Is the black liquid inclined towards certain kind of life forms and deadly to others?
In the first scene of the movie, the Engineer is shown drinking the black goop and disintegrates totally.
Later on, on the moon, inside the artificial construct, our team is shown stamping (unknowingly) on a couple of worms (which didn't die then).
Shortly after that, they are shown slipping into the oozing black goop. If those worms drank it, they should have disintegrated too. But later that night, they turned into lethal serpents.
The question is, why did it help the worms?