Re: Snappy zero to hero

On 19/01/2025 2:03 am, RonO wrote:

On 1/17/2025 9:52 PM, MarkE wrote:

"Here we infer that LUCA lived ~4.2 Ga (4.09–4.33 Ga) through divergence time analysis of pre-LUCA gene duplicates, calibrated using microbial fossils and isotope records under a new cross-bracing implementation. Phylogenetic reconciliation suggests that LUCA had a genome of at least 2.5 Mb (2.49–2.99 Mb), encoding around 2,600 proteins, comparable to modern prokaryotes."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02461-1
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Early earth able to support life 4.3-4.4 Ga?
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This would give a time frame for the evolution from the origin of life to LUCA of a few hundred million years at most, i.e. zero to 2,500,000 base pairs encoding around 2,600 proteins.
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Not enough time?
Not the rate predicted by evolutionary theory?
Or all good?
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I put up this article last year when it was first published.  What you should be worried about is that the origin of life is definitely not Biblical.  You seem to be worshiping the wrong god, or is the one responsible for the origin of life the pretender god?  Maybe the Bible is just wrong about everything that we can determine about nature.  You are the one that needs to decide how you are going to deal with reality.
 The paper does admit that their results would indicate that there would only be a couple hundred million years for life to evolve on this planet, but there is the option that it first evolved somewhere else like Mars.  Look at Figure 1.  That could also explain why only two lineages (archaea, and eubacteria) survived, and why it looks like it took a billion years before those two lineages started to diversify on earth.
 If life did not get to earth before 3.2 billion years ago that would explain the lack of diversification  within Archaea and bacteria.
 The alternaitive is that LUCA existed over 4.2 billion years ago. Diversification occurred for over a billion years, but sometime around 3.2 billion years there was a mass extinction event and only one lineage of Archaea and one lineage of eubacteria survived to diversify after the mass extinction event.
 Neither scenario is Biblical even if you claim that some designer created Archaea and eubacteria 3.2 billion years ago in a way that makes it look like their common ancestor existed for a billion years before they existed.
 Ron Okimoto
 

Thanks Ron for the summary; interesting science and process of deduction. As far as compatibility with biblical theology goes, does not an old earth interpretation allow for this? Personally, my reading of the science is old earth with significant interventions re life. YMMV.
Btw, is this you? https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ronald-Okimoto-3