It's #WorldBiodiversityDay today! The complexity of life is amazing, but also begs one question: what did the first life form on Earth actually look like?
Now there's no universally agreed definition of life: even Erwin Schrödinger was uncertain what it was. But an ability to resist entropy, to reproduce, to mutate, to have a metabolism and to self-organise feature in most definitions.
And whatever life is we reliably assume it's all interlinked in some way. We still use the medieval idea of a 'tree of life' to map the connections and currently scientists believe this tree has either two or three fundamental branches.
Bacteria and archaea form two of these fundamental branches: both are simple single-cell organisms that usually lack organelles, but their ribosomal RNA is very different. They also form the bulk of the biomass on the planet.
Eukaryotes are different: they have membrane-bound organelles such as mitochondria and form multicellular organisms such as you and I. So fid they evolve from archaea, or are they a third fundamental branch of the tree of life?
Views vary on this, and it's due to horizontal gene transfer. You don't just inherit your genes from your parents, you can also swap them with your neighbors! That's how bacteria share antibiotic resistance, and viruses can help it happen.
But it also complicates the tree of life, making it hard to tease out who was related to whom in our prehistory based on gene sequencing. Maybe it's best to talk about a mosaic of life instead of a tree.
This hasn't stopped biologists trying to discover LUCA: the last comon universal ancestor of all living things. Gene analysis of multiple bacteria and archaea suggest there are 355 common protein clusters across all life, which give us a clue as to what LUCA may have looked like.
LUCA was possibly an anaerobic organism that lived in ocean hydrothermal vents, places rich in H2, CO2 and iron. The energy gradient between the warm vent and surrounding colder water allowed LUCA to make adenosine triphosphate - the molecule that allows energy transfer in cells.
This means LUCA, like a virus, was an organism on the edge of life. It possibly had no cell membrane and relied on iron to form its boundaries. LUCA was a fizzing undersea rock using its unique environment to create energy. Possibly.
The ability for organisms to generate their own energy gradients evolved later on, allowing life to break away from the vents on at least two occasions – one giving rise to the first archaea, the other to bacteria.
But the story has one big flaw...
It's based on working backwards from organisms that currently exist. What about the extinct ones? Plus LUCA is still a complicated organism. How did this complexity come about? What was before LUCA?
Well in 1992, in a water tower in Bradford being tested for Legionnaires disease, scientists found an amoeba which contained a starting secret...
It was infected with a giant virus!
Viruses are normally small, but Mimivirus - as it came to be known - was a monster. It was big enough to be seen under a normal microscope and its genome was far bigger than it needed to be for a virus, with almost a thousand protein-coding genes.
Since 1992 a number of other scary sounding giant viruses - Pandoravirus, Megavirus etc - have been found. Stranger still these can themselves become infected by other, simpler viruses. So what's going on?
Well there are two theories about giant viruses. One is they grew from simpler viruses by capturing DNA from host organisms. They may be huge but that's just accidental; their big genome doesn't really mean anything.
The other theory is they evolved from complicated organisms which lost their ability to reproduce themselves. What's fascinating is that these initial organisms may not have been bacteria or archaea - instead they may have been earlier types of life which are now extinct.
The good news is that giant viruses only attack amoebas. But are they evidence of a lost fourth domain of life? Many are skeptical, but the more examples we find the more we learn about the earliest life on Earth and how it may have developed.
Today I'm looking back at the work of British graphic designer Abram Games!
Abram Games was born in Whitechapel, London in 1914. His father, Joseph, was a photographer who taught him the art of colouring by airbrush.
Games attended Hackney Downs School before dropping out of Saint Martin’s School of Art after two terms. His design skills were mainly self-taught by working as his father’s assistant.
Today I'm looking back at the career of English painter, book illustrator and war artist Edward Ardizzone!
Edward Ardizzone was born in Vietnam in 1900 to Anglo-French parents. Aged 5 he moved to England, settling in Suffolk.
Whilst working as an office clerk in London Ardizzone began to take lessons at the Westminster School of Art in his spare time. In 1926 he gave up his office job to concentrate on becoming a professional artist.
Today in pulp I look back at the Witchploitation explosion of the late 1960s: black magic, bare bottoms and terrible, terrible curtains!
Come this way...
Mainstream occult magazines and books had been around since late Victorian times. These were mostly about spiritualism, with perhaps a bit of magic thrown in.
But it was the writings of Aleister Crowley in English and Maria de Naglowska in French and Russian that first popularised the idea of 'sex magick' in the 20th century - the use of sexual energy and ritual to achieve mystical outcomes.
Between 1960 and 1970 Penguin Books underwent several revolutions in cover layout, at a time when public tastes were rapidly changing.
Today in pulp I look back at 10 years that shook the Penguin!
Allen Lane founded Penguin Books in 1935, aiming to bring high-quality paperbacks to the masses for the same price as a packet of cigarettes. Lane began by snapping up publishing rights for inexpensive mid-market novels and packaging them expertly for book lovers.
From the start Penguins were consciously designed; Lane wanted to distinguish his paperbacks from pulp novels. Edward Young created the first cover grid, using three horizontal bands and the new-ish Gill Sans typeface for the text.
Today in pulp: a tale of an unintentionally radical publisher. It only produced 42 books between 1968-9, but it caught the hedonistic, solipsistic, free love mood of the West Coast freakout scene like no other.
This is the story of Essex House...
Essex House was an offshoot of Parliament Press, a California publishing company set up by pulp artist Milton Luros after the market for pulp magazines began to decline. It specialised in stag magazines sold through liquor stores, to skirt around US obscenity publishing laws.
By the 1960s Parliament Press was already selling pornographic novels through its Brandon House imprint, though these were mostly reprints or translations of existing work. Luros was interested in publishing new erotic authors, and set up Essex House to do just that.
Today in pulp... one of my favourite SF authors: Harry Harrison!
Harry Harrison was born Stamford, Connecticut, in 1925. He served in the US Army Air Corps during WWII, but became disheartened with military life. In his spare time he learned Esperanto.
Harrison started his sci-fi career as an illustrator, working with Wally Wood on Weird Fantasy and Weird Science up until 1950. He also wrote for syndicated comic strips, including Flash Gordon and Rick Random.