More Than Panspermia
Hans-Georg Michna
Cosmic Ancestry is a new theory pertaining to evolution and the
origin of life on Earth. It holds that life on Earth was seeded
from space, and that life's evolution to higher forms depends on
genetic programs that come from space. (It accepts the Darwinian
account of evolution that does not require new genetic
programs.) It is a wholly scientific, testable theory for which
evidence is accumulating.
The first point, which deals with the origin of life on Earth,
is known as panspermia—literally, "seeds everywhere." Its
earliest recorded advocate was the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras,
who influenced Socrates. However, Aristotle's theory of
spontaneous generation came to be preferred by science for more
than two thousand years. Then on April 9, 1864, French chemist
Louis Pasteur announced his great experiment disproving
spontaneous generation as it was then held to occur. In the
1870s, British physicist Lord Kelvin and German physicist
Hermann von Helmholtz reinforced Pasteur and argued that life
could come from space. And in the first decade of the 1900s,
Swedish chemist and Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius theorized
that bacterial spores propelled through space by light pressure
were the seeds of life on Earth.
But in the 1920s, Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin and
English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, writing independently,
revived the doctrine of spontaneous generation in a more
sophisticated form. In the new version, the spontaneous
generation of life no longer happens on Earth, takes too long to
observe in a laboratory, and has left no clues about its
occurrence. Supporting this theory, in 1953, American chemists
Stanley Miller and Harold Urey showed that some amino acids can
be chemically produced from amonia and methane. That experiment
is now famous, and the Oparin-Haldane paradigm still prevails
today.
Starting in the 1970s, British astronomers Fred Hoyle and
Chandra Wickramasinghe rekindled interest in panspermia. By
careful spectroscopic observation and analysis of light from
distant stars they found new evidence, traces of life, in the
intervening dust. They also proposed that comets, which are
largely made of water-ice, carry bacterial life across galaxies
and protect it from radiation damage along the way. One aspect
of this research program, that interstellar dust and comets
contain organic compounds, has been pursued by others as well.
It is now universally accepted that space contains the
"ingredients" of life. This development could be the first hint
of a huge paradigm shift. But mainstream science has not
accepted the hard core of modern panspermia, that whole cells
seeded life on Earth.
Article continues at: http://www.panspermia.org/intro.htm
Hans-Georg
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