by Neil Dale | Aug 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
After its fiery Hadean beginning, Earth seems to have spent up to a billion years covered completely in a world ocean. Volcanoes and small islands probably broke through the surface, but life’s first few 100 million years were probably underwater. Simple...
by Neil Dale | Aug 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
In the 1990s James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis. This proposes that the whole of life on Earth acts as a single system, maintaining both the composition of the atmosphere and the temperature at the surface. Both conditions seem to be maintained by negative...
by Neil Dale | Aug 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
Less than 1% of the bacterial species, about 4500, can be cultivated in the lab. Most of the research on bacteria has therefore been done on a tiny fraction of the bacteria. Slava Epstein, at Northeastern University in the US, has been able to cultivate about...
by Neil Dale | Aug 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
Once cooperation had evolved the first cell there were apparently metabolic processes inside of it that could not simply keep getting bigger. Instead, the growing cell divided, and then kept on dividing. There were few limits in the early ocean. Two questions are...
by Neil Dale | Aug 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
How does cooperation work in the creation of the first cell? We go into the molecules of water itself to find a place where this process may have begun. In the traditional view, molecules of water can be tightly organized in ice, loosely collected in liquid...
by Neil Dale | Aug 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
This chapter focuses on the idea of cooperation and looks at examples in the “nonliving” world, before beginning to talk about the self-generating systems from which life arose. An important function of cooperation is that it creates a new, quite real, entity out of...
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