DNA in Space

Chapter two of The Selfish Gene stresses out a point I believe is worth discussing. Referring to DNA, Hawkins says "What does matter is that suddenly a new kind of 'stability' came into the world,"(pg. 16) which brought to my mind a topic I've talked about with my biology teacher, Dr. Gregory. The structure of DNA is a almost like a miracle, no other molecule has such characteristics like being able to replicate in such an accurate and unstable way, having such a way of expressing its information through RNA synthesis or attracting each of its strands together. Even the flaws of DNA structure and function, like the possibility of mutations happening, make it unique. Thanks to mutations, as Hawkins explains, evolutions is possible.
So back to what I said about my biology teacher, and to place emphasis on the importance of DNA structure, she told me about the discovery of DNA precursors in space. As she explained to me, a precursor is a molecule that is missing a final touch, like bonds or atoms, to be the molecule it is a precursor of. A DNA precursor might have a slightly different structure or miss some of the molecules that makes it perform its functions, making it actually useless, but its importance, especially to the area of evolution, is infinite. Finding these structures in space shows that wherever these might fall, there might be life. As of now the scientific world doesn't know about any other molecule that can carry out the necessary function of heredity or genetics, so discovering that DNA might have come from space, takes evolution even further back. I decided to do some research online on DNA precursors. Although the scientific world isn't flooded with papers or information about it, I found enough to see how important it is. According to an article on Time, scientists in Antarctica found DNA precursors in uncontaminated meteorites. According to Dr. Gregory, with the ultimate technology on telescopes scientist have also spotted DNA precursors in actual outer space, but I don't have an article to confirm that. If any evolution skeptic reads this, the precursors in Antarctica are not contaminated because, if they were, as molecules always look for their most stable structure, they wouldn't be precursors anymore and would become DNA. The reason these precursors were not DNA already is because the circumstances in space either didn't allow it to bond for some reason or simply don't have the necessary molecules.
The stability of DNA has allowed these precursors to have landed on Earth billions of years ago, or at least have existed in space since. Having DNA be built, even without a cell living with it, probably gathered up molecules, that throughout millions of years built up until a life-like structure was formed. Viruses could have developed from it, and as some scientists hypothesize, cells could have come from these viruses. The rest is history, these prokaryotic cells reproduced asexually until mutations allowed them to grow into multicellular organisms, then have specialized cells, and in the long-run become animals like humans.

"Perlegen's microarray technology shows that the human and chimpanzee genomes are more different than previously thought. In yellow, researchers have circled areas of the genome that have been rearranged over time."

I didn't just want to write aimlessly about DNA and evolution, I also want to make a point on the accuracy of evolution. The stability of structures is essential to evolution. Having such structure as an base of life shows that every organism, every cell, shares something. We all have something in common, so we all must have come from something similar. If you observe the DNA or chromosomes of different organism, you can see how species that are closer in evolution (in time) have similar characteristics. Every organism functions with the same axiom, and evolution seems to explain that better to me than other creation theories. The image above shows a comparison between human and chimpanzee DNA, and although it means nothing to me, the article explains how scientists discovered how similar they are. As believing that protein can be genetic material is outdated, evidence of evolution like this will soon obsolete the ideas that reject it completely.


This is the link of the article I mentioned: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2087758,00.html