[Taxacom] Octopuses Came From Outer Space

[John Grehan]

Come on Ken, do you expect me not to believe that octopus are aliens? Just
stare into their eyes and you will know :)

John Grehan

On Mon, May 21, 2018 at 2:24 PM, Kenneth Kinman <kinman at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 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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