My idea of how there could be more than one tree of life

[Jim]

NOTE: I changed the title of the thread. Originally it was “My theory of more than one tree of life.”

I’m not proposing this as something for people to believe. I’m proposing it as one possible way among others to model the data.

Maybe life started in many different places, and maybe more than once in those places. Maybe in some of those places life started with all the chemistry that it needed to evolve into one or more of today’s species. I’m not specifying which species are in any one tree, just that there are more trees than one, with some species in one tree and some in another, and that some of those trees have evolved along separate lines of ancestry from the others, from the times when life first started.

One way I see for that to be tested is to modify a tree-building process to build more trees than one, and apply it to the data, to see if that model deviates from the data less than any single-tree model.

I would like to know all the reasons that anyone can think of for rejecting this idea.

 

[Heyo]

I’m not proposing this as something for people to believe. I’m proposing it as one possible way among others to model the data.

Maybe life started in many different places, and maybe more than once in those places. Maybe in some of those places life started with all the chemistry that it needed to evolve into one or more of today’s species. I’m not specifying which species are in any one tree, just that there are more trees than one, with some species in one tree and some in another, and that some of those trees have evolved separately from the time when life first started.

One way I see for that to be tested is to modify a tree-building process to build more trees than one, and apply it to the data, to see if that model deviates from the data less than any single-tree model.

That's not a theory, it's not even a hypothesis. And it's not even wrong.
You are not very specific and you have stated no evidence in favour of your idea.

 

[Jim]

That's not a theory, it's not even a hypothesis. And it's not even wrong.
You are not very specific and you have stated no evidence in favour of your idea.

Thank you. After I saw that, I changed “theory” to “model” in the title of this thread.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

I would like to know all the reasons that anyone can think of for rejecting this idea.

It's frivolous, undisciplined and counterproductive.

 

[sun rise]

I would like to know all the reasons that anyone can think of for rejecting this idea.

There's no reason for rejecting or accepting the idea from a scientific perspective.

 

[Heyo]

Thank you. After I saw that, I changed “theory” to “model” in the title of this thread.

Most scientific endeavour starts with a "that's odd", an observation that demands an answer. What's your observation? What's the question that led to your model?

 

[Audie]

NOTE: I changed the title of the thread. Originally it was “My theory of more than one tree of life.”

I’m not proposing this as something for people to believe. I’m proposing it as one possible way among others to model the data.

Maybe life started in many different places, and maybe more than once in those places. Maybe in some of those places life started with all the chemistry that it needed to evolve into one or more of today’s species. I’m not specifying which species are in any one tree, just that there are more trees than one, with some species in one tree and some in another, and that some of those trees have evolved along separate lines of ancestry from the others, from the times when life first started.

One way I see for that to be tested is to modify a tree-building process to build more trees than one, and apply it to the data, to see if that model deviates from the data less than any single-tree model.

I would like to know all the reasons that anyone can think of for rejecting this idea.

A theory needs to be fully supported by all relevant facts.

You have no theory as it has no supporting facts at all.

 

[Audie]

Most scientific endeavour starts with a "that's odd", an observation that demands an answer. What's your observation? What's the question that led to your model?

Theory or model, he has no facts to work with.

 

[Jim]

Most scientific endeavour starts with a "that's odd", an observation that demands an answer. What's your observation? What's the question that led to your model?

The first one was “That’s odd. Why would anyone think that life could have started only once and only in one place?” When some people told me that no one is saying that, my next thought was “That’s odd. Then why would anyone think that there’s only one tree of life?” That’s what I’m trying to find out in this thread.

 

[Heyo]

The first one was “That’s odd. Why would anyone think that life could have started only once and only in one place?” When some people told me that no one is saying that, my next thought was “That’s odd. Then why would anyone think that there’s only one tree of life?” That’s what I’m trying to find out in this thread.

Those are two different questions. The answer to the later is: There is only one tree of life as we know about the relationship of all life. (See Aron Ra's series "Systematic Classification of Life" on YouTube.)
The answer to the former is: We don't know. There are multiple hypothesis for abiogenesis and each one could be true - or multiple. They could have been similar from the beginning, combined at some time or the strongest survived and the others died out.
Anyway, there is only evidence for one lineage that must have existed before the split into bacteria, archaea and eucarya about 2.2 to 3.5 bya.

 

[Jim]

My idea is that life could have started in many different places and at different times, with whatever chemistry it needed to evolve into one or more of today’s species. What that would mean in practical terms would be that a model with many trees could fit the data better than one with only one tree. That might be what some models actually are, with extra lines drawn in to represent a universal common ancestor just to avoid controversy.

 

[Jim]

I don’t see any researchers saying anything against what I’m saying. I don’t see them discussing it at all, maybe because it doesn’t matter for any of their research purposes. I think it might open up new possibilities in research and technology though, if they could discuss it openly.

 

[Jim]

One objection that I’ve seen to the idea of many trees is thinking that it would be unlikely for identical species to evolve on separate trees. They wouldn’t need to, for my idea to work. Each species could be on only one tree. Some species could have evolved on one tree, and some on another.

Another objection is that it would be virtually impossible for life to have started more than once or in more than one place with the chemistry that would be needed to evolve into the chemistry that is common to all life today. No one knows if if it would even be possible for life to start with any other kind of chemistry, but for for discussion purposes let’s say that it would be possible. Then the kind of chemistry that all life has in common today could be a kind that is more likely than some others to have existed whenever and wherever life started and to support life, so life could have used that chemistry in many of the places where it started.