What did the first organism eat?

This stuff can be counter-intutive and it can be easy to flip stuff around: heat death represents a local maximum of the entropy of a system, not a minimum.

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You are, of course, correct!

I have been away from the formal study of physics for 30 or 40 years and got my stuff backward. Thanks for the correction :+1:

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Cool.

I’ll give the concept of a god the tiniest bit of credit as soon as a single bit of evidence is discovered.
Nice chatting with you.

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I’m bumping this purely for the irony. :rofl:

It’s pretty funny when a roll steps on his own tail. .

  • Examples of bacteria that lack a cell wall are Mycoplasma and L-form bacteria .

Clay may have been birthplace of life on Earth, new study suggests

Date: November 5, 2013

[quote=ā€œLukang, post:15, topic:1209ā€]
The consideration that an organism could suddenly take energy from vibrations in the earth and use it for itself resembles no life firm on earth, so it doesn’t make sense that we would have evolved from this creature.
[/quote] (You would of course be wrong.) It is a viable theory that does happen to 'make sense." And, is taken seriously enough to experiment with. )

YOUR VIEW OF LIFE IS EXTREMELY RESTRICTED.

It’s not exactly that the organisms do not have cell walls, it is that they do not generate their own cell walls.

Heh, I have at least a dozen scientific papers covering the catalysis of RNA formation by montmorillonite clays in my collection :slight_smile:

This has been a staple of abiogenesis research since the 1990s to my knowledge, and some of the work on this topic may even date back to the early 1980s. Indeed, a reference cited by James P. Ferris, in one of his papers currently residing in my collection, is this one:

Bernal, J. D., The Physical Basis Of Life, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 375A: 537-558 (1949)

which is probably the earliest reference in the scientific literature to the idea of clay minerals being important in prebiotic chemistry and the origin of life.

The paper containing the above citation is this one:

Mineral Catalysis And Prebiotic Synthesis: Montmorillonite-Catalysed Formation Of RNA by James P. Ferris, Elements, Vol. 1, pp 145-149, June 2005

Sadly I can’t attach the PDF to this post, but it makes interesting reading if you track the paper down :slight_smile:

Ferris has been pretty prolific with respect to papers on montmorillonite catalysis of RNA oligomers, and a substantial amount of the literature on this topic emanates from his laboratory.

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Cecropia moths don’t eat.

https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Invertebrates/Cecropia-Moth#:~:text=The%20adult%20moths%20don't,t%20live%20to%20see%20adulthood.

The caterpillars eat.

My pet rock does not eat. Kuphus doesn’t eat. Is he considering what trees do, eating? Perhaps the assertion should be altered to something like,ā€œtake in nourishment from the environment.ā€ But, would that make the same point? Isn’t that exactly what abiogenisis asserts? Hmmm? Stuck, I suppose.

Oh, there are numerous insects with non-feeding adult stages. The Saturniidae, the Family containing the Silkmoths, is simply one of the more spectacular examples. There’s also a brace of insects known as the Strepsiptera, many of which are obligate parasitoids or parasites of various Hymenoptera, but in this case, the females continue to feed as adults, but the males don’t. The males typically have five hours to find a female to mate with, before their energy reserves run out and they die.

However, while the males in this Order resemble normal winged insects, having the usual well-defined division of the body into the usual tagmata (head, thorax, abdomen), plus the usual three pairs of legs and two pairs of wings seen in several other insect Orders, the females are little more than bags of organs. The adult females differ little, if at all, from their appearance as larvae, and have vestigial genitalia that are next to useless for copulation.

So, what do the males do, when they alight upon these unprepossessing mates?

Yes, we have another of the many instances of hypodermic insemination that can be found in insects, and more recently, at least one species of spider. But because the female doesn’t have functional genitalia, the male, instead, pierces her body cavity at the back of the head with his hypodermic penis. Yes, this is a lineage of organisms in which reproduction involves what could technically be regarded as ā€œskull fuckingā€. :smiley:

The sperm swim through the female haemolymph directly to the ovaries, and fertilise her eggs. These then hatch out inside the mother’s body cavity, and so the female gives birth to live young. Which make their way out into the world through the same hole the male originally bored in the back of her head.

Quite simply, the more you study invertebrate zoology, the more you arrive at the conclusion that if the cartoon magic man of the usual suspects actually exists, it’s a sadistic monster that used insects as the testing ground for its nastiest and darkest fantasies.

Though there are numerous instances of reproductive weirdness in the world of invertebrates that make even this example look tame. I derive much pleasure from introducing the door knockers to this little lot, some of whom leave skid marks on exit. :smiley:

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