NASA Finds New Life (Updated with Pictures)

[AquaEyes11010]

Doesn't this pretty much prove that evolution is real?

Perhaps, but there is already so much else that happens that supports the reality of evolution.

 

[JustAsking]

Doesn't this pretty much prove that evolution is real?

No more or less than the 1 million or so other species we have studied that prove that evolution is real.

 

[B_Hickboy]

I guess this precludes the existence of a god. In some people's minds.

 

[maxcok]

*YAWN* Old news.

Really? Did you know something the rest of the world scientific community was unaware of?

as uninteresting as this sounds it is the best science can come up with. Sadly it cost us hundreds of millions of dollars,probably.

hmmm . . . It sure doesn't sound like that: The Wall Street Journal reports

To borrow the words of our Vice Prez, "this is fuckin' HUGE'!!!

The implications are even huger.

Here's an interview with the dicoverer Felisa Wolfe-Simon. She's one of those rare scientists who can break it down for an unscientific audience and make it interesting, educational and entertaining all at the same time. She sounds like a lot of fun too. Enjoy: Arsenic-Eating Bacteria Challenge View Of How Life Works

 

[molotovmuffin]

I'm not a scientist but I have wonder about something that can live as a result of posionous matter; is that really a good thing?

You do realize that arsenic is in every thing...?


I would have been more impressed if this was a non-carbon life form... then we'd be all abuzz. :tongue:

 

[nudeyorker]

You do realize that arsenic is in every thing...?


I would have been more impressed if this was a non-carbon life form... then we'd be all abuzz. :tongue:

Thanks for the science lesson. But it's still toxic.

 

[JustAsking]

The implications are even huger.

Here's an interview with the dicoverer Felisa Wolfe-Simon. She's one of those rare scientists who can break it down for an unscientific audience and make it interesting, educational and entertaining all at the same time. She sounds like a lot of fun too. Enjoy: Arsenic-Eating Bacteria Challenge View Of How Life Works

You do realize that arsenic is in every thing...?

I would have been more impressed if this was a non-carbon life form... then we'd be all abuzz. :tongue:

What really bothers me about scientific journalism is the astonishing laziness and pandering to the readers. It does a great disservice to science and affects how people understand how science knows things and how it advances that knowledge.

This arsenic organism discovery is a really good example. The story that maxcok linked to is pretty good. But the title does more damage than the story does good. In fact the title says everything that is wrong about science journalism.

The standard hack formula is to play into the already existing cognitive frame that people have about science in order to add a kind of lurid drama to the event. The false frame that they play into is that science is a bunch of guys who protect their dogma until some maverick comes along with the real truth and has to fight to overturn the prevailing established science.

Then it becomes a struggle between that one Clint Eastwood-like maverick with "the truth", who fights the establishment until he is either overcome and buried, or he prevails and successfully "challenges the prevailing science".

There is nothing about this arsenic discovery that really challenges our view of how life works. In fact, this very clever and imaginative young scientist happened to pick out and concentrate on a well known speculation that arsenic's similarity to phosphorous might imply that it could substitute for phosphorous in some biological pathways of synthesis.

But all that being said, this is still a really dramatic, remarkable, and very imaginative piece of science. Initially, she didn't really run into a dogma barrier so much as the highly speculative hypothesis she was proposing was not attractive enough for the limited funding that was available.

However, once she received some support from a think-tank that was looking for speculative hypotheses she was funded enough to carry out the work. After that it was a very good piece of scientific inquiry.

She researched different parts of the world where there were high levels of arsenic and decided on Lake Mono. She dredged up some muck from the lake, and removed all the phosphorous in her samples and waited to see if any bacteria survived. Although this was a very well conceived experiment, I still think she was very lucky to find a surviving bacteria the first time out.

Although this bacteria really doesn't challenge anything we know about how life works, this woman is the first to discover organic life that metabolizes arsenic. And like a new movie director who happens to make a hit the first time out, she is now a kind of scientific celebrity such that her next speculative proposal is apt to be funded much more readily.

This was a combination of very good science and some very good luck, I think. It is a really big find, but it is not as big as if she had discovered a non-carbon based life form or something.

She gets my admiration for all of this, but the journalist earns my scorn for being lazy and deliberately exploiting the public's misconception about how science works.

 

[JustAsking]

Thanks for the science lesson. But it's still toxic.

nude,
Actually, Oxygen is toxic to much of life on the planet. Those organisms that metabolize oxygen do so because they evolved protective mechanims against the highly reactive nature of oxygen.

Life evolved to metabolize oxygen in response to plants having evolved photosynthesis and as a result, changed the mixture of the atmosphere over time to have a lot of oxygen.

I think that life evolving to burn oxygen is more interesting than the arsenic bug, but it is not newsworthy because it happened millions of years ago.

I mention this to support what I said earlier that one organism's poison is another organism's life sustaining chemical.

 

[nudeyorker]

nude,
Actually, Oxygen is toxic to much of life on the planet. Those organisms that metabolize oxygen do so because they evolved protective mechanims against the highly reactive nature of oxygen.

Life evolved to metabolize oxygen in response to plants having evolved photosynthesis and as a result, changed the mixture of the atmosphere over time to have a lot of oxygen.

I think that life evolving to burn oxygen is more interesting than the arsenic bug, but it is not newsworthy because it happened millions of years ago.

I mention this to support what I said earlier that one organism's poison is another organism's life sustaining chemical.

Thank you for all of your thought and time you have put into this thread. I've learned so much. I'm planning on doing more reading and research because you have inspired me. I hope you won't mind if I PM you with questions. Thank you again.

 

[JustAsking]

This is what I love about science. It has built in quality control. The QA department happens to be the rest of the scientific community.

 

[Drifterwood]

I guess this precludes the existence of a god. In some people's minds.

Good science neither includes, excludes, precludes nor assumes anything. When you do, you have bad science.

I like the term exobiotic, JA, just not for what they use it.

 

[MotorPT]

Came out to be false like most news now a days. Arsenic breaks down in water. And it was bacteria built like any regular one and they just replaced phosphours with arsenic to see if it would hold.
http://http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/pagenum/all/

 

[maxcok]

^ Your link doesn't work.

After doing my own research to find the article, it seems there's some debate about how the experiment was conducted and the conclusion drawn from it.

So at this point the claim appears to be neither true nor false, but perhaps unproven.

 

[JustAsking]

^ Your link doesn't work.

After doing my own research to find the article, it seems there's some debate about how the experiment was conducted and the conclusion drawn from it.

So at this point the claim appears to be neither true nor false, but perhaps unproven.

Maxcok,
You are correct in the short form. The long form is that no scientific finding or theory is actually proven like a mathematical proof is proven. The veracity of a scientific finding or theory is related to how well its predictions are supported by others duplicating the work or using it in their own work successfully.

This corroboration has to be done against the original paper published in a peer reviewed scientific journal, and the corroborating work also has to be published the same way.

So until that happens, this one article in Science is unsupported by any independent corroboration.

The blogger that I linked to is a professional microbiologist who was flying the "Research Blogging" banner indicating that he was referring to the original paper throughout his critique. This at least helps us separate it from scientific gossip. However, his critique is not admissable to the court of scientific inquiry until he publishes it in a professional journal.

On the other hand, his blogging has some usefulness in that it is of interest to you and I, and it will draw other professional microbiologists into the fray to do some investigation of their own and publish professionally.

Another useful aspect of it is that since the blogger is a well known professional microbiologist, his blog is read by other professionals. Since this arsenic topic is newsworthy, his blog article generated a lot of comments by other professional microbiologists.

So while we wait for others to either corroborate or refute the claims officially in their professional journal publications, we can read the comments from other professionals as they weigh in casually on the subject. You will notice that some of the commenters names are live links to their own blogs or other pages that advertise their credentials. So you can draw your own conclusion about their credibility as you eavesdrop in this kind of "around the water cooler" conversation they are having about the subject.

I am not a microbiologist. I have a degree in Physics and one in EE, and worked for about 20 years in designing and building scientific instruments for chemists and biologists at universities and in industry. So you can say I am a scientist, but in microbiology I am simply a well read layman who enjoys writing about science for other laymen. My interest in biology and microbiology has come later in life as the culture wars started to heat up about ten years ago around the topic of teaching evolution in public schools.

In the process, I learned a lot about biology and microbiology, and became very interested in how the philosophy and practice of science leads us to degrees of certainty about things that are accessible to scientific investigation.

So my opinion about this article has no scientific validity. After reading some of the critiques of the original article, my gut feel is that there is a 50/50 chance of the arsenic bug hypothesis turning out to be valid.

If it turns out to be true, it will have been a very good bit of science done by the young woman scientist. If it turns out to be unsupportable by others, it will be a shame if it is because she was naive and sloppy about her analytical techniques.

 

[JustAsking]

Came out to be false like most news now a days. Arsenic breaks down in water. And it was bacteria built like any regular one and they just replaced phosphours with arsenic to see if it would hold.
http://http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/pagenum/all/

You have to be careful with news articles in the popular press when it comes to reporting scientific news. These days journalist just want to sell more copies so they make any news supporting or refuting something into a big noisy drama.

Sometimes scientists are premature about reporting things to the popular press and then lose control of story as journalist hype it up in their echo chamber. This what happened to cold fusion and quite a few other things. It makes it look like science is less reliable than it really is, but only if you judge it by the noise from the popular press.

The veracity of the arsenic claim will work itself out with due diligence by a number of different independent investigators and only then will the scientific community have a real opinion on it. Until then, it is an interesting but so far uncorroborated hypothesis.

 

[JustAsking]

I found the Slate.com article. It is by a very very good science journalist, Carl Zimmer. I provided a link to the Slate article that works, and also a link to Zimmer's blog.

I defer to Zimmer on this story. If you are interested in following it closely, read Zimmers blog every few days for updates. This is one science journalist you can trust to not sensationalize stuff but simply articulate it very well to those of us outside the profession.

The NASA study of arsenic-based life was fatally flawed, say scientists. - By Carl Zimmer - Slate Magazine

The Loom | Discover Magazine

 

[maxcok]

^ The Zimmer article is the one I read too.

Maxcok,
You are correct in the short form. The long form is that no scientific finding or theory is actually proven like a mathematical proof is proven. The veracity of a scientific finding or theory is related to how well its predictions are supported by others duplicating the work or using it in their own work successfully.

This corroboration has to be done against the original paper published in a peer reviewed scientific journal, and the corroborating work also has to be published the same way.

So until that happens, this one article in Science is unsupported by any independent corroboration.

The blogger that I linked to is a professional microbiologist who was flying the "Research Blogging" banner indicating that he was referring to the original paper throughout his critique. This at least helps us separate it from scientific gossip. However, his critique is not admissable to the court of scientific inquiry until he publishes it in a professional journal.

On the other hand, his blogging has some usefulness in that it is of interest to you and I, and it will draw other professional microbiologists into the fray to do some investigation of their own and publish professionally.

Another useful aspect of it is that since the blogger is a well known professional microbiologist, his blog is read by other professionals. Since this arsenic topic is newsworthy, his blog article generated a lot of comments by other professional microbiologists.

So while we wait for others to either corroborate or refute the claims officially in their professional journal publications, we can read the comments from other professionals as they weigh in casually on the subject. You will notice that some of the commenters names are live links to their own blogs or other pages that advertise their credentials. So you can draw your own conclusion about their credibility as you eavesdrop in this kind of "around the water cooler" conversation they are having about the subject.

I am not a microbiologist. I have a degree in Physics and one in EE, and worked for about 20 years in designing and building scientific instruments for chemists and biologists at universities and in industry. So you can say I am a scientist, but in microbiology I am simply a well read layman who enjoys writing about science for other laymen. My interest in biology and microbiology has come later in life as the culture wars started to heat up about ten years ago around the topic of teaching evolution in public schools.

In the process, I learned a lot about biology and microbiology, and became very interested in how the philosophy and practice of science leads us to degrees of certainty about things that are accessible to scientific investigation.

So my opinion about this article has no scientific validity. After reading some of the critiques of the original article, my gut feel is that there is a 50/50 chance of the arsenic bug hypothesis turning out to be valid.

If it turns out to be true, it will have been a very good bit of science done by the young woman scientist. If it turns out to be unsupportable by others, it will be a shame if it is because she was naive and sloppy about her analytical techniques.

Thanks for the explanation of the scientific peer review process, JA. Most informative for the laity I hope.

That's what I was sayin in brief. :wink:

Came out to be false like most news now a days. . . .

. . . it seems there's some debate about how the experiment was conducted and the conclusion drawn from it.

So at this point the claim appears to be neither true nor false, but perhaps unproven.

 

[JustAsking]

...Thanks for the explanation of the scientific peer review process, JA. Most informative.

That's what I was sayin in brief. :wink:

I am incapable of saying anything in brief. Fot that I apologize.

I just wanted to clarify something, though. The peer review process is not what happens after an article is published in a journal. What I described earlier is how findings and theories must accumulate corroboration by other independent investigators over a period of time after publication.

But rather, peer review is a process by which an article is pre-screened by other scientists in the field before it is accepted for publication. That process is simply to determine if the experimental methodology was sound and the conclusions were warranted from the supporting data. The peer reviewers are chosen by the journal staff itself from other professionals in the exact same field as the submitter. It acts as kind of a quality control.

If this particular work fails because of sloppy methodology and unwarranted conclusions, then it will be a failure of the peer review process as well. But it will also represent a success for the basic process of science, which is to only accept findings or theories that have had sufficient independent verification. The only acceptable authority in science is the authority of accumulated evidence from the successful independent duplication of the original work by many different workers.

It is interesting to see how blogging by professionals is raising the bar so fast, though. Just like in politics, you can't say or do anything publicly without someone calling you out on falsehoods only hours later in the blogosphere.

 

[maxcok]

I am incapable of saying anything in brief. Fot that I apologize. . . .

Don't apologize, I was being sincere. I think it's great that you take time to explain what people like me have neither the interest nor expertise to do. I hope others may be enlightened by your contributions too. :smile:




Point of clarification: Are you saying that there is never "peer review" of the science once it is published,
or that it's not referred to with that term, or both?

 

[JustAsking]

Don't apologize, I was being sincere. I think it's great that you take time to explain what people like me have neither the interest nor expertise to do. I hope others may be enlightened by your contributions too. :smile:




Point of clarification: Are you saying that there is never "peer review" of the science once it is published,
or that it's not referred to with that term, or both?

I am saying that the term "peer review" refers specifically to the pre-publication quality control review by peers of the submitter. Professional journals are mostly all "peer reviewed" journals including the rather broad and diverse journal Science which published this article.

On the other hand, once anything is published, peer reviewed or not, it will be still be considered speculative until other independent investigators reproduce the results and publish, or publish other findings that support the same hypothesis. Over time the hypothesis will accumulate a record of successful "citations" where the original work is cited in other publications.

So if you are setting out to do some work, there may be a number of things you can get from the professional literature rather than doing it yourself. For example, suppose you need to know what ordinary e. coli bacteria can tolerate in terms of levels of dissolved salt in its medium.

You would do a literature search for any work on the topic, and you would find a number of articles on the subject. And you would also find quite a few other articles that cite the articles you found, from workers who either corroborated the findings about salt and e coli, or successfully used the results in their own work. (or you would find people refuting the results).

Some of the corroborating work might even come from industry where the salt/ecoli information was used successfuly in some very large scale process, and so on.

From that diverse body of independent workers and their publications, you would come to conclude that certain knowledge about e coli and salt levels are very reliable. And you would go ahead and use it in your work. And your sources for that information would be in your bibliography and when you publish, your paper would add to the list of citations for the other articles.

The implications of this is that the case is never closed on any scientific finding or theory. But rather, a finding or theory accumulates a record of success or failure by a somewhat objective process over time.

Here is an example using the e. coli / salt subject.

Notice the stuff on the right is all about citations and related articles. The article presents the hypothesis and one group's supporting data and methodology. But because we take no one's word for it alone, the stuff on the left represents the scientific community's independent verification process.