Frequently Asked Questions about Cosmic Ancestry
Q. Why is Cosmic Ancestry necessary? Isn't the theory that life on Earth arose here spontaneously a perfectly adequate theory?
A. No. The theory that life can arise spontaneously from nonliving chemicals is speculative and "...will remain so until living creatures have been synthesized in the biochemical laboratory. We are a long way from that goal." J.B.S Haldane wrote those words in "The Origin of Life," in 1928. The goal looks farther away now than it did then.
Q. Isn't life as likely to have started here on Earth as anywhere else?
A. Yes. But that likelihood is still effectively zero.
Q. Didn't life have to start somewhere, somehow?
A. This is a preference that many people have, not a necessary truth. Cosmic Ancestry does not attempt to explain the origin of life in the first place. As Hermann von Helmholtz said in 1873, "if failure attends of our efforts to obtain a generation of organisms from lifeless matter, it seems to me a thoroughly correct scientific procedure to inquire whether there has ever been an origination of life, or whether it is not as old as matter."
Q. What about the big bang? Nothing could have existed before then. Life had to have a starting point that came after the big bang.
A. The big bang theory is not secure enough to serve as a foundation for beliefs about the origin of life. For example, the universe has contents which are apparently twice as old as the big bang theory indicates the universe itself should be; and the most distant galaxies we can see look as rich and fully evolved as our own, even though they are theoretically only 5 percent as old. And in 1998, scientists see evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating — totally unexpected in any version of the big bang theory. But even if there was a big bang seven, ten, fifteen, or twenty billion years ago, there could well have been many other big bangs, creating other universes (Andre Linde, Scientific American November 1994, p 48). Big bangs could be ongoing. And we are not necessarily isolated from other universes, just as matter can enter black holes from outside them.
Q. So how did life on Earth originate then, according to Cosmic Ancestry?
A. Life on Earth originated when bacterial spores arrived here from space.
Q. What direct evidence is there that there are, or were, bacterial spores in space?
A. On August 7, 1996, NASA announced that it sees evidence of fossilized "nanobacteria" in a meteorite from Mars.
Q. But that was only from Mars. Life could well have started from a chemical soup there just as we say it did here. I want evidence that life on Earth comes from distant space. Isn't that what Cosmic Ancestry maintains?
A. Yes. But to stay on Mars for a minute, if that evidence stands up, then either a) it is very easy to start life on suitable planets from nonliving chemicals (which is not what our molecular biology laboratories are finding out), or b) life on different planets comes from a common source — Cosmic Ancestry.
Q. OK, so life started on either Earth or Mars (more likely Mars) and then got transferred to the other one on a rock like the one NASA investigated.
A. That's one scenario. But other evidence of fossilized bacteria in meteorites — meteorites not from Mars but from spent comets — has been reported. In 1961, George Claus and Bartholomew Nagy published pictures in Nature (v 192 p 594) of such fossils from the Orgueil and Ivuna carbonaceous chondrites. Harold Urey supported their finding. In the early 1980s, Hans Pflug published even more startling pictures from the Murchison meteorite, which fell in Australia in 1969. Finally, searches in the high atmosphere always find cells. (Mainstream science rejects all of this evidence as contamination or fakery.) Convincing evidence of fossilized germs in meteorites has been hard to come by, but such investigations have received very little funding. Now that NASA has revived scientific interest in meteorites with fossils, and has improved the tools and techniques available, more evidence should emerge, such as the fossils in the Murchison meteorite reported by NASA's Richard Hoover in 1997.
Q. How could any living thing survive in space?
A. New evidence indicates that bacterial spores can survive the cold and dry vacuum of space. Other evidence shows that some may be immortal!
Q. But wouldn't any germs in space be sterilized by the heat of atmospheric entry or impact with Earth?
A. No. There are several plausible mechanisms for delivering viable cells to Earth from space.
Q. If there are germs in space, wouldn't we see evidence, for example, in the lunar soil samples?
A. We do! Samples of lunar soil from all the successful Apollo mission tested positive for amino acids.
Q. Why are we calling it Cosmic Ancestry now, instead of panspermia?
A. The old theory of panspermia deals with only the origin of life on Earth. The modern version adds a completely new understanding of evolution to the theory. And Cosmic Ancestry integrates the theory called Gaia, according to which life engineers its environment, into the new worldview.
Q. Why is a new understanding of evolution necessary? Isn't the existing theory of evolution satisfactory?
A. The theory that more organized forms of life on Earth evolved from less organized forms over about four billion years is well-established. But new genes are necessary for this process. The theory that new genes arise by random mutation of old genes and natural selection is not established. The result of every known mutation is either neutral or deleterious, except when the disabling of a gene is advantageous. It is possible that "gene duplication" followed by other mutations could have occasionally produced a closely related new gene with a function very similar to the original one. But a convincing account of even one wholly new gene with an unrelated specific new function, arising from mutations of an existing gene, or assembled from random strands of nucleotides, has not been given.
Q. What is the new understanding of evolution that comes with Cosmic Ancestry?
A. It is that new genes, already wholly composed, are installed into the genomes of species to enable evolution to advance.
Q. Where do new genes come from, according to Cosmic Ancestry?
A. Ultimately from the same place that all of life comes from, elsewhere, space.
Q. But there is absolutely no plausible mechanism by which genes could come from space.
A. Genes can come from space as silent DNA, within the genomes of bacteria, or in extragenomic units such as plasmids; or as viruses.
Q. How do the new genes get installed?
A. Infectious diseases spread new genes around very effectively. It is very well-known that viruses often install their genes into their host's genome.
Q. There is absolutely no convincing evidence that evolution is driven by genes from space.
A. True, the evidence is not yet convincing to many people. But there is no evidence that random mutation can compose new genes with important new coding sequences. The math makes it absurdly unlikely. Why are people convinced of that theory? The conservative theory is that such genes already exist. If so, it would be logical to conclude that they come from space. They have to come from somewhere, and that's the only "somewhere" there is.
Q. But where do the new genes come from originally?
A. Cosmic Ancestry does not attempt to answer this question. It seems logical that the genetic instructions for life on Earth came from prior life elsewhere in space. That this life has a nonliving origin, a well-entrenched belief, may be simply mistaken speculation.
Q. I think you're crazy.
A. I know.
Q. What are some examples of progress in the laboratory toward the creation of life from nonliving chemicals?
A. In spite of much honest effort, there are only weak examples of such progress. Yes, random RNA sequences have recently been shown to exhibit ligase activity, for example (Eckland et al., Science v269 p364). But the net result of this research — in the flood of new knowledge about the complexity of a bacterial cell — is that the goal looks farther away than ever. Francis Crick has apparently despaired of finding the origin of life in nonliving chemicals; in 1981 he wrote Life Itself, in which he advocated a theory now categorized as "directed panspermia."
Q. Doesn't the fossil record indicate that the first cells on Earth evolved after a long, gradual process that started with nonliving chemicals?
A. No. The oldest rocks that are capable of containing evidence of life (the rocks whose information hasn't been erased by melting or otherwise) contain evidence that the metabolism of bacterial cells was already under way. The best guess to make from that clue is that bacterial life — whole cells — were present on Earth from day one. (The standard prebiotic soup theory is now compelled to say that the first cells evolved from nonliving chemicals very quickly.)
Q. Aren't there examples of computer programs that evolve just as genetic programs must have done?
A. No. According to the standard theory, new genes with unprecedented instructional meaning arose gradually, after many iterations of random mutation and recombination. There are no examples of anything analogous to this process in computer software. Just to be sure, we asked the experts. In August, 1996, we polled the newsgroups bionet.biology.computational; bionet.molbio.evolution; comp.ai.alife; comp.ai.genetic; comp.ai.philosophy; and comp.theory.self-org-sys. We asked if anyone had any such examples. Although examples were submitted, none met the stated criteria. Other alleged examples are considered in detail in the following pages of this website.
Q. Isn't the logic behind neo-Darwinism perfectly sound?
A. Maybe not. For example, in what sense are frogs and birds better at surviving than bacteria?
Q. Isn't there good reason to believe that Earth is a biologically closed system?
A. I'm not aware of any good reason to believe that. The very existence of life on Earth is a good reason not to believe it.
Q. Then why does modern science insist that Earth is a biologically closed system?
A. I have no idea.
What'sNEW
 Brig Klyce: Cosmic Ancestry - The Modern Version of Panspermia: Transcript of ICSD Internet chat, 9:00-10:00 PM EDT, 19 June 2003.
 Panspermia Asks New Questions, 22 January 2001.
Panspermia and Cosmic Ancestry: An Interview With Brig Klyce, 2000 ThinkQuest Team C003763.
Brig Klyce has occasionally posted notices and entered discussions pertaining to Cosmic Ancestry on Internet newsgroups since 1996. An index of links to the postings is available from Google Groups.
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