Another Explanation for Multicellular Life

DrJay writes "Hot on the heels of Slashdot's coverage of a controversial model for a viral origin of the multi-cellular branch of life, Nature has published an alternative model that has nothing to do with viruses. Ars Technica's science journal has the rundown on the differences between these proposals." From the Ars article: "It's funny that this proposal for the origin of Eukaryotes should hit the popular press at a time where Nature has just published a hypothesis regarding the formation of the nucleus that has nothing to do with viruses, but everything to do with parasites. The parasites in this case are molecular: Type-II introns. These DNA sequences exist in both eukaryotes and bacteria, where they can insert in the middle of genes without causing harm because they can undergo chemical reactions by which they remove themselves from the RNA messages the genes make."

Re:History, not science

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that it's a little futile to speculate on how cellular and multicellular life first appeared because the evidence was lost long ago.

Wrong. The evidence is all around is in the branches of life existing today. The challenge to us is how to best interpret it the evidence of our biological past.

It' wrong to say that science cannot make claims about past events. We can not only say definitely, for instance, that speciation occurs and that different species have common ancestors. Nowadays we can even place all of these species into their proper place in phylogentic trees, and estimate the time of their divergence, witha high degree of confidence. We can do this through comparative genomics, using the genomes of different species (i.e. evidence existing today), together with empirically observable rates of genetic drift.

Re:History, not science

[Jarn_Firebrand]

Yes, I mean, who cares if people want to think? If it's controvertial, get rid of it! And next, we can start burning the books!