[Taxacom] Octopuses Came From Outer Space

[Kenneth Kinman]

Hi all,

            I've never liked the idea of a Cambrian "explosion" of taxa, but believe it was more likely a sort of explosion of hard parts in various already-established taxa in different phyla due to changes in ocean chemistry (as I expressed in a 2001 posting that I made on the Dinosaur Mailing List:  http://dinosaurmailinglist.cmnh.org/2001Mar/msg00191.html  ).  And I think it was Prothero in his 2007 book who later expressed a somewhat similar viewpoint, calling it the Cambrian "slow fuse", rather than an explosion.



      But I even more dislike the idea (Hoyle and others) of life on Earth being seeded by extraterrestrial viruses hitching a ride on comets or asteroids.  And reading that recently published paper ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300798 ) I could hardly believe my eyes when I read the part about octopus eggs.

       I also find that the suggestions by some NASA scientists (and others) that we could find microbial life in places like the moon Europa (an idea probably based on the Woesian belief that the earliest life forms on Earth were extremophiles) very improbable.  Darwin's "warm little pond" is probably closer to the truth.   But that improbability cannot compete with the far more improbable idea of octopus genes and/or eggs in icy bolides.

                      ----------------------Ken

________________________________
From: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> on behalf of John Grehan <calabar.john at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2018 12:01 PM
To: taxacom
Subject: [Taxacom] Octopuses Came From Outer Space

Believe whatever you will I guess :)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300798


Abstract

We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the
Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology. Much of
this physical and biological evidence is multifactorial. One particular
focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex
retroviruses
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/retroviruses>
 of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian Explosion of ∼500 Ma.
Such viruses are known to be plausibly associated with major evolutionary
genomic
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/evolutionary-genomics>
processes.
We believe this coincidence is not fortuitous but is consistent with a key
prediction of H-W theory whereby major extinction-diversification
evolutionary boundaries coincide with virus-bearing cometary-bolide
bombardment events. A second focus is the remarkable evolution of
intelligent complexity (Cephalopods) culminating in the emergence of the
Octopus. A third focus concerns the micro-organism fossil evidence
contained within meteorites as well as the detection in the upper
atmosphere of apparent incoming life-bearing particles from space. In our
view the totality of the multifactorial data and critical analyses
assembled by Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe and their many colleagues
since the 1960s leads to a very plausible conclusion – life may have been
seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth
allowed it to flourish (about or just before 4.1 Billion years ago); and
living organisms such as space-resistant and space-hardy bacteria, viruses,
more complex eukaryotic cells, fertilised ova and seeds have been
continuously delivered ever since to Earth so being one important driver of
further terrestrial evolution which has resulted in considerable genetic
diversity and which has led to the emergence of mankind.
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