Introduction: More Than

Panspermia What'sNEW
Cosmic Ancestry is a new theory pertaining to evolution and the origin of life on
Earth. It holds that life on Earth was seeded from space, and that life's evolution to
higher forms depends on genetic programs that come from space. (It accepts the
Darwinian account of evolution that does not require new genetic programs.) It is a
wholly scientific, testable theory for which
evidence is accumulating.
The first point, which deals with the origin of
life on Earth, is known as panspermia
Panspermia the theory that microbes
literally, "seeds everywhere." Its earliest
transmit life to habitable bodies in space;
recorded advocate was the Greek philosopher
or the process of such transmission.
The origin of the word "panspermia"
Anaxagoras, who influenced Socrates.
Various kinds of panspermia
However, Aristotle's theory of spontaneous
generation came to be preferred by science for
more than two thousand years. But on April 9, 1864, French chemist Louis Pasteur
reported his experiment disproving spontaneous generation as it was then held to
occur. In the 1870s, British physicist Lord Kelvin and German physicist Hermann von
Helmholtz reinforced Pasteur and argued that life could come from space. And in the
first decade of the 1900s, Swedish chemist and Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius
theorized that bacterial spores, propelled through space by light pressure, were the
seeds of life on Earth.

Hoyle

Wickramasinghe

In the 1920s, Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin and English

geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, writing independently, revived the
doctrine of spontaneous generation in a more sophisticated form.
In the new version, the spontaneous generation of life no longer
happens on Earth, takes too long to observe in a laboratory, and
has left no clues about its occurrence. Supporting this theory, in
1953, American chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey showed
that some amino acids can be chemically produced from amonia
and methane. The Miller-Urey experiment is now famous, and the
paradigm of Oparin and Haldane still prevails today.

Starting in the 1970s, British astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe
rekindled interest in panspermia. By careful spectroscopic observation and analysis of
light from distant stars they found new evidence, traces of life, in the intervening dust.
They also proposed that comets, which are largely made of water-ice, carry bacterial
life across galaxies and protect it from radiation damage along the way. One aspect of
this research program, that interstellar dust and comets contain organic compounds,
has been pursued by others as well. It is now widely accepted that space contains the
"ingredients" of life. This development could be the first hint of a huge paradigm
shift. But mainstream science has not accepted the hard core of modern panspermia,
that whole cells seeded life on Earth.
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe also broadened or generalized panspermia to include a
new understanding of evolution. While accepting the fact that life on Earth evolved
over the course of about four billion years, they say that the genetic programs for
higher evolution cannot be explained by random mutation and recombination among
genes for single-celled organisms, even in that long a time: the programs must come
from somewhere beyond Earth. In a nutshell, their theory holds that all of life comes
from space. It incorporates the original panspermia much as General Relativity
incorporates Special Relativity. Their expanded theory can well be termed "strong"
panspermia.
On a different track, in the early 1970s, British chemist and
inventor James Lovelock proposed the theory that life controls
Earth's environment to make it suitable for life. The theory, which
William Golding suggested he call Gaia, has gained a small but
growing, sometimes cultish following. However, seen from a
Darwinian perspective, the Gaia theory looks teleological. It is
hard to imagine how purposeful Gaian processes that take millions
of years could be discovered by trial and error. In response to such
criticism, Lovelock has retreated slightly from some of his earlier
bold claims for Gaia. Here we endorse Lovelock's theory at its

Lovelock

original strength. We propose that Gaian processes are not blindly found and peculiar
to Earth, but are pre-existent and universal life from space brings Gaian processes
with it. We suggest that Gaian processes are necessary for higher forms of life to
emerge and succeed on any planet.
We are calling the union of Lovelock's Gaia with Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's
expanded theory of panspermia Cosmic Ancestry. This account of evolution and the
origin of life on Earth is profoundly different from the prevailing scientific paradigm.
The new theory challenges not merely the answers but the questions that are popular
today. Cosmic Ancestry implies, we find, that life can only descend from ancestors at
least as highly evolved as itself. And it means, we believe, that there can be no origin
of life from nonbiological matter. Without supernatural intervention, therefore, we
conclude that life must have always existed. Although these conclusions cut across the
boundaries between science, philosophy, and religion, we believe they are grounded
in good evidence. And new data that support many aspects of Cosmic Ancestry are
coming in rapidly. In the following pages we will explain how these and other recent
developments support Cosmic Ancestry:
19 May 1995: two scientists at Cal Poly showed that bacteria can survive without
any metabolism for at least 25 million years; probably they are immortal.
24 November 1995: The New York Times described bacteria that can survive
radiation much stronger than any that Earth has ever experienced.
7 August 1996: NASA announced fossilized evidence of ancient life in meteorite
ALH 84001 from Mars.
27 October 1996: geneticists showed evidence that many genes are much older than
the fossil record would indicate. Subsequent studies have strengthened this finding.
29 July 1997: a NASA scientist announced evidence of fossilized microscopic life
forms in a meteorite not from any known planet.
Spring, 1998: a microfossil that was found in a meteorite and photographed in 1966,
was recognized by a Russian microbiologist as a magnetotactic bacterium.
Fall, 1998: NASA's public position on life-from-space shifted dramatically.
4 January 1999: NASA officially recognized the possibility that life on Earth comes
from space.
19 March 1999: NASA scientists announced that two more meteorites hold even
stronger fossilized evidence for past life on Mars.
26 April 2000: the German team operating the mass spectrometer on NASA's
Stardust mission announced the detection of very large organic molecules in space.
Nonbiological sources for organic molecules so large are not known.
19 October 2000, a team of biologists and a geologist announced the revival of
bacteria that are 250 million years old, strengthening that case that bacterial spores
can be immortal.

13 December 2000: a NASA team demonstrated that the magnetosomes in Mars

meteorite ALH 84001 are biological.
June 2002: Geneticists reported evidence that the evolutionary step from chimps to
humans was assisted by viruses.
2 August 2004: Very convincing photos of fossilized cyanobacteria in a meteorite
were reported by a NASA scientist.
25 January 2005: J. Craig Venter endorses panspermia.
10 May 2007: E. O. Wilson endorses panspermia.
18 April 2008: Richard Dawkins endorses panspermia.
7 April 2009: Stephen Hawking endorses panspermia.
2 May 2009: Freeman Dyson speaks favorably about panspermia.
3 March 2011: NASA's Richard Hoover publishes excellent images of microfossils
in carbonaceous meteorites.
January 2013: A meteorite that fell, 29 December, in Sri Lanka is seen to contain
fossilized diatoms.
The case for Cosmic Ancestry is not yet proven, of course. At this point the best
reason to notice it is that the mainstream darwinian paradigm does not satisfactorily
account for sustained evolutionary progress and the origin of life on Earth. We will
mention some of the flaws in the darwinian account, but our primary purpose is to
present Cosmic Ancestry as a viable scientific account of evolutionary progress and
the origin of life on Earth.
http://www.panspermia.org/intro.htm