If this could be done it seems like the ideal compromise. Everyone gets what they want.
That said eventually more modern languages will be dependencies of the tools one way or another (and they should). So probably Debian as a whole should come to a consensus on how that should happen, so it can happen in some sort of standard and fair fashion.
Does it seem that way? It happened at least once (but could have happened many times without "taking over"), and certainly one sort of life seemed to successfully out-compete all others. But none of that says single-origin to me.
Early on I would expect a whole lot of "horizontal gene transfer" sort of things to have taken place. So for example in addition to actual horizontal gene transfer, there are mechanisms like one organism enveloping another to eventually become organelles, co-opting products from each other, etc. All of which would act to homogenize life and make certain process ubiquitous.
Finally, there's an outside chance that "there's only one way to do it".
I think single origin event is highly likely because, for example, it's wholly conceivable that a slightly different variant of AUCG (or just one of the molecules) could've emerged and it would have similar characteristics, but not differentiated enough that one would have a very strong selective advantage over the other.
Diversity could exist in harmony and the lack of any diversity is a pretty strong signal that the only extant version is either very rare or the only to ever emerge.
Everything in nature is diverse except RNA/DNA and this fact alone is a sort of evidence.
I'm pretty sure we've checked every lifeform to see if they follow the universal genetic code, and they do. RNA is too fundamental to be a virus infection.
When you should see evidence but don't, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" doesn't apply. Otherwise absence becomes unprovable à la Russell's teapot.
Except for that you’d have to have a reasonable belief you know what to look for and where to look.
By comparison, we’ve looked nowhere (Earth is big and mostly inaccessible to humans) and don’t know what we should be looking for, since we don’t have any testable models for the origin of life yet.
And re RNA I was just giving one example of why all life might have it (ie RNA gave an evolutionary advantage so anything without RNA died). There’s all sorts of reasons why we don’t have evidence of multiple origins, not least of which is that we just haven’t looked in the right place and there could easily be life being created from scratch on this planet without even knowing about it. That’s what the entire field of synthetic biology is even about; just doing it in a lab instead of out in nature so that we can understand the conditions better.
This is about a quarter of the lifetime of the universe ago, and we don’t have any evidence at all that life has ever occurred in any other way. We’ve only really been looking for a hundred years or so, but we’ve not found any “fountain of life” where life is being created, we’ve not found evidence of any type of life that isn’t broadly related.
I absolutely agree that it’s not evidence, but I believe that on balance, it makes more sense to take our working hypothesis to be something that fits the evidence we do have, rather than believing the evidence must exist we just don’t have it.
To be clear, I’m not advocating that we don’t investigate both possibilities, and I wouldn’t put much weight behind my own guess here.
An important nuance here is that LUCA doesn't really imply there was only that one organism. There could be more organisms, it's just the one that we can trace, similar to mitochondrial Eve (see the "popular reception" section): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve
You are right: this is indeed no smoking gun (and it isn't hyped to be one). This is more like "we can't rule out life having created this, but there are alternate explanations which have also not been ruled out".
Unfortunately most of the evidence is going to be like this. The chances for better evidence would probably require a sample return of some sort, and even then I wouldn't expect a smoking gun (either way).
Well, not exactly. By my read, the known alternate explanations are very strained, only there for propriety. They don't have a really clear idea how this could have formed abiotically.
I think the building blocks of life are so common in the universe it might be a case of "easy come, easy go". It wouldn't be surprising if simple life happened anywhere it was given half a chance at all, but one would equally expect that it would die out just as quickly when conditions changed (which they certainly did on Mars).
And of course nothing is ruling out life in the nooks and crannies of Mars.
Allison Hayes is another person who campaigned against lead--this time in vitamin supplements--which lead to a change in FDA rules. She was a frequent actor in Roger Corman's B-movies which is where I first encountered her. She suffered disability from the lead in Calcium supplements.
Presumably you'd follow the same regulations regarding actual animals in testing regarding inflicting pain or distress. Usually IRB's weigh whether the scientific results offset the risk of harm and emphasize minimizing pain (doing things under anesthesia, providing analgesia, or not letting animals regain consciousness). The ethical bars you have to clear get higher the "higher" the animal you use.
If you're doing it via simulation, physical pain issues become a lot easier to fix and more over you can probably simulate subsections of the brain rather than the whole thing. You can also limit simulation time to prevent perception of harm, and you can arbitrarily limit negative feedback in the whole simulation (stress hormones, etc).
I would also imagine one should act conservatively to the question of whether you should treat a simulated "thing" humanely.
