Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

A new study argues that life may have emerged twice on Earth. “Two of the main lineages of life – bacteria and archaea – may have independently figured out the secrets of metabolism that upgraded them from non-living to living,” reports ScienceAlert, citing a new study that “focused on the most rudimentary set of chemical reactions thought to enable this transformation.” From the report: “The surprise is that the enzymes that catalyze those reactions are not conserved across the evolutionary divide that separates bacteria and archaea,” says William Martin, a biologist at Heinrich Heine Unive