Octopi From Outer Space

No Really. That is being posited as the source of the many-faceted oddness of the 8-tentacled creature that has been shoehorned into the mollusk group but really, in many ways, is such an outlier that it seems like it came from–OUT THERE!

A recent proposal in the scientific journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology posits that octopus DNA could have arrived on Earth in “an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized octopus eggs.” And these eggs might have “arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago.”

Not everyone is aware that Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, suggested that life on Earth was the product of “directed Panspermia“–a seeding of the galaxies by an advanced being, also OUT THERE.

And admittedly really OUT THERE is where many see the credibility of this intriguing proposal. But I have lived through a time when many “impossibilities” have proven to ultimately have been taken as fact. Stay tuned!

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fred
fred

Fred First holds masters degrees in Vertebrate Zoology and physical therapy, and has been a biology teacher and physical therapist by profession. He moved to southwest Virginia in 1975 and to Floyd County in 1997. He maintains a daily photo-blog, broadcasts essays on the Roanoke NPR station, and contributes regular columns for the Floyd Press and Roanoke's Star Sentinel. His two non-fiction books, Slow Road Home and his recent What We Hold in Our Hands, celebrate the riches that we possess in our families and communities, our natural bounty, social capital and Appalachian cultures old and new. He has served on the Jacksonville Center Board of Directors and is newly active in the Sustain Floyd organization. He lives in northeastern Floyd County on the headwaters of the Roanoke River.

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  1. I love this! That Watson and Crick hypothesized this is too cool. I knew they intended to get to the bottom of human dream creation as their next endeavor, but I have not heard any more about that. Have you?

  2. Just Crick I think held this OUT THERE idea. No info at all on dreams from either. Are both or either still alive? Think at least one has passed.