FYI: panspermia
Cosmic Ancestry is a new theory of 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 is a wholly scientific, testable theory for which evidence is accumulating.
Hoyle
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, thought to be Socrates's teacher. 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.
Wickramasinghe
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe also broadened or generalized panspermia to include a new understanding of evolution. While accepting the fact that life on Earth evolved over the course of about four billion years, they say that the genetic programs for higher evolution cannot be explained by random mutation and recombination among genes for single-celled organisms, even in that long a time: the programs must come from somewhere beyond Earth. In a nutshell, their theory holds that all of life comes from space. It incorporates the original panspermia in the same way that General Relativity incorporates Special Relativity. Their expanded theory can well be termed "strong" panspermia.
Meanwhile on a different track, in the early 1970s, British chemist and inventor James Lovelock proposed a theory that life controls Earth's environment to make it suitable for life. The theory, which he named Gaia, has gained a small but growing, sometimes cultish following. However, seen from a neo-Darwinian perspective, the theory looks teleological. It is hard to imagine how purposeful Gaian processes that take millions of years could be discovered by trial and error. In response to such criticism, Lovelock has retreated somewhat from some of his earlier bold claims for Gaia. Here we endorse Lovelock's theory at its original strength. We propose that Gaian processes are not blindly found and peculiar to Earth, but are pre-existent and universal — life from space brings Gaian processes with it. We suggest that Gaian processes are necessary for higher forms of life to emerge and succeed on any planet.
Lovelock
We are calling the union of Lovelock's Gaia with Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's expanded theory of panspermia Cosmic Ancestry. Its account of evolution and the origin of life on Earth is profoundly different from the prevailing scientific paradigm — the theory challenges not merely the answers but the questions that are popular today. Cosmic Ancestry implies, we find, that life can only descend from ancestors that were at least as highly evolved as itself. And it means, we believe, that there can be no origin of life from nonliving matter in the finite past. Without supernatural intervention, therefore, we conclude that life must have always existed. Although these conclusions cut across the boundaries between science, philosophy, and religion, we believe they are grounded in good evidence. In fact, new evidence that supports many aspects Cosmic Ancestry is coming in rapidly. In the following pages we will explain how these and other recent developments support Cosmic Ancestry:
19 May 1995: two scientists at Cal Poly showed that bacteria can survive without any metabolism for at least 25 million years; probably they are immortal.
24 November 1995: The New York Times ran a story about bacteria that can survive radiation much stronger than any that Earth has ever experienced.
7 August 1996: NASA announced fossilized evidence of ancient life in meteorite ALH 84001 from Mars.
27 October 1996: geneticists showed evidence that many genes are much older than the fossil record would indicate. Subsequent studies have strengthened this finding.
29 July 1997: a NASA scientist announced evidence of fossilized microscopic life forms in a meteorite not from any planet.
Spring, 1998: a microfossil that was found in a meteorite and photographed in 1966, was recognized by a Russian microbiologist as a magnetotactic bacterium.
Fall, 1998: NASA's public position on life-from-space shifted dramatically.
4 January 1999: NASA officially recognized the possibility that life on Earth comes from space.
19 March 1999: NASA scientists announced that two more meteorites hold even stronger fossilized evidence for past life on Mars.
26 April 2000: the team operating the mass spectrometer on NASA's Stardust mission announced the detection of very large organic molecules in space. Nonbiological sources for organic molecules so large are not known.
19 October 2000, a team of biologists and a geologist announced the revival of bacteria that are 250 million years old, strengthening that case that bacterial spores can be immortal.
13 December 2000: a NASA team demonstrated that the magnetosomes in Mars meteorite ALH 84001 are biological.
The case for Cosmic Ancestry is not yet proven, of course. At this point the best reason to notice it is that sustained evolutionary progress and the origin of life on Earth are not satisfactorily accounted for by neo-Darwinism. We will mention some of the flaws in that theory, but our primary purpose is to present Cosmic Ancestry as a viable, new scientific account of evolutionary progress and the origin of life on Earth.
