Re:Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed
by kjkjadksj on Thursday March 06, 2025 @09:36AM
(#43280702)
I don’t see how it weakens the hypothesis. We are making the assumption that life must be chiral. Maybe chirality is something more or less inherited. So it is a coin flip whether your last ancestor was left handed or right handed. So a racemic mix doesn’t disprove that because the population could be heterogeneous for this phenotype and not yet fixed. There are many heterogeneous phenotypes on earth.
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Re:Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed
by ajuc on Thursday March 06, 2025 @12:10PM
(#43282560)
If life is chiral it weakens the hypothesis. If life is not chiral it changes nothing.
Nonzero-weighted sum of something and nothing is something.
Re:Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed
by scotty79 on Thursday March 06, 2025 @10:45AM
(#43281508)
It seems unlikely for such a hard thing as spontaneous creation of biomachinery from amino-acids happened at the same time for both left-handed and right-handed versions. And once you got machinery that uses, for example, left-handed version, it's pretty much game over for the alternative because life grows, evolves and colonizes at insane rates compared to random chemical processes. So it's very likely that wherever carbon based life exists it's chiral rather than racemic.