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Oops... I forgot to write the rest of my comments on this thing,
before hitting the send button! Sorry. Here's the missing stuff:
Dan Fiscus wrote:
In addition to a balance of gravitation and radiation for
conditions needed for an "endless" hydrological cycle, which in turn is perhaps necessary for life to emerge, I forgot to mention that I think a planet(oid) would need water itself. Why do you think water is required?
I was trying to describe an approach to telling the story
of the origin of life as told from the perspective of ecosystemic/community life as opposed to trying to imagine how life emerged as cells/organisms. Well, it seems to me that we may have a problem imagining the earliest organisms because the planetary situation was radically different back then. We can't use our current biosphere as a model, which means that current living organisms are probably not appropriate as models, either. The earliest organisms may not have been plants, and may not have been sun energy based. So many planetary cataclysms have occurred, too, causing massive die-offs. We know about a few of those from the fossil record, but it would be pretty much impossible to find a fossil record of microscopic evolutionary epochs, wouldn't it? Anyway, all of this begs the question; Is there only going to be one way for life to form? How is an organism a community? Do you mean inwardly, or outwardly? Well, my comment was based on your reference to a series of
"proto-biotic" complementary processes as "a community". I then suggested that
this definition was a synonym of "system". It also struck me that an
organism could be viewed as basically the same thing... The stuff
organisms are made up of is not alive, the processes, themselves, aren't alive;
in fact life is not IN the parts, but in the whole.
I guess I was playing with the words, trying to see if perhaps
the different definitions were somehow just a perspective problem-- that perhaps
we were both describing the same exact "thing".
Judith
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