Posted by Davis Landstrom (195.93.48.187) on August 22, 2002 at 15:36:12:
Hello grim and others, I have heard of Crosse and his experiments. He is reputed to have created mites of the genus Acarus whilst conducting electrical experiments that involved dripping certain hyper saturated solutions through some funnels onto an 'electrified' piece of volcanic rock (it was connected to a primative voltaic pile), in the hope that he might discover a new method of growing crystals. Instead he discovered tiny eggs that hatched into small mites emerging from the volcanic rock, he repeated this taking a few precautions to try and ensure that the eggs weren't already latent within the rock and he seemed to observe the same pattern of emergence.
He was of course ridiculed by the scientists of the day, however he recieved support from Michael Faraday who is supposed to have successfully repeated Crosse's experiments.
I am incredibly doubtful as to whether Crosse did 'spontaniously generate' these mites in his laboratory/stately home, for three main reasons. Firstly, these mites are known to quite literally cling onto life even under the most adverse of environments, that includes the fairly toxic chemical environments that Crosse would have created during the course of his experiments. There is no way that scientists at the turn of the 19th centuary could have ensured that all the materials they used were completely sterile, especialy the volcanic stone that was used, volcanic rocks tend to be full of bubble holes in which the mites could hide their eggs. There were no autoclaves, X-rays, Gamma-rays or heat shock aparatus available to them, they didn't even know about the existance of bacteria of other micro-organisms, a standard pre-Pasteur method of 'sterilisation' was to wash the material with water, there is no way that they could have ensured that the materials weren't already contaminated with the extreamly hardy eggs of these mites.
The second reason is that not very many people managed to 'verify' his observations, this leads me to the conclusion that perhaps it was a mutation that confered chemical hardiness to a small number of these mites, the remainder of them were not adapted and were destroyed by the chemicals used, hence the large numbers of failed replications.
The third reason is that the mite is an extreamly complex multicellular organism with a nervous and sensory system, multiple organs and apendages and a complex DNA code, the chances that chemicals in the experiment randomly formed into these mites many times is astronomicaly unlikely, impossible more like.
Obviously life started off from chemicals found here on Earth (mabey with some from else where also) but it wouldn't have involved the formation of whole insects or even 'simple' bacteria for that matter. Life would have started off with the formation of amino acids and ribo-nucleic acids (RNA), which has been shown to take place when the conditions that were present on primevil Earth are replicated in the laboratory. The Urey-Miller experiment forinstance, demonstrated that four out of the twenty types of amino acid can be created using a limited range of chemicals, subsequent reproductions of this experiment using other chemicals also known to have been present on primevil Earth have succeded in producing many more amino acid types and even short chained RNAs. The first 'life' (it is debateable whether it could be called life or not) would probably be a complex molecule consisting of RNA and protein (the product of polymerising amino acids in the presence of a catalyst-that catalyst being RNA), this complex molecule would have been able to build copies of it's self out of materials available to it in it's environment and more importantly it would have the ability to be influenced by the environment and change randomly, this allows it to evolve both directly in response to changes in the environment and through natural sellection. Over the course of 3.3 Billion years or so, those self replicating molecules would have evolved into the current array of life we know today.
I hope that this is of interest, I apreciate t