Complex Numbers

Tentacled Monsters from Spaaaaaaace

Sigh. I gotta start a crappy month off with this bullshit? Thanks a lot, Random Number Generator.

New scientific paper claims octopuses are actually aliens from outer space  

No, it doesn't.

Octopuses are from space. I know, that sounds like the opening line of a cheesy science fiction movie from the black and white days of Hollywood. But it’s actually the main part of the argument behind a research paper published in an actual peer-reviewed journal.

No it actually is not. Except in the most general sense, in that every element in our bodies, those of other animals, plants, and other life, and the Earth itself is "from space."

The paper was published in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. Titled Cause of the Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?, the paper digs deep into the origin of life on Earth.

Allow me to go on an aside here. Read this section   of a Wikipedia article about that particular journal. Note, I'm not calling into question the integrity of that journal; just highlighting this bit:

In 2018, the journal published a review article entitled Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic? authored by over 30 authors, including Edward J.Steele and Chandra Wickramasinghe, which argued in favour of panspermia as the origin of the Cambrian explosion, and two articles arguing against that position by Keith Baverstock and Karin Mölling, both highly critical of the notion that life had originated elsewhere than on this planet.

So, the paper was published three or four years ago; why is this popping back up in the popular press now? Without any mention of the contrarian papers?

Back to the original article.

As a result, it posits that life began thanks to a rain of retroviruses, which literally fell from space. Those retroviruses then added new DNA sequences to terrestrial genomes, which the paper says further drove mutagenic change.

This is just shitty science reporting. "life began thanks to... retroviruses... from space" but the viruses "added new DNA sequences to terrestrial genomes." Which is it?

And do not get me started on using the word "literally" in a science article, even if it is literally being used literally.

Where things start to get really interesting, though, is when the paper starts to discuss the arrival of cephalopods. The paper itself claims that certain cephalopods like octopuses, squid, and others arrived on the planet by falling from space, frozen in a kind of stasis.

Uh huh. "We don't understand it, so it must be aliens."

Also...

“Thus the possibility that cryopreserved squid and/or octopus eggs, arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago should not be discounted,” the paper reads.

Saying that the possibility cannot be discounted is not the same thing as saying that squids are from space. Like "the possibility cannot be discounted" that there is microscopic life frozen in the nitrogen ice of Pluto -- not until someone sends a robot there to sample it, and even then, if they don't find it at the first sample site, the possibility couldn't be discounted that they missed something. Plus, it's far more likely that there's life in liquid water under the ice of Europa, and Europa is closer, so why not check there first?

The idea that life originated beyond Earth isn’t exactly a new one. As Stephen Fleischfresser points out in a post about the paper from 2018, the theory of panspermia has been around since Ancient Greece.

And now, considering the idea of panspermia itself:

There exist perfectly reasonable hypotheses for a terrestrial origin of terrestrial life. Meaning, given chemical elements that indeed "came from space," said elements became organized through natural, terrestrial processes (liquid water, energy source, random movements, etc.) and eventually became self-organizing and able to reproduce. (There's more to it than this but, of course, I'm not a biologist.) While nothing's settled on the subject, this is a far more parsimonious explanation than "life began elsewhere, spored up, survived hard vacuum for an unspecified amount of time, and then came to Earth." Occam's Razor alone is enough to dismiss the idea of extraterrestrial origins before ruling out terrestrial origins.

Also, consider this: it doesn't matter where the first life-form became organized. If you are proposing an extraterrestrial origin, you still have to present a reasonable hypothesis for the organization of the first proto-cell, or whatever you're going to consider the first life. Panspermia theories just kick that can down the road, and, worse from my point of view, they seem to come from the philosophical foundation of "Earth just isn't that special," which is contradicted by available evidence, to wit: we have not yet detected extraterrestrial life of any kind.

I do expect that we will, and that might shed some more light on the subject, but as of right now, all you're doing is disrespecting the complex web of interactions that makes life on Earth slightly bearable, and likely crapping on all of humanity while you're at it. Like the people who insist that aliens HAD to have built the pyramids, because humans just aren't clever enough. Spoiler: we really are that clever, or at least some of us are. (Yes, I'm aware of the Stargate series which is based around just that assertion. I'm also aware that it's fiction.) And you have to ask yourself: why are some people so dead-set on believing, without evidence either way, that life on Earth didn't begin on Earth?

Point being, you're not explaining how life got its start; you're just hand-waving it as "from somewhere else." It doesn't answer the important question. No, saying "Aliens did it" is just like saying "God did it." You're free to believe that, of course, but it's not science.

To be fair to the article, it does go on to point out:

But this paper fails to put itself above any of the other theories we have out there.

Which is... I don't know. What's the opposite of damning with faint praise? Praising with faint damnation? That's not quite right, either. It's an understatement, anyway. From what I've seen, the paper doesn't just fail to put itself above any of the other theories, but fails to rise to anywhere close to the level of some.

Still, there’s something interesting about the possibility that octopuses are from space.

Sure, and there's something interesting about the possibility that Bigfeet (bigsfoot, bigfoots, goddamn I still don't know what the plural is) exist. It's great fodder for storytelling. Don't for a second believe, as the article implies, just because a couple of scientists floated the possibility, that it's settled science.

Of course, it’s going to take a lot to actually prove it, too. And, singling out one specific group of animals could be making the focus far too narrow to actually prove anything.

"Prove" is a bad word for science. I'd settle for finding evidence that may support the hypothesis, or at least rule out terrestrial origin.

For now, all we can do is look back at the paper and watch to see what other evidence these scientists might bring forward in the future.

I'm sure I'll smell that bullshit when it comes out, too.

One final thing, though... for which I'll go back to the Wikipedia article I linked above.

The editorial of that issue authored by Noble commented that panspermia was a "highly controversial hypothesis with the majority of biologists dismissing it out of hand", and noted that the Origin of Life remained an unsolved problem, and that all conjectures on the topic at this time were speculative.

Speculation is a good thing. And dismissing something "out of hand" smacks of having a closed mind, which is also antithetical to science. They know more than I do, obviously, but I think there's nothing wrong with thinking about these things. What I'm railing on here is the penchant for science reporting to sensationalize this crap and treat speculation as fact because they know that people will eat this shit up -- either believing it uncritically, or, like me, taking an hour out of my precious day to rag on it.