Genomic analysis, based on increases in genome size and the evolutionary record, indicate that genes began to evolve and to undergo duplicative events billions of years before the formation of this planet, at least 10 billion years ago. This does not mean that life began 10 billion years ago, but rather that the first gene was fashioned approximately 6 billion years before the creation of Earth. The genetic evidence supports extra-terrestrial abiognesis... (p.12) ...the first gene was fashioned billions of years before the creation of Earth (p.19).
-Rhawn Joseph and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe,
"Genetics Indicates Extra-terrestrial Origins for Life", Journal of Cosmology, 2011, Volume 16,
Ironically, it was genealogy that led me to reflect on exobiology - the evolution of extraterrestrial life and its possible migration to Earth. And it wasn't simply the bizarre idea that the Hottentotsgot (the praying mantis) of my Khoi forbears, thought by some to have been a "Sky God", had genetically engineered us! Rather, it was a more sober, scientific pursuit that led me in this direction.
Family tradition maintained that the Garvies of Perthshire, Scotland were from somewhere else. A family oral tradition insisted that the Garvies were descended from John Garbh, seventh MacLean of Coll, through one of his sons. This son was wounded at the Battle of Inverkeithing in 1651, and did not return to Coll. His three sons (or grandsons) John, James and Patrick rented Upper Balgarvie, Lower Balgarvie, and Mill of Balgarvie in the parish of Scone. From them stemmed the Garvies of Perthshire where my great grandfather Laurance was born two centuries later.
To date I haven't found source documentation to substantiate this tradition. It is simply one of our many Garvie ancestral legends and now part of the corpus of Garvie mythology. In an attempt to verify this I then resorted to y-DNA analysis. I was hoping to find a genetic connection between the Garvies of Perthshire and the Macleans of Coll. Unfortunately no such proof has been found. We have far too few Garvie and Maclean DNA samples to confirm a genetic connection. All we can say at this stage is that both the Garvies and the Macleans share strong Celtic DNA material in common. We must still find the documentary and genetic "missing links" to solve this puzzle. But it was this conundrum that got me thinking about the bigger picture, the origin of life on planet Earth.
In recent years, astrophysicists have discovered a vast number of "extrasolar planets", "islands" in far flung Galactic Hebrides, that could and probably harbours life far beyond our wildest imaginings...
Extrasolar Planets
An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet outside the Solar System we take for granted and imagine is extraordinarily unique.. As of November 23, 2011, some 704 extrasolar planets (in 578 planetary systems and 83 multiple-planet systems) have been identified.
A substantial fraction of stars have planetary systems - data from the HARPS mission indicates that this includes more than half of all Sun-like stars. Data from the Kepler mission has been used to estimate that there are at least 50 billion planets in our own galaxy.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet
Unashamedly, Earthlings are searching for habitable planets that they could one day colonize! This archaic "colonial mentality", now projected on a cosmic scale, is to my mind, just a little too presumptuous. What if it happened the other way round, that instead, Earth had been colonized? There is a surprising proponent for this view. Dr Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA-molecule and Nobel Prize Winner has suggested just this!
Panspermia
Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS (8 June 1916 - 28 July 2004) was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, and most noted for being one of two co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, together with James D. Watson. He, Watson and Maurice Wilkins were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".
During the 1960s, Crick became concerned with the origins of the genetic code. In 1966, Crick took the place of Leslie Orgel at a meeting where Orgel was to talk about the origin of life. ..... Many molecular biologists were puzzled by the problem of the origin of a protein replicating system that is as complex as that which exists in organisms currently inhabiting Earth. In the early 1970s, Crick and Orgel further speculated about the possibility that the production of living systems from molecules may have been a very rare event in the universe, but once it had developed it could be spread by intelligent life forms using space travel technology, a process they called “Directed Panspermia”.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Crick#Directed_panspermia
Dr. Francis Crick suggests in his book Life Itself: Its Origins and Nature (1981) that primordial life was shipped to Earth in "spaceships" of some kind. Crick makes this startling proposition: "Life did not evolve first on Earth; a highly advanced civilization became threatened so they devised a way to pass on their existence. They genetically-modified their DNA and sent it out from their planet on bacteria or meteorites with the hope that it would collide with another planet. It did, and that's why we're here."
Terming his model "Directed Panspermia", Crick suggested that a "spaceship" carrying "large samples of... microorganisms" was sent to the Earth billions of years ago by an extraterrestrial civilisation - either as an experiment, preparation for colonisation or a genetic Noah’s Ark of some sort. (Crick, F. H. C., and Orgel, L. E. "Directed Panspermia", Icarus, 19, 341 (1973), quoted in David Darling’s Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy, and Spaceflight)
Dr Crick is not alone in these views. Sir Fred Hoyle in his Life from Space, took a similar view. He rejected chemical evolution in favour of propagation from space or panspermia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_chemical_evolution
It is speculated that our DNA was encoded with messages from that other civilization. They programmed the molecules so that when we reached a certain level of intelligence, we would be able to access their information, and they could therefore "teach" us about ourselves, and how to progress. (For more about so-called "Junk DNA" see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA) The Universe could be teeming with life.
Sumerian and other mythologies, even passages in the Bible, tantalise us with stories of our celestial origins. Crick and others have suggested there might be DNA evidence that could substantiate this. Just as Garvies suspect that their origins go back to the distant Isle of Coll so Earthlings infer they've come from some far away planetary island in the Cosmos! But our limited historic and genetic records continue to tease us.- had we been pollinated from afar?
Eccentric? Science Fiction? Till more evidence comes in, it may seem so. But we live with the "missing links" and the questions! To think that we already have all the answers is presumptuous to say the least. So the Khoikhoi idea of a Celestial Mantid, a Khoi Prometheus, that once gave their ancestors the gift of fire and their distinctive clicking language, might not be as far fetched as sceptics might think! Sober biologists and cosmologists are entertaining similar ideas. And if not a Praying Mantis, then perhaps a Galactic Stork really did bring us, just as our parents taught us!
For further study:
Also see Wikipedia articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_life and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrobiology
©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za
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