As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/
Here’s an interesting idea. Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. That has produced an exponential increase in the number of transistors on microchips and continues to do so. But if an observer today was to measure this rate of increase, it would be straightforward to extrapolate backwards and work out when the number of transistors on a chip was zero. In other words, the date when microchips were first developed in the 1960s. A similar process works with scientific publications. Between 1990 and 1960, they doubled in number every 15 years or so. Extrapolating this backwards gives the origin of scientific publication as 1710, about the time of Isaac Newton. Today, Alexei Sharov at the National Institute on Ageing in Baltimore and his mate Richard Gordon at the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida, have taken a similar to complexity and life. These guys argue that it’s possible to measure the complexity of life and the rate at which it has increased from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to more complex creatures such as worms, fish and finally mammals. That produces a clear exponential increase identical to that behind Moore’s Law although in this case the doubling time is 376 million years rather than two years. That raises an interesting question. What happens if you extrapolate backwards to the point of no complexity–the origin of life? Sharov and Gordon say that the evidence by this measure is clear. “Linear regression of genetic complexity (on a log scale) extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life = 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago,” they say. And since the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, that raises a whole series of other questions. Not least of these is how and where did life begin.
However, if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with humans, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilisation in our galaxy. And this is the reason why when we gaze into space, we do not yet see signs of other intelligent species. There’s no question that this is a controversial idea that will ruffle more than a few feathers amongst evolutionary theorists. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/
...thereby demonstrating the dangers in using an uncertain model to extrapolate far beyond the limits of your data.
Yeah, it seems like it invalidates their application of a model, rather than invalidating the idea that life evolved on Earth. Ed O.
Still in town! MIT is awesome -- but that doesn't make their pop-science blogazine's headline-grabbers any more credible as a source of science news. The actual paper that the article is based on (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.3381) is not from MIT and has not been officially published (or even reviewed, as far as I can tell). But, it has a provocative title, which makes it perfect pop-science fodder...
The panspermia idea has existed for some time, but it has been just one theory with no evidence. I am sure that many panspermiasts (sp?) will point to this study as evidence, but it's not. I have no idea what the answer is, but there are so damned many problems with making conclusions from a model that is not intended to be used in this way. I think it is meant as a thought experiment, and as such kind of interesting, but people will certainly use this swiss cheese of an experiment to make claims that have no validity.
Panspermists age exponentially, and I calculate Sly's age as coming out of the first 10 to the negative 26th second of the Big Bang before there was light.
