What are the theories on how the very first organisms on earth formed?

Question

if you think about it, the materials for the very first organism had to be randomly arranged (maybe by the churning of water) in such a way that spontanously began life. that is incredibly, incredibly random.

or are there more sophisticated theories out there?

secondly, have any scientists been able to create life yet? I read in discovery magazine that some scientist created like a miniature black hole or someting that lasted for like a trillionth of a second. if we can create a black hole surely we can create one teeny little one celled organism right?

good answer robotron! that makes sense to me.

as for the dude who told me to ask it in the biology category.... i did..i just thought there woudl be plenty of people in this category who would be interested in this topic or would know something. and i was right. and i of course expected to find some real jerks in this category too, comes with the territory... and look, i was right.

martin that is a good answer also, and explains even more to me.

but the second part of your answer i dont agree with. ..i do think it is entirely possible for life to have evolved simultanously in millions of different directions and thus creating what we have today.

the earth is 4.6 billion years old. thats plents of time. ...and these organisms didnt evolve one at a time.

you ever hear that riddle about would you rather have a million dollars or a penny doubled every day for a month? youre supposed to take the penny cause its more.

even if it took 4 billion years for the very first life form to emerge i think that is still plenty of time for life to evolve into what we see today.

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Answer 1

The most accepted and sophisticated is evolution. The Bubble experiement (and its repetition) proved life could be formed from non-living material (CHON gases exposed to sea water and electricity, amino acids formed)

Answer 2

There are more sophisticated theories out there, but they do involve that essential randomness. (URL below)

But if you throw a set of dice enough times, any given result WILL turn up. One of the lively discussions in this area concerns the numbers involved in these scenarios. and whether that leaves the hypothesis feasible or unfeasible. Billions of molecules over millions of years...

And the first organism on earth may not have formed there. Two theories suggest that life may have existed elsewhere before appearing on earth, avoiding the time limit for the formation of life being only since the earth cooled. Exogenesis and panspermia are both worth looking up: they are not just from the realm of science fiction (Though Star Trek NG did use the idea).
We may just all be Martians.

Apart from the sheer randonmness, countered by sheer numbers, and the possible rain of organic molecules from space, the substrate concept is interesting. The "clay theory" allows complex molecules to form more easily than previous calculations had suggested.

The concept is rather like building an arch for a bridge.
Surely you can't, as unless all the bricks are in place at once, they all fall down, and what are the chances of that happening?
But the bricks are laid on a supporting structure, a wooden former, so the whole arch does not need to be formed at once. This would be the function served by a surface of mineral clay.

The relatively recent discovery of self-reproducing prions (Not alive but reproducing?) has also affected thought in this area.

Answer 3

A one cell organism would have vastly more information that a black hole... and did the scientist that made the black hole get sucked into it and nerver heard from again?... scary

REALITY CHECK:
If scientists created life in a laboratory by a careful synthesis, it would ultimately only be evidense of need of an intelligent designer. The best they did so far was taking existing life... or... making a few amino acids and allot of poisson from a mix of chemicals that never existed on earth anyhow with the Miller experiment

This also dodged a much larger issue ... where did the vast informratin needed in biological systems... which is running down... come from??? many believe in every case of point mutatiosn information is lost or stays the same... you can never gain information. see "In the beginning was information" by Werner Gitt

There are several theories all not so good:

1) the earth had a basic atmosphere which was more condusive to retaining some amino acids as opposed to an oxidyzing one... this was popular with the MIller Experiment but today largely rejected as the earth never had a reducing atmosphere most scientists and groups would conclude

2) life was seeded by aliens..pansperma... this skirts the issue... who made the aliens... its like dodgeball Crick of the famouse Watson and Crick who discovered the double helix structure of DNA believed DNA was so complex it must have happened by alien seeding... sheesh... believing in God would be simpler

3) life was made on Saturn or some place with a basic atmosphere and a meteor knocked off a chunk of that planet and sent it to seed earth randomly... problem Saturns moons are oceans of liquid methans and alien and terminator wouldnt live long enought to have a decent fight... reject...all those gas giants are not just freezin but have winds over 1000mph nuthins gunna live there longer than about 1 milli sec

In the end life is so vastly complex it isnt just unlikely... its like shooting arrows at the moon... it will never happen by random chance... it takes a creator

The whole quesation begs the unanswersed issues of

1) how do revolutionary things n biology come about with out a creator... bird lungs and feather from reptiles...not possible.. they are tooo revolutionat

2) animal symbiosis... Darwin couldnt figure that one out..

3) animal sexuality.. it takes two to tango... not just one lucky random thing

Answer 4

The naturally occurring attraction of certain molecules to one another is not a random thing. This happens all the time in nature, it just so happens that some of them when they come together with the right molecules in the right conditions can form to become amino acids, these acids are the building blocks of life. These formation of molecules burn energy to stay together, this is how the need to find more energy evolved, thus evolving into more and more complex formation of molecule's till you get the one celled creature, and this happened again with one celled creatures, who were also attracted to each other. I hope that cleared things up for you a bit.

Answer 5

I don't believe that life created itself but I've done a bit of research into this matter so that I could witness to people who don't believe that God created life here on earth.

Scientists have been able to create environments that they hypothesis are a near duplication of the early earth's atmosphere and seas. Supposedly RNA molecules form in these artificial environments and they become very similar to life forms because they replicate and "evolve".

The theory goes that these formed the basis for the first single celled creatures or bacteria or viruses and that because of the nature of these self replicating features that natural selection and random mutations have resulted in all of the life that we see on earth today.

Basically it's a huge house of cards because for every different life form you have to come up with mulitple explanations of how they evolved. For instance, how did a caterpillar/butterfly evolve? How did random chance cause a creature that spins a defenseless cocoon and transforms itself into a butterfly happen?

How can one species let alone millions of them transform into a totally different species? Saying that random chance + natural selection + time is the answer is no real answer at all because it assumes that useful information on a massive scale comes from chance. Sure if you pour a bowel of alphabet cereal you might see a couple of words in it but you have to isolate those letters from all of the rest of them in your mind. It's like the analogy of monkeys typing on type writers. A monkey might type "this is a sentence" but after that it's going to be "this is a sentence xypwerp theiouoo eaosdifu" if you see what I mean.

Answer 6

Life didnt' evolve, the earth isnt' that old.

God created each animal according to their kind, consult.
Genesis.

now evolutionists claim that fossils are millions of years old. false!
look this up. if a fossil doesn't form fast, then it doesn't form at all.

Everything God created He created mature. He didn't create baby chickens, or puppies. He created Chickens and Dogs.
believe it or not.
Evolution is the only theory and it's been proved wrong a number of times.
At the time of Darwins claims, he actually had no proof for what he said, he just pushed it forward into schools, and here we are today.

Answer 7

Where did the water come from? How did the water churn?



God is sitting in Heaven when a scientist says to Him, “Lord, we don’t need
you anymore. Science has finally figured out a way to create life out of
nothing. In other words, we can now do what you did in the ‘beginning.’”

“Oh, is that so? Tell me…” replies God.

“Well, ” says the scientist, “we can take dirt and form it into the likeness
of You and breathe life into it, thus creating man.”

“Well, that’s interesting. Show Me.”

So the scientist bends down to the earth and starts to mold the soil.

“Oh no, no, no…” interrupts God,

“Get your own dirt.”

Answer 8

What does this have to do with religion? Ask it on the biology forum.

Answer 9

God created life. that was easy :)