hot stone surface would have influenced the chemistry of the fluid in contact with it, and that layer of fluid would have been different than the fluid that is not in contact with the rock. Thus, a primitive membrane could have evolved, separating the fluid inside the membrane from the environment outside the membrane.

This process, involving the temperature and chemistry of the rock influencing the chemistry of the fluid, is very similar to the presence of certain chemicals and electrical fields, causing an embryo to differentiate into heads and toes, front and back and the growth and development of different organs, etc. (Davies, 2014)

Imagine volcanic eruptions or some other wave of pressure, causing the older rocks in and around these vents to burp out a cloud of prokaryote cells, probably Archaia, that eventually fill the ocean and then begin the process of natural selection, evolving first into bacteria, then into eukaryote cells [cells with a nucleus] in the layer of ocean that solar radiation penetrates and then multi-cellular organisms in the inter-tidal regions.

Some of the Archaea adapted to the ecosystem by evolving into bacteria. Some evolved into the Mitochondria that the Kreb’s Cycle runs in to make energy for Eukariote cells. Mitochondria are simple cellular organelles in which the Krebs cycle generates all the ATP that all organic cells use as energy for all biological processes, at least on earth.

99.99% of them would have been destroyed by the volcanic eruptions and then by the cold hostile environment of the ocean. The tiny fraction that has survived has evolved into a vast and complex carpet of life on earth. Life has adapted to almost every nook and cranny on or near the surface of the earth.

The Archaea and Bacteria formed Microbial Mats laying on the ocean floor all around the volcanoes. They secreted fluid so they would stick together. The individual single celled organisms cooperated by filtering minerals out of the sea water flowing around and through the mats.

Eukariote cells also began evolving in the microbial mats. One bacteria eats another one and instead of digesting it and using the molecules for its own chemical biology, they individual cells adapt to the circumstances by becoming symbiotes. The Kreb’s Cycle runs in the inner cell, most likely an Archaea, generating energy, while the larger outer cells starts producing more complex proteins and cell structures.

The DNA forms because of the laws of chemistry. Molecules attract and repel each other and stick together in strings of material. Amino acids are long strings of chemicals that stick together in even longer strands of Ribonuclear Acid (RNA). The Ribonuclear Acid naturally attracts complimentary chemicals, creating a mirror image of itself, resulting in the double helix form of Dioxyribonuclear Acid (DNA).

Very gradually, the mats of individual cells start evolving into sponges. Sponges are probably the original multicellular animal. They are attached to the ground, but they belong to the animal kingdom, because they eat food instead of getting their energy from the sun. Just like the microbial mats, the sponges filter minerals out of the water for food. I figure that moss was one of the original plants.

Those original bacteria eventually grew together into colonies of Mitochondria surrounded by a membrane into a biological cell. Perhaps the bacteria were caught inside bubbles caused by waves and rainfall near the surface of the ocean. Using energy from the sunshine they adapted to their circumstances causing the bubble to evolve into a membrane.

The point is that, life is both a supernatural act of creation and a very natural feature of the chemistry of earth. Planets like earth, and I’m sure there are many of them, very naturally generate life. It’s a feature of the chemistry of the universe. Evolution is how God is creating natural history.

Self-replication is an inherent feature of the chemistry of RNA. The molecules in the amino acid chains, naturally attract and interact with certain complementary molecules, their symmetrical counterparts, which are constituents of the chemical fluid that the RNA is made of and in which the RNA is evolving.

As each segment of the RNA molecule attracts its complementary molecule from the surrounding chemicals, the RNA assembles a mirror image of itself. These are all perfectly natural, self-directed and motivated by the natural attributes of the chemicals, such as electric charge, attraction and repulsion, etc.

The RNA and the membrane, the bubble, enter into a kind of symbiotic relationship, catalyzing each other into living beings called cells. The RNA evolves into DNA by creating a mirror image of itself. The bubbles evolve into cell membranes. Earth’s hydrosphere evolves into a biosphere.

The DNA supplies the proteins, and other materials, by unzipping the two symmetrical strands of the DNA and producing copies of certain sections of the DNA. Genes produce proteins that are then transported to wherever they’re needed by transferase, a particular kind of RNA that has evolved for that purpose.

Another particular kind of protein produced by DNA are molecules called receptors. Receptors allow certain other molecules to either attach to the cell membrane or to pass through the membrane, while keeping other molecules out. They contribute to a very complex screening process in the relationship of the cell with its environment.

The cell membrane is an equally important partner in this symbiotic relationship between DNA and the cell membranes. They’re the Yin and the Yang of biology. There are two main membranes, the one between the cell and it’s environment and the one between the cell nucleus and its environment, the rest of the cell.

The membranes organize themselves into intelligent screens that attract and allow good and healthy resources through. They screen most harmful substances out and enable waste to be pumped out of the cell by electrical and chemical gradients.

Membranes provide DNA a relatively safe environment and the resources the DNA uses to replicate itself and produce the proteins and other chemicals that our bodies are made of. It is a fold of the outer membrane of an embryo that eventually grows into the central nervous system. A section of the membrane, becomes the brain (Lipton, 2008).

This cellular biology demonstrates just how primal our relationships are. The chemistry and function of the cell membrane, is at least as important as the chemistry and function of the genes in the DNA in the cell’s nucleus.

Other chemical factors, such as the electrical charge of the material inside the cell, relative to the electric charge of the material outside the cell, drive the flow of material in and out of the cell. Other chemicals fit into receptors in the cell membrane and change the chemistry or electric charge of the system, in a diverse assortment of complex chemical interaction between the cell and its internal and external environment.

Cellular Relationships

Jamie A. Davies points out in his book Life Unfolding (Davies, 2014), that the influence that all the parts of our bodies have on each other, is a very important facet of how our cells grow into different tissues and organs. The attraction and repulsion of different chemicals causes the cells our bodies are made of, to differentiate into a variety of structures, such as legs and lungs.

I suppose that our relationships with each other influences the development of a diverse assortment of specialties and partnerships, as the teamwork inherent in human nature causes us to grow together into civilization. This is a natural process, not an artificial one. Its the same with any ecosystem. Different species of life, or even inorganic chemical ecosystems, will adapt to all the other species of life in a symbiotic dance of interactive evolution.

This organic chemistry has been evolving on earth for about 5 billion years now. Tiny little incremental changes and improvements, interrupted by episodes of drastic change, caused by environmental disasters and phase changes, like water freezing, etc., has resulted in the evolution of life on earth, into the immense variety of species in earth’s biosphere.

The first great mass extinction in the history of earth was a result of the respiration of this ocean full of Prokaryote cells [cells with no nucleus], inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. The oxygen is poisonous to the cells, and the resulting mass extinction left a vacuum in that primitive biosphere of life on earth, which made room for subsequent waves of evolution of, first Eukaryote cells [cells with a nucleus], and then the Cambrian Explosion [about 580 million years ago] of multicellular life on earth.

Most of the history of life on earth involves the evolution and the relationships of the primitive Archaea and Bacteria into more and more complex organisms. Just think, from about 4 billion years ago to about 580 million years ago, life on earth consisted of these single cellular organisms, mostly floating around in the ocean. That’s three and a half billion years of evolution of all kinds of biological cells, before they began to grow together into multicellular organisms.

Perhaps some of the bubbles caused by rainfall in the tropical ocean had colonies of mitochondria trapped inside. The sunshine continued to supply plenty of energy and the mitochondria gradually transformed the bubble into a cell membrane. Mitochondria are the organelles that convert oxygen into carbon dioxide and Adenosine Triphosphate [ATP] in the chemical reaction called the Krebs Cycle. ATP is the molecule that all Eukaryote cells use for energy.

Mitochondria may be closely related descendants of those original Prokaryotic cells, created in the pores in the rocks in a completely natural evolution of the chemistry of earth, and then migrating into the ocean. Colonies of Mitochondria, caught in bubbles caused by rain falling into the ocean and then solar radiation fueling further adaptation, have grown together into a very diverse assortment of biological cells.

In the ocean full of life, one cell eats another one. Sometimes they swallow each other whole. Eventually, some of them adapt to the environment inside other cells, developing a symbiotic relationship with one another.

They keep producing ATP and CO2, and the cell they exist inside of, begins to adapt to the situation by using some of the ATP being supplied by the Mitochondria, instead of producing ATP itself. This allows the larger, outer cell to specialize in other activities, such as producing complex proteins and other biological processes.

At some point during this process of the evolution of life on earth, one bacteria ate, or otherwise absorbed another bacteria, and the Eukaryote cell, with its cell nucleus, began evolving a much more complex biorhythm than their Prokaryote ancestors.

Most of these earliest earthlings got their energy directly from sunlight and the ground, like plants still do. When they started eating each other to get energy and protein, the animal kingdom began diverging away from the plant kingdom.

Multi-Cellular Organisms

The single celled viruses, bacteria and amoebae had been floating around in a dynamic and evolving biosphere and catalyzing each other in a variety of chemical reactions for about 3 billion years until, in a phase transition like water freezing or melting, they began to grow together into colonies of single celled creatures.

After about 580 million years ago, life on Earth experienced the “Cambrian Explosion,” of speciation into an immense variety of complex multicellular life forms. Microbial Mats, relatively suddenly, evolved into coral reefs, marshes full of plant life, schools of fish, forests, swarms of insects, flocks of birds and all kinds of land animals.

At first, large sections of earth’s land was probably covered with moss, as life began crawling out of the ocean, about the same time life began to evolve into multi-cellular organisms. The oceans have been tossing the single cell organisms up on the beaches for billions of years. The organisms eventually adapted to that circumstance and learned how to survive on the beach.

Perhaps teamwork was one of the adaptations that enabled life to survive on land. A clump of Eucaryote cells gets tossed ashore by a wave. The cells on the surface of the clump die and form a hard crust that shields a few inner cells from the harsh alien environment.

This evolution of symbiotic relationships has continued to occur, over and over again. The volcanic vents at the bottom of the oceans are probably still generating prokaryotic cells and injecting them into the ocean.

I imagine that some of the bacteria managed to adapt to living on land. The low tides would have left some bacteria laying around in ponds and on the beach. Gradually, they would have adapted to those circumstances, one way or another, and evolved the ability to survive in a variety of environments outside of the ocean. Adaptation to surviving on the beach in the inter-tidal regions may have led the to evolution of multicellular organisms.

After a while, some of the members of the colonies began to specialize to accomplish certain functions that benefit the colony. Some of the cells became specialized for internal functions; others became specialized to separate and protect the colony from the outside environment.

For example, for some of the cells that specialized for internal functions, a tough protective cell membrane may have been selected for extinction, because of the relatively safe ecosystem within the colony of cells. The cells on the surface of the colony, on the other hand, may have evolved to attain a tough outer membrane and other attributes that enable them to seal the colony off from the environment outside the colony.

The cells inside the colony eventually lost the ability to survive in the environment outside the colony. They depend on the membrane formed around the colony by the cells that specialize for that purpose.

After millions of years of natural selection and enzymes and amino acids catalyzing each other in the chemical froth, and the specialization of individual cells, some of these colonies of single celled organisms had begun to evolve into multi-cellular organisms.

Perhaps the Krebs Cycle started up in the volcanic vents first. The Krebs Cycle attracts and catalyzes the surrounding chemicals and structures to evolve into the first prokaryote cells.

The phase transition from Prokaryote to Eukaryote cells has been happening for billions of years, in the plankton ecosystem in that top layer of the ocean, where sunshine penetrates. The transition into multi-cellular organisms took place in the inter-tidal regions. Probably in and around river estuaries and swampy areas with stagnant pools of water, etc.

Coral reefs and the immense variety of life associated with them, evolved during this Cambrian Explosion. Some of the clumps of moss gradually evolved into corals. The corals eventually evolved into the vast and diverse flowering of coral reefs.

After the Cambrian Explosion, trees have dominated life on Earth, at least on land. The oceans have their own related and equally abundant history. But the forest dominates earth’s biosphere on land. The oil that we use today is mostly made out of the decayed remains of trees.

For 400 million years, life on earth evolved with trees, ferns, insects and dinosaurs being the stars of the show. The trilobites and many other primitive life forms were thriving back then.

I remember reading a story long ago, about how and why the tip of a plant, the apical meristem, grows out in one direction, making long roots, stems and branches. A pattern repeated at various scales and in various facets of nature, the “Tree of Life” and the cobweb pattern in the structure of the universe, in particular.

Isn’t it interesting that the Book of Genesis and biology both describe life on earth as a tree? And that man is made out of clay, which implies that man is native to earth, rather than transplanted from any other planet.

Spirals, circles and spheres, trees and cobwebs and families, tribes and nations seem to be fractal patterns that are repeated in nature on various scales. The energy, the substance of the universe, always seems to settle into these patterns.

The spheres and circles seem to be characteristic of the material and the tree seems to characterize the action, growth and evolution of life. A never ending process of cause and effect. Life on earth, converging and diverging into an immense variety of life on earth.

All governed by the divine rule of law, revealed by the one true God, the Creator of nature. Natural law is a subset of the divine rule of law. Yin and yang, attraction and radiance, positive and negative, male and female, gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the speed of light, the symmetry in super-symmetry. These are all facets and patterns of one divine rule of law, one language. When we learn to understand and speak that divine language, we will be one universal and divine civilization and free to travel around the universe.

Earth the Incubator

Earth naturally generates life. Life evolves into a vast and diverse web of life on earth. The trees are like the lungs of earth. They transform earth’s atmosphere, by converting a substantial percentage of earth’s carbon dioxide into oxygen. The forest has drastically altered the chemistry of earth’s atmosphere, making it possible for us oxygen breathing, carbon based creatures to evolve.

Human consciousness is the apex of the evolution of life on earth, the apical meristem of the tree of life on earth. We, the people of earth, are terraforming earth from a wilderness, into a beautiful, thriving garden. The agricultural and industrial revolutions are waves of rapid and drastic transformation of earth’s biosphere. And now the information age is awakening us to truth about natural history and human nature and civilization.

The creation of human nature is a supernatural process, which is influencing the evolution of life on earth in a supernatural way. Spirituality is a supernatural facet of reality.

Spirituality is the source of human morality. Ignoring or objecting to this most important feature of human nature is not rational or reasonable and is actually, extremely harmful. Natural history is just one small facet of the supernatural, spiritual reality. Natural history is the shadow of spirituality.

There have been long periods of relatively stable, slowly evolving ecology, interrupted by drastic and sometimes violent changes in earth’s biosphere. There is a very slow gradual process of natural selection, punctuated by sudden, rapid and drastic changes, usually caused by environmental factors interacting with internal potentials, etc.

At one point, about 260 million years ago, when all the land had come together into one giant land mass, more than 90% of all life on earth was selected for extinction during the Permian extinction (Lane 2009).

Apparently, two giant waves of volcanic eruption, probably associated in some way with the disintegration of the super-continent, caused the Emeishan traps in China and 8 million years later, a second, even greater outpouring produced the Siberian traps, causing or at least contributing to the Permian extinction of most life on earth.

This is when the Trilobites and many other species disappear from the fossil record. Scientists have been able to discover this ancient history of life on earth, by investigating the fossil record and the nuclear chemistry of the rocks the fossils are in.

The K-Pg Boundary

200 million years later, another catastrophic environmental event changed the world, in another one of those punctuations, in the punctuated equilibrium of the evolution of life on earth.

There’s a layer of soil, called the Cretaceous-Paleogene [K-Pg] Boundary covering the earth, which contains more of the element Iridium than the earth itself normally contains. This layer of soil is sometimes called the Iridium layer and it covers the earth. It can be found on every continent, and in some places is clearly visible.

We can tell a lot about history by investigating the fossils in soil deposited in layers of sediment. One of the things we’ve discovered is that the soil deposited earlier than this Iridium layer has dinosaur fossils, and the soil deposited after the K-Pg Boundary has no dinosaur fossils.

Based on this evidence, we hypothesize that earth was hit by a large asteroid or comet, that had more Iridium in it than earth does, and that the effects of that impact caused the dinosaurs to be selected for extinction.

The impact probably shook the entire planet, 65 million years ago. A massive firestorm of molten rock was blasted all around the earth. The immense impact was probably followed by decades of nuclear winter and then eons of drastically altered climate.

Scientists have discovered magnetic remnants of a crater on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, which is about the right size and age to fit the description of the hypothesized impact. I’ve also read that there are geological formations on the bottom of the Indian Ocean, on the opposite side of the planet relative to the impact, which may have been caused by shock waves generated by the impact.

Another interesting aspect of the story of dinosaurs is that modern birds are apparently descendants of dinosaurs. So, they aren’t really extinct, they just adapted to the drastically altered climate by evolving into birds.

And if you think I’m just making that up, take a look at a plucked chicken. They look exactly like a Therapoda. Therapodas were carnivores, which ranged in size from dinosaurs the size of a chicken, up to the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and the even larger Spinosaurus.

Mammals

Mammals had originally evolved about the same time as dinosaurs, soon after animals had migrated out of the ocean onto the land, and had remained very small in the world dominated by dinosaurs.

The extinction of the dinosaur ecosystem opened up a whole new range of habitat for mammals to evolve in. Not only were they free from the dreadful fear of dinosaur predators, but they also had a much larger food supply, now that the dinosaurs were not competing with them for food.

During millions of years of natural selection and adaptation to a diverse and continuously evolving biosphere, mammals grew larger and more diverse. Pretty soon, the mouse like creatures were the size of squirrels, then lemurs.

After a while, some of them grew so large that it became more economical to swing along the bottom of the tree branches, instead of running along the top of the branch. Front legs and feet began evolving into arms and hands, and the skeleton stretched out into a more upright posture. [I remember reading that idea somewhere]

Ida is a 47 million year old primate fossil discovered in an oil shale deposit in Germany. At the time Ida lived, during the Eocene epoch, Germany was over the same volcanic vent that Sicily is over now. Earth was much warmer then than it is today, probably covered with tropical forest.

Ida is a creature about 2 feet long from the top of her head to the tip of her tail, about 60 percent tail. She has opposable thumbs on all four limbs, and fingernails, rather than claws. A 2 foot long squirrel would be getting close to big enough to swing along under branches, rather than running along on top of the them. Fingernails would give it more dexterity. It’s feet are beginning to evolve into hands.

Ida is probably not an ancestor of Hominidae, but is a very interesting and well preserved fossil of an ancient primate [I can’t remember the library magazine in which I first read about Ida many years ago].