has it ever been formally proposed that life can come frome non-life?

Question

it is presumed that this is how life came about in the primordial ooze, but has there ever been a work published on how such a thing occured?
it is my opinion that it is true, but since it (to my knowledge) it has never been observed or tested and no principle (that i am aware of) predicts it, i am not sure that it is science. all observed life comes from other life.
does the theory has a name or title?

Answer 1

Yes, this is assumed to be the case, and much has been written on it, but little is known in detail. The first life form, or the ancestor of life, depending on how you define things, is generally presumed to have been a single molecule or small group of molecules capable of doing two things: 1 Catalyze reactions in its environment that lead to a copy of itself being assembled and 2 be nontrivial enough in structure so that slight changes can result in mutations still capable of performing number 1. 1 has been achieved in highly specialized environments, but not 2. To be a candidate for the first natural life, 1 would have to be possible in the natural environment of the time. Until such is found, there will remain a gap in our understanding that some will prefer to explain by the action of their God of the Gaps.

I've listed one book that discusses such speculations.

Answer 2

I'm not trying to cause a snit, well maybe I am, but this argument that "just because we haven't proven it yet doesn't mean it hasn't happened" is exactly the same as "just because we haven't captured an alien yet doesn't mean that there are no UFO's flying around." ( I have heard about the amino acid formation, though)

We scientists can't have it both ways. Either we accept that space aliens are running around with little more than speculation to prove it, or we don't. Either we accept that life arose without an engendering act based on little more than speculation (called evolution), or we don't.

As the great Feynman said, and I'm paraphrasing here, it's not the function of science to disprove evolution. It's the responsibility of evolutionists to prove it. And concensus doesn't count. Science is NOT a democracy.

I personally do not think that anything that takes place over super-geological timescales is yet within our grasp to hold meaningful discussions about. We've only been doing anything even remotely resembling real science for the past several hundred years. To try to exptrapolate the evidence of such a meager observation period to the time scales that they do is hard for me to swallow.

For me, this includes such things as evolution, climatology, cosmology, etc. It is the height of hubris to think we have enough information to make the claims that we do. We have devolved back to little more than a bunch of superstitious heathens going around substituting what sounds reasonable for what it would actually take much more work to know for sure.

Answer 3

Once upon a time it was thought that life spontaneously arose. One common thought was that maggots arose from rotting meat. Experiments proved that covered meat gave rise to no flies so they could not have sponatneously arisen.
Life from non-life has never been observed, nor proven, but the theory of how it works includes an outside force. Life from non-life is called abiogenesis. One theory of how life wasw created involves a lightening striking ocean water which does in fact create amino acids (which are the building blocks to DNA). Just because it is not known how it works, or hasnt been proven yet, doesnt necessarily mean it isnt possible. Remember, for a very very long time, we didnt understand gravity, yet it was always there.

Answer 4

Abiogenesis.

And it's absolutely unproven.

And, if someone had succeeded in creating life from inanimate matter, you wouldn't find out about it here. Such a thing would have Earth shattering consequences, and it would be heralded from every TV network, newspaper, radio station and magazine for months and years on end.

As soon as anyone can create the simplest form of life (from non-life)... we have a whole new ballgame.

Answer 5

It would not be a theory as you first have to have a verifiable hypothesis and no one has ever come up with that.

But every biologist of any repute agrees that life had to come from non-life. There is no other reasonable explanation. Religious explanations are not reasonable.

Answer 6

yes it has, we have actually created oil based lifeforms in labratories in the us, their hydrocarbon mixture formed a coding structure that was on the exterior of the cell. they met the 3 primary conditions, grow, multiply, and encode. so in fact, more of a life form than a viruses of sorts.

that begs the question, why will all the christian science nuts mod me down even though this is direct evidence?

Answer 7

The standard (unit) of life is the cell. And we all know that all cells came from pre-existing cells!