opinions by Ryan Maue
While we breathlessly await the publication of “critical reviews” from the soon to be defunct Journal of Cosmology, experts from a variety of fields are crawling over each other to denounce the claims of Dr. Hoover, who claimed to found definitive proof of alien life from extraterrestrial meteorites (Meteorite Alien Life). It would be an interesting exercise to compare the immediate broad-spectrum skepticism of this study to, let’s say, the Nature flood papers or the contrived Union of Concerned Scientists snowjob conference call. But, one could describe the reception of pro-global warming literature, whether peer-reviewed or not, as quite partisan in nature. So what has triggered this inherent skepticism of Dr. Hoover’s research, which is grandiose and ground-breaking, or something?
As mentioned in the Gawker blog post by Adrien Chen yesterday, Fox News apparently had the “exclusive” first crack at breaking Hoover’s research paper. You can set your watch by this — whenever Fox News is mentioned in the first few sentences of an article or blog posting, expect biased and vitriolic language to follow — even in this new era of civility. Dr. PZ Myers, a University of Minnesota biologist, accurately and more than adequately disassembles the claims of Dr. Hoover with humor and wit. I’ll snip and encourage you to read his own blog.
Fox News broke the story, which ought to make one immediately suspicious — it’s not an organization noted for scientific acumen. But even worse, the paper claiming the discovery of bacteria fossils in carbonaceous chondrites was published in … the Journal of Cosmology. I’ve mentioned Cosmology before — it isn’t a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth. It doesn’t exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint. For a while, it seemed to be entirely the domain of a crackpot named Rhawn Joseph who called himself the emeritus professor of something mysteriously called the Brain Research Laboratory, based in the general neighborhood of Northern California (seriously, that was the address: “Northern California”), and self-published all of his pseudo-scientific “publications” on this web site.
In this instance, the gratuitous reference to Fox News in the first sentence immediately soils the otherwise readable post. Obviously, Dr. Myers does not have the ability to separate the hard news and opinion shows on Fox News, since there is little evidence of how this NASA discovery exclusive is evidence of any bias. It simply detracts from a very good article, and turns off readers who do not watch MSNBC or wrap their dead fish with the NY Times editorial pages.
He brings up near the end a very cogent argument on how science matriculates, and ideas are vetted:
While they’re at it, maybe they should try publishing it in a journal with some reputation for rigorous peer review and expectation that the data will meet certain minimal standards of evidence and professionalism.
I agree completely. And, whenever the Union of Concerned Scientists or World Wildlife Fund marches to the podium with some obvious politically tinged research, I’ll expect the same level of skepticism from both sides of the proverbial aisle. The hair trigger response to a “Fox News exclusive” has brought out the armchair experts, who have unloaded a salvo of rhetorical firepower at the listing Journal of Cosmology. Unfortunately, in their zeal to score a partisan political point, most neglected to see the rest of the media reported the same exclusive story. This is called “science by press release”, and it has to stop.
/sarc alert
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sorry…how do we know meteorites are not ejectiles of earth?
There is ample precedent for serious scientists pursuing nutty or unscientific conjectures. A large fraction of Isaac Newton’s output was on alchemy. A further large fraction was heterodox theological writing (e.g. “debunking” the Trinity).
You have to concentrate on finding the science and dealing with it scientifically because sometimes (maybe often, maybe always) it will be mixed in with unutterable dross. Which is not to say that you can’t tell the difference quickly and easily, but you do have to at least make a serious attempt.
@Patrick Guinness and Robert of Ottawa – I hear ya, Both Ind and SA games were brilliant.
Worms in rocks, I prefer pigs in space and the whole Murdoch empire is running this story:-
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3449881/Worms-in-space-Rocks-show-alien-life.html
how do we know meteorites are not ejectiles of earth?
In the 1950’s and 60’s we used to buy these little black cylinders in the store.
We took a match to them and they would ignite and begin to grow out like they were alive into small snakes or worm-like creatures .
They looked just like those “alien life forms.”
They were never really alive, and never will be.
But they would also look very convincing as fossils in some piece of rock.
The mind is very creative.
Dave Springer, you have completely intrigued me; did you mean that the person you were admonishing is a moron, or were you implying that he is a resident of a Breton town?
If you were implying he is a moron, your implication is a little like a parent beating a child to curb the child’s violent tendencies.
Might this alleged ‘life’ not have originated from Earth, got ejected into space and came back?
—I have always found it very strange that so many people — lay and scientist — seem determined not to ‘believe’ in life elsewhere in the universe. They keep their eyes closed and hum away, fingers in ears, no, no, no, it’s not possible, I don’t want to consider it… But why not? Are they afraid and if so, what are they afraid of? In our early history, we were quite naturally afraid of the stranger outside the gates, but surely we’re more understanding now?
I think the idea of life elsewhere is not only fascinating but obvious. It must be impossible for this little planet to be the only one amongst the trillions in the universe on which life evolved.
But if we get out into the cosmos one of these centuries and do find that we are entirely alone, then all these people — lay and scientis — are going to have to go back to church because this one little planet must indeed have been alone peopled by a God.
They can’t have it both ways.
I took the time to read the entire paper at JOC. It’s good. The electron microscopy is fantastic. One might expect that from Hoover as he has contributed greatly to the world of exotic imaging (both inner and outer space) techniques and hardware. The chemistry appears be a slam dunk for indigenous life. It’s better evidence than we have that prokaryotes inhabited the earth 3.5bya. All the widely accepted diagnostics are present and nothing contary. If this was an earth rock there’d be no question it contains fossilized prokaryotes.
This upsets a lot of ideological applecarts on both the left and right. There’s something in it for everyone to hate.
For the anti-evolutionists it’s the idea that life is not just 3.5 billion years old but many billions of years older than that and comes from comets rather than being created by God 6,000 years ago. For them it’s like “it’s worse than we thought”.
For evolutionists it pushes origin of life questions off planet, out of the solar system, and billions of years into the past before our sun was born where they can’t explore. If life originated on the earth they have a nice closed system with no outside contamination. They have a universal common ancestor (or perhaps a few) that existed billions of years ago from which all life descended and, importantly, an unbroken cell line from which all extant DNA evolved so they can create all these tidy little narratives about it changed over time and theoretically can be traced back to its common ancestors through similar DNA sequences shared by all living things.
But now, if the cometary panspermia hypothesis is true, they have to deal with the concept of genetic material raining down from space constantly polluting the global gene pool. Our genome, you see, is about 3 billion nucleotides long but only 1-2% of that is actually intact genes that code for functional proteins and enzymes. In the meantime 8% of our genome is made of remnants of endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). These are viral invaders that insert foreign DNA into our DNA in order to commandeer the molecular machinery of our cells to produce copies of the virus. The 8% of our genomes can thus be likened to battle scars picked up by our ancestors dating back millions or even billions of years. If there is a prokayotic world inhabiting comets then it follows there will also be a world of retroviruses (bacteriophages) on those comets. So the packets of foreign DNA delivered by ERVs found in earthly genomes might not have been picked up and carried from one form of earth life to another but rather have come from another solar system thousands of light years distant and with many billions of years of reproductive isolation from its source there and life on the earth. It throws a real serious monkey wrench into evolution research based on the theory of common ancestry. Lynn Margulis caught an inordinate amount of flak from mainstream evolutionists for introducing the endosymbiosis theory (which is now widely accepted at least in the evolutionary pathway from prokaryotes to eukaryotes) which posits that widely separated cell lines once thought to be reproductively isolated from each other for millions or billions of years might actually exchange and merge genetic material in unpredictable times and places. And Lynn’s theory only polluted earthly genomes from other earthly genomes not with genetic material from far reaches of the galaxy with many billions of reproductive isolation.
So this is a real can of worms for dogmatic creationists and dogmatic evolutionists alike. For the rest of us science buffs who follow the evidence wherever it leads this is one of most interesting, important, and exciting discoveries in the history of life science on a par with the discovery of the universal genetic code. It gives the “universal” part a whole new meaning.
@ur momisugly Dave Springer
Well, no.
First, creationists are not even privy to any scientific discussion, so we can ignore them here.
And the origin of life has nothing to do with evolution at all, this is the subject of abiogenisis. So an ‘evolutionist’ couldn’t care less, even if he had an agenda.
K says:
March 7, 2011 at 1:25 am
It’s the latter and I stand guilty as charged. I reacted to quoting PZ Myers’ rant against Hoover. PZ Myers is a highly undistinguished 50-something associate biology professor whose only claim to fame is being the iconic leader of a large ragtag band of potty-mouthed militant atheist college students through his “science” blog at scienceblogs.com/pharyngula. Pharyngula was runner-up in the 2011 Bloggies Award for Science which WUWT recently won. Myers has a nasty of habit of directing his minions to flash-mob online polls to bias the results. I’m surprised he didn’t win the Bloggies given his known tactics in such things. Anthony Watts on the other hand did everything he could to discourage unfair voting. Adding insult to injury one of Hoover’s colleagues at UAH (an astrophysicist who was co-author on a paper several years ago proposing a cometary origin of life) is a personal friend of mine. Hoover, unlike Myers, is an impeccable scientist of great integrity with a long distinguished history of contributions to science. His collaborator on the paper (my friend) is a man of great integrity as well as a remarkably well-informed astrophysicist. The ignorance Maue displayed in praising Myers’ rant against Hoover pissed me off on several different levels.
[ryanm: you are completely missing the whole point of the posting again. Get a grip on your hair-trigger indignation. If you are able to recognize the ghoulish nature of Myers’ blog and sycophants, then you should recognize the method to my postings. I cannot blatantly discuss the politics of climate change here per Anthony’s rules.]
Matt says:
March 7, 2011 at 3:17 am
@ur momisugly Dave Springer
“Well, no.”
Well, yes. You have no bloody idea what you’re talking about.
This has everything to do with evolution. It’s an extra-terrestrial source of genetic material that potentially found its way into terrestrial genomes at any and all times from the word go 3.5bya right up to the present day as comets haven’t stopped falling to earth and Sol hasn’t stopped wandering through the galaxy having close encounters with other stars. Our solar system does not orbit the galactic center at the same speed as the spiral arms. It wanders up and down out of the galactic plane and traverses the spiral arms on the horizontal plane. If there is intact genetic material in the cometary halos of other stars it has all kinds of implications for the evolution of life on earth.
Jimbo says:
March 7, 2011 at 2:39 am
“Might this alleged ‘life’ not have originated from Earth, got ejected into space and came back?”
No. The chiral amino acids found on the meteorite were racemic i.e. a mixture of both left and right handed varieties. Terrestrial amino acids are not racemic. Life on this planet only uses left handed chiral amino acids. The exclusive use of left-handed amino acids is one the great biochemical mysteries of life on this planet. Miller-Urey type chemical reactions that form amino acids in sterile environments create racemic mixtures of amino acids. No one has figured out a non-biological synthesis pathway that generates a non-racemic mixture nor have they figured how or why life on the earth uses only left handed amino acids. It’s called the “homochirality problem” and it’s one of the key pieces of chemical evidence leading to the conclusion that the meteorite is both extra-terrestrial in origin and wasn’t contaminated by terrestrial material after it landed.
One of the neat things I learned reading Hoover’s paper is that comet cores, even as far away from the sun as the orbit of Mars, reach temperatures of 60C. Temperatures that high greatly accelerate a lot of chemical reactions. Even though chemistry doesn’t stop when these same comets are in the long slow part of their orbits among and past the outer planets it slows down so much it makes it less credible that chemical evolution could happen on them. The periodic heating and cooling of comets in highly elliptical orbits makes the potential chemistry far more active and interesting. Miller-Urey type reactions creating amino acids are definitely happening on comets. That’s been known for 60 years though. What Hoover brought to the table in this paper is bleeding edge electron microscopy imaging and chemical analysis of fine structure components of the alleged fossils.
Another mystery of chemical evolution is the structure of the universal genetic code which consists of triplets of three nucleic acids (A,C,T, and G) called codons. There are 64 possible combinations which code for one of twenty amino acids plus codes for sequence stop/start. Three bases is minimal number that can can code for more than 16 acids. There’s a lot of redundancy in the code with many codes coding for the same acid. There are preferences for one redundant codes over another and these are though to relate to speed of decoding. As codon sequence proceeds through a ribosome like a paper tape with an amino acid polymer coming out the other end like grease out of a grease gun the speed at which the polymer is emerging influences how it folds. The holy grail of biochemistry is predicting how a polymer sequence stored in a coding gene will fold into an equisitely complex functional 3 dimensional structure. If it doesn’t fold right it’s useless and it can potentially fold in many different ways. The translation speed of redundant codons is variable and different organisms have different preferences.
One of the implications was discovered the hard way. We use prokaryotes to produce human proteins and enzymes used in medical and other applications (such as insulin). To do that we take a prokaryote and insert a human gene into it along with regulatory sequences so the critter produces the protein or enzyme we’re interested in. However, prokaryotes have different codon preferences ostensibly due to differences in the ribosomes (ribosomes are factories composed of RNA and proteins which read transfer-RNA sequences and build proteins out of them). Ribosomes are universal to all living cells. Viruses don’t have ribosomes and it’s controversial whether viruses are living organisms or just dead parasitic machines since they can’t replicate without commandeering the ribosome of a conventional living cell.
Anyhow, when we first started our own commandeering of prokaryote ribosomes to produce proteins and enzymes of interest we found that a gene transplanted into them from a eukaryote often produced an improperly folded insoluble useless product. To fix that we had to substitute a different but redundant codon to match the prokaryote preference. Then the output would fold properly.
But back to the meteorite. Only a subset of the 20 amino acids used by life on earth was found on the meteorite. I believe it was 8 of them. The author didn’t have a firm answer for why it was only 8 out of 20. An incomplete set is associated with fossilized terrestrial bacteria and while the extra-terrestrial and terresterial sets have some overlap they are not identical sets. Evidently some amino acids are more durable in fossilization than others. But this brings up another interesting mystery in the evolution of the genetic code. Many suppose that in the beginning life didn’t use 20 amino acids but rather 14 (or fewer) plus stop and start sequences for a total of 16 codes or less. That can be coded for by ACTG doublets instead of triplets and hence the genetic code could have seamlessly moved from doublets to triplets very early in the evolution of life.
Of course the biggest mystery is how an abstract digital code came to exist in the first place without invention by an intelligent agency. There are only two examples of codes known to exist in nature. The universal genetic code is one of them. All the others are codes of human invention such as the morse codes and the alphabet. Abstract codes exist nowhere else. So what was found on the meteorite might possibly contain clues about the evolution of the genetic code from an ancient abandoned system of doublets to the modern universal triplets (if that’s how it happened). Accidental evolutionary theory absolutely relies on a path of increasing complexity from the exceedingly simple billions of years ago to the mind boggling complexity of extant life. The problem is that even the simplest form of extant prokaryotic free living thing is a mind bogglingly complex nano-molecular collection of machinery. The cometary hypothesis doesn’t solve the problem of chemical-to-biological evolution but it increases by many orders of magnitude the time and opportunity for it to happen. As far as we know every solar system of the many billions of solar systems in the galaxy has a cloud of trillions of comets and if each of those comets is a potential organic chemistry lab, and if these clouds mingle when stars pass within a light year or two of other then the evolution of life takes on whole new and exciting world of possibility.
Who knows? Maybe the Borg will like singing, “It’s Howdy-Doody time. . .”
Oh, and it’s “The Borg aren’t within. . .” The Borg are a collectivity, you know.
/Mr Lynn
Oh rats! Left the > off the end of the blockquote tag. I wish we could select and format, as on so many other blogs. /Mr L
[That’s OK, you have me, the insomniac mod. ~dbs]
Thanks for the fascinating discussion of issues in early biochemical evolution. I save the links.
/Mr Lynn
joesp says:
March 7, 2011 at 12:00 am
“sorry…how do we know meteorites are not ejectiles of earth?”
Thats actually fairly easy to discern by looking at the ratios of elements and isotopes, particularly the ratio of iron to nickel, among other flags (asteroids originating in the asteroid belt that contain iron are thought to be from the core of a differentiated planetesimal and have iron/nickel ratios that don’t exist on Earth’s surface or mantle, but would exist in our planet’s core). Again, I recommend watching the show “Meteorite Men” on the Science Channel (also on Comcast Xfinity you can see old episodes, not sure of availability elsewhere), for a very decent laymans exposure to the answers to these sorts of questions.
Martian meteorites found on Earth likewise have an isotopic profile and exhibit mineral structures that are unique to Mars surface. Quoting wikipedia:
“In 1983 it was suggested by Smith et al. [3] that meteorites in the so called SNC group (Shergottites, Nakhlites, Chassignites) originated from Mars, from evidence from an instrumental and radiochemical neutron activation analysis of the meteorites. They found that the SNC meteorites possess chemical, isotopic, and petrologic features consistent with data available from Mars at the time, findings further confirmed by Treiman et al. [4] a few years later, by similar methods. Then in late 1983, Bogard et al. [5] showed that the isotopic concentrations of various noble gases of some of the shergottites were consistent with the observations of the atmosphere of Mars made by the Viking spacecraft in the mid-to-late 1970s.
In 2000, an article by Treiman, Gleason and Bogard gave a survey of all the arguments used to conclude the SNC meteorites (of which 14 had been found at the time) were from Mars. They wrote, “There seems little likelihood that the SNCs are not from Mars. If they were from another planetary body, it would have to be substantially identical to Mars as it now is understood.”[6]”
There’s good evidence that much of the magnetites found in the one meteorite the investigators have looked at were of a type that can only be formed by biological processes. Others have tried to claim that those magnetites are due to earthly contamination, but a 2009 article in Scientific American ruled out any earthly or nonbiological orgins to the magnetites, so by process of elimination, really, you have to accept the high probability of biological activity happening on Mars at the time the rock was there.
Beyond that, a lot of scientists are looking at methane plumes detected in the Martian atmosphere in recent years by orbiting space probes that indicate that some specific areas regularly outgass methane with each Martian spring/summer season, something which is is too regular with increases in insolation to be supported by geological processes, which are the only other possible explanation other than existing biological activity either on the surface or in subsurface habitats.
People that continue to dispute the possibility of life on Mars IMHO are akin to the Inquisition denying the Galilean moons of Jupiter for theological reasons. Evidence of various types continues to pile up that is no longer deniable.
Mike Lorrey says:
“People that continue to dispute the possibility of life on Mars IMHO are akin to the Inquisition denying the Galilean moons of Jupiter for theological reasons.”
Agree completely. I would be willing to bet money on finding life on Mars [and maybe on a moon of Saturn]. Life can be found in hydrothermal vents in the ocean, where temperatures are much more extreme than on Mars. Of course that is life adapted from more moderate environments, but the universe seems to be constructed in a way that spontaneously creates life from 92 elements + energy.
A hot planet I can understand. There may be heated water below the surface that allows life to exist. Even a heated gas planet may harbor life. We have life that has evolved to exist in our thin, radiated atmosphere.
A cold planet is less a life-supporting environment in my opinion. Cold tells me that water may not be available. Yes, bacteria exists in our ice. But that is not the kind of cold I am talking about.
My opinion: while life may have occurred in an earlier phase on many planets, and fossils can be found, these discoveries will be extremely rare and will tell us that life is abundant on a planet in impossible to imagine, extremely rare places.
Pamela Gray says:
“A cold planet is less a life-supporting environment in my opinion. Cold tells me that water may not be available.”
Proof of water on Mars: click
Communication w/purported aliens would be nearly impossible. We’d have better luck trying to communicate w/ants. “They” would use some kind of communication completely foreign to ours — communication by simple air vibrations would be as incomprehensible to them as much as their advanced communication would be to us.
Aliens would first send robots to do their exploring, just like we do. Why subject their biologically-vulnerable bodies to the hazards of high-speed space travel? Unless the speed-of-light barrier can be broken, any trip of multiple lightyears becomes too problematic for fragile biological forms. Even if “they” did come in their biological forms, they would be unimaginably different. Looking anything remotely like a human is certain evidence of a hoax, IMO.
Anyway, I’m perfectly comfortable w/UFOs — obviously not every flash or object in the sky can be identified. I’ve seen some odd meteor tracks — one came almost straight down at me, slowly, and blossomed into a “blue-nimbus” just overhead before slowly vanishing. Another was an small orange ball traveling mostly horizontally that broke up into a half-dozen orange “sparks” directly overhead before dissipating.
Michael Jankowski says:
March 6, 2011 at 3:59 pm
“The Journal of Cosmology is an absolute joke.”
Check out the editorial staff. Good grief. Do you have any idea who Roger Penrose is? That’s a Who’s Who list of recognized experts in relevant fields.
The joke’s on you.
“And it will stop “publication” in May because of “liars and thieves” per a press release last month.”
Political appointees running NASA are the joke. More interested in feeding at the ginned up CAGW trough than doing real space science. Half the scientists on the list are senior scientists at NASA and JPL. Aside from Penrose (Oxford) of course who’s arguably the most recognized living theoretical physicist in the world today.
“Hoover may be a legit scientist, but JoS clearly has a pro-ET mantra.”
How perceptive!
“You can go back to their first article back in Oct 2009 and go from there. Maybe you’ll like the thought-provoking “Sex on Mars” paper, too.”
Colonizing Mars would seem to require some of that. Not gay sex though so it might have been of an instructional nature for you.
“Hoover submitting his “paper” to this “journal” is either a “mauronic” move or an act of pure desperation while being unable to get his research published at a legitimate journal.”
If by that you mean get through pal review at consensus driven mainstream journals afraid to rock the establishment boat (sort of like getting climate change skepticism published in the same places) then yes, you might deserve some partial credit for that portion of your response. It certainly wasn’t moronic though. It was brilliant.
“Richard B. Hoover” name appears 67,400 times in articles no older than 24 hours:
http://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=navclient-ff#q=%22richard+b.+Hoover%22&hl=en&prmd=ivnsuo&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:d&sa=X&ei=PwV1TcDRJoep8AbwkPiYDw&ved=0CBQQpwUoAg&bav=on.2,or.&fp=eda1291fdd569703
Talk about publicity. And it didn’t cost him a dime. Everyone from the New York Times to Fox News to the Drudge Report. There was even a Wikipedia biographical entry hastily cobbled together in the last 24 hours. Absolutely brilliant.
Nothing that comes out of NASA should be believed until it is confirmed by independent 3rd parties. NASA is a corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy that left the field of science years ago. They only exist now to seek more funding and grow the bureaucracy. And I’m not even being cynical.
beng says:
March 7, 2011 at 7:40 am
“Aliens would first send robots to do their exploring, just like we do. Why subject their biologically-vulnerable bodies to the hazards of high-speed space travel?”
The stock answer is that they would no longer have biologically-vulnerable bodies. Why would they? Bodies are just machines unless one subscribes to some kind of mysticism that the mind isn’t an emergent property of the brain but rather has some magical component to it specially created for you by your own personal deity. Are you a mystic?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying all mystics are wrong. It just seems like they can’t all be right and I don’t know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.