If life can be created from dead material by itself, why can we not reproduce that in a laboratory?

Answer 1

It is NOT correct to say we simply "cannot" reproduce these results ... only that it is exceedingly difficult, for fairly obvious reasons.

Actually, a lot of progress has been made in reproducing these results in a laboratory. The experiments are too numerous to list here, but if you're interested, you can google these names: Stanley Miller/Harold Urey; Aleksandr Oparin; J.B.S. Haldane; Joan Óro; Sol Spiegelman (google Spiegelman's monster); Eigen, and Oehlenschlager; Günter Wächtershäuser; and many others. These are all preliminary results ... just trying to show how a certain set of non-living ingredients and conditions *may* have produced certain building blocks or processes (like RNA replication).

So here is why it is difficult (but not necessarily impossible) to reproduce the beginning of life in the laboratory. Supposedly the emergence of life from non-life included three ingredients:
1) The organic and inorganic compounds, water, gasses, etc. that were present in the early ages of the earth.
2) One or a combination of energy sources (sunlight, cosmic rays, lightning, thermal vents, volcanic heat, in some combination of intense energy followed by long periods of slow percolation).
3) Eons of time ... as in 950,000,000 to 1,600,000,000 *years* (950 million to 1.6 billion years). And these chemical combinations weren't happening in a vat or a few beakers worth of water, but on an entire planet covered by billions of gallons of water in all sorts of tidal pools, deep sea vents, etc. Literally billions of chemical reactions per second, for all those eons of time.

For (1) and (2) we can simulate all sorts of things in a laboratory based on our best research on the chemical environment and energy sources available at the earth's infancy. For example, we do know that there was no free oxygen in the oceans or atmosphere in the early earth, which is consistent with the finding that oxygen is toxic to these primitive molecules.

But how do we simulate (3) in a laboratory? ... I.e. millions upon millions of years of chemical reactions blasted with high energy followed by millions of years of slow percolation.

In other words, if you insist on reproducing a random result that was produced with billions of billions of rolls of the dice, then such an experiment would take a *long* time.

Here's an analogy. The odds of winning the California lottery (super lotto) are 1 in 18 million. If 18 million tickets are bought, then the odds are pretty good that there will be a winner. But if you then take the winning numbers, and ask what are the odds of getting the *same* winning numbers again "in a laboratory" just by random picking of ping-pong balls in a machine ... the odds are astronomically low of repeating the exact same winning numbers a second time. But that doesn't mean it was "magic", "divine intervention", or "intelligent design" that there was a winner the first time around.

So it is not correct to say we "cannot" reproduce results that show how life *might* have arisen from non-life ... only that it is exceedingly difficult, for fairly obvious reasons. But that doesn't keep biochemists from making a *lot* of progress.

--- P.S. to cdf-rom ---
Sorry, but your analysis is so full of errors I don't know where to start. For example, the odds of reproducing a *specific* protein with 100 amino acids is not 100-factorial, but 20-raised-to-the-100th power (since there are 20 amino acids) ... still a large number, but not nearly as large as 100! (100-factorial). So your math is wrong right from the start.

But it doesn't matter. The first step in your analysis is the statement: "To build the simplest protein molecule from amino acids that could be considered alive would require, say, 100 amino acids ..."

Just from your choice of language it is clear that you are just making that statement up. As your analysis then builds from that first made-up step, your analysis doesn't get very far off the ground.

Specifically, that first statement assumes that there is only one correct primordial protein that can be "considered alive." And if life did not produce that one single result (out of the trillions of equally possible combinations), then it cannot be "considered alive". Pray tell, what is this single 100-component protein, the only correct result out of trillions, that is the definition of life?

In other words, your rookie error was in presupposing a single correct answer, and *then* computing (incorrectly) what the odds are that it would occur. Even if there were only a single correct answer (and you have not established that there is only one), that would be like going up to a lottery-winner and saying "your odds of winning the lottery were 18-million to 1, so therefore it was an act of intelligent design that you won the lottery." Nope. You just happen to be talking only to the winner.

And in an observable universe with a bilion billion planets ... ... each one buying a billion lottery tickets per second for a billion years ... there are a lot of lottery tickets! And when you add to that the idea that there may be a *lot* of winning numbers, the odds were pretty high that someone would win the lottery, at least once ... in which case, the winner (whereever they would happen to be in the universe) would be marveling at their own good fortune.

So please stop answering science questions if you don't really know what you're talking about.

Answer 2

Have to define what life is. Many years ago the constiuent parts of the tobacco mosaic virus were successfully reconstitued into live virus that could reproduce!!!!!

Answer 3

Because there aren't any 1 to 3 billion year-old scientists that can run and keep track of an experiment of the same age.

Answer 4

Reproduce life ?????? u really need to get a grip !!! that is a job for god and god only not for a couple of guys in a lab!

Answer 5

Nobody has ever or can ever prove that life arose spontaneously and solely from previously unliving matter; they just find that likelihood (as unlikely as it is, by the laws of probability) more emotionally comforting than the alternative, which is that we were created by somebody and are responsible to that somebody.

To build the simplest protein molecule from amino acids that could be considered alive would require, say, 100 amino acids, all in the right order, for it to 'work' --for it to be considered 'alive'. No near misses, only the one that works right!

The number of different combinations (sequences) that 100 different components can make is 100!, read as one hundred factorial. This is found by multiplying. 100! = (1x2x3x4x5x ... 97x98x99x100)

This is equivalent to ten to the 158th power, or 1 with 158 zeros after it. (We don't have a name for such a number. For comparison purposes, there are only supposed to be about 10 to the 80th power electrons in the entire universe!)

Suppose the entire mass of the Earth (6.6 sextillion, or 6.6 times ten to the 18th power tons) were amino acids, waiting for the right one to form.

In each ton, there would be about 5 times 10 to the 27th power amino acid molecules, using the weight of an average amino acid for simplicity.

The total number of molecules available if the whole Earth were amino acids is about 3.3 times ten to the 46th power. Using groups of 100 molecules, this is 3.3 times ten to the 44th power groups of components.

Now let us suppose further that the molecules are able to combine and separate to recombine if the right combination is not found a trillion times a second (1 times ten to the 12th power.)

Suppose that they have been doing so since the Earth was made about four and a half billion years ago. (4.5 times ten to the 9th power years, or 1.42 times ten to the 17th power seconds.)

So, up to the present, we have been able to go through 1.42 times 1 times 3.3 times ten to the 44th plus 12th plus 17th power.
That is about 4.69 times ten to the 73rd power combinations, since the Earth began.

Ten to the 158th power divided by 4.69 times ten to the 73rd power is about 2 times ten to the 84th power.

So, all this effort-- the mixing and breaking apart of molecules that were close but did not work right and recombining the components in another way, must be repeated that many times-- 2 times ten to the 84th power times-- before we can be sure that, by the working of random chance, we will get a functioning, living protein molecule.

Such a protein moleule would not be able to reproduce itself. Let's try to make a DNA molecule that is complex enough to reproduce itself. This will require about a thousand 'bases' connected together in the right sequence. There are four types of bases, so that is four to the 1000th power. Converting that to base ten for convenience, we have about 10 to the 600th power.

(You can do the math yourself if you want to.)

"But," you might say, "scientists HAVE created protein molecules in the lab!"

Yes, that's true. They used their "pre-existing intelligence" to "intelligently design" the molecules they wanted. But doing it that way when it is supposed to be done by chance is cheating!

Now, it would be EASY if there were partial protein molecules, left over from previously-living things... but then we would be left with the question of where those previously living things came from!!!!

(Maybe we can just ignore the question...?)

The answers all strongly suggest that life did not appear randomly but as a result of somebody's deliberate actions.

We are not on our own... we are not "our own". I am forced by the math to conlude that we are the product of some intelligence immeasureably superior to ours, and responsible to that person or persons. We are not here by accident. We are here for a purpose, and it is the purpose of the one or ones that brought all life, and us, into existence.

Answer 6

That is where God comes in.... seriously, there are still questions like that that cannot be answered by us!