ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
An objective Bayesian analysis of life's early start and our late arrival.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Other Earths, Gaian bottlenecks and Darwinized Gaias.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Potassium at the Origins of Life: Did Biology Emerge from Biotite in Micaceous Clay?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Formulation and resolutions of the red sky paradox.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
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Abstract
Life emerged on Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window, but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts to infer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated by the selection effect that if the evolution of intelligence is a slow process, then life's early start may simply be a prerequisite to our existence, rather than useful evidence for optimism. In this work, we interpret the chronology of these two events in a Bayesian framework, extending upon previous work by considering that the evolutionary timescale is itself an unknown that needs to be jointly inferred, rather than fiducially set. We further adopt an objective Bayesian approach, such that our results would be agreed upon even by those using wildly different priors for the rates of abiogenesis and evolution-common points of contention for this problem. It is then shown that the earliest microfossil evidence for life indicates that the rate of abiogenesis is at least 2.8 times more likely to be a typically rapid process, rather than a slow one. This modest limiting Bayes factor rises to 8.7 if we accept the more disputed evidence of
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