Notes from the biomass

The cosmological model of eternal inflation and the transition from chance to biological evolution in the history of life is the kind of paper that you would want for breakfast. Eugene Koonin combines a few back-of-the-envelope calculations on the absurdly low probabilities of the emergence of ribonucleotides/proteins capable of natural selection with a multiverse view of cosmology to explain why the existence of life as we know it is not unlikely.

The essay touches on the anthropic principle and I won’t be surprised if the anticreationists science blogs will have a word with him on fueling the intelligent design debate, although he states that their is no room for such quakery in this view of the world. Much of it sounds like I have heard it before; the novel elements are the numbers and the break point in evolution after the RNA world-protein world transition.
The article appears in Biology Direct, still my favorite journal for its open peer review. Again, the reviews are quite critical, including questioning Koonin’s background in philosophy. Then again, how many philosophers have his expertise in the RNA world?

Konrad was the first this morning to hint at release of Venters effort of providing  environmental sequencing samples from the world oceans. The data is backed by several papers in PLoS Biology and the new camera database. Other bloggers have followed and the main stream media will pick it up soon.
What to add on a busy day like today? The results might not breathtaking but that was as true for the release of the release of the human genome project back in 2000. Sequencing the human genome was a necessity - but the environmental samples provide a complete new picture of our planet, even if our initial view is warped and noisy and our ways of understanding the data is limited.

Refuting phylogenetic relationships, published recently in Biology Direct is a peculiar paper in several ways. Bucknam, Bucher and Bapteste suggest a novel way of assessing phylogenies. Rather than searching the most probable of a species tree given a concatenated alignment, unsupported phylogenies are rejected, leaving possible ones and not inferring more than what the data delivers. The method appears powerful in removing weak hypothesis more strictly than classical methods do in difficult cases.

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