Thread

1. adrian_b · 1790541762 · focus · HN ↗

   While the research about Paulinella is very interesting, it has no relationship whatsoever with "the origins of life".

   What this research is about is the origin of plants, which are indeed one of the most important forms of life, but the origin of plants is distant by billions of years from the origin of life and it is even distant by billions of years from the origin of phototrophy (frequently, but not really correctly, called "photosynthesis", i.e. the extraction of energy from solar light).

   The ancestor of red algae and green algae (the terrestrial plants are descended from green algae) has been created by the hybridization through symbiosis between a unicellular eukaryote (i.e. nucleated cell) and a cyanobacterium, a.k.a. blue-green alga.

   As explained in TFA, Paulinella is the second case of such a symbiosis between a nucleated cell and a cyanobacterium, which happened relatively recently, unlike the symbiosis from the origin of plants, which happened about a billion and a half years ago.

   Because Paulinella and its internal symbionts have not been modified so profoundly by symbiosis like the red algae or green algae, it can provide information about how the early stages of the hybridization happened, eventually allowing a better understanding of how plants function.

   1. popalchemist · 1790543731 · focus · HN ↗

      the origins of plant life is related to the origins of life; even if by abstraction.

      1. NooneAtAll3 · 1790548453 · focus · HN ↗

         at best it's related to origins of eucaryotic life, but definitely not whole life in general

         we basically uncovered early network sending unencrypted html, and you expect to understand how compiler works - simply different levels of abstraction

         1. popalchemist · 1790557315 · focus · HN ↗

            cracking the "origin of life" (I put it in quotes because if you subscribe to the panpsychism premise that consciousness is fundamental then the question of hte origin of life is a bit nonsensical; everything is a permutation of the same primordial life-consciousness) is a bit like cracking AGI; if some new insight gets us closer to the larger question, it is relevant to the larger question even if the larger question is a superset of the sub-question.

            It is related in that way.

            1. tsimionescu · 1790582916 · focus · HN ↗

               The origin of life means abiogenesis - how the first living "stuff" arose from simpler chemistry.

               And it is just as relevant if you believe in panpsychism as it is if you don't - panspsychism holds that rocks and even electrons are conscious to some extent, but that has nothing to do with how we got from organic chemistry to proto-cells (as both protocells and organic molecules have some degree of consciousness in this theory).

               Questions of the origin of life are only irrelevant/settled for those who subscribe to explicit divine origins of life, such as Creationists, who hold that God literally created the first life from nothing directly - that it was an unknowable miracle, not a physical process.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.