How could animated life come from inanimate matter?

Question

Is it possible? Has your CD player ever grown arms and legs and started communicating with you?

If not, how come we are here?

Answer 1

From your boombox strawman, I assume you are a skeptic with regards to "animated life" coming from "inanimate matter". Let's see how far I can go in convincing you...

Evolution by means of natural selection is a non-controversial topic among literate, scientific, reasonable people. I am going to skip over the evolution lecture for today as it does not technically bear on your question, but we will have to take for granted the likelihood that if I can show animate life emerging from inanimate matter, that very basic animate life can evolve into all life on this planet, including things with arms and legs with whom you can communicate.

Now, "animate life" means an organism with the ability to react to its environment and reproduce. Inanimate matter of course cannot do those things. Scientists have not yet determined exactly how life originated on earth, or are even in complete agreement that it did originate here (it could be some sort of "seeding" from another world).

However, as long ago as 1953, a student and teacher experimenting together at the University of Chicago, succeeded in proving the concept, by literally doing it! In what is now referred to as the Miller-Urey Experiment, Miller and Urey isolated four gases in a closed system. The gases chosen are four that are widely believed to be common between 4.4 billion and 2.7 billion years ago on earth (the age range in which life originated). Next they ran a pulsating electrical current through the system, simulating lighting storms, which were also common on early Earth.

After a mere one week, 10-15% of the carbon in the system had formed into organic compounds, 2% of which were amino acids! Amino acids are used to make proteins, essential to cellular life.

This groundbreaking finding proved that creating animate life from inanimate matter was possible in theory and led to many more important experiments. Though science has yet to provide the difinitive answer of how life originated on earth, you can put your money in the bank that it WAS created from inanimate matter at some point. It only had to happen once, then evolution takes over, making more complex animate life from simpler animate life in a very well understood and noncontroversial way.

Make sure to treat your CD player with a little more respect from here on out so when those legs sprout and he runs you a bath he doesn't jump in to take you both out!

Answer 2

Isn't all "animated life" composed of "inanimate matter" (atoms)? The difference between you and I and our CD players is that we are largely composed of the right atoms (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon) in the right combinations (molecules) that admit of animated interaction with the environment while our CD players are largely composed of atoms (iron, aluminum, copper, nickel) combined in "inorganic" molecules that do not result in animated interaction with the environment. Now, as to the question of why the world works that way...

Answer 3

I've seen an animate object die and become an inanimate object. Why not the reverse?

I haven't seen a CD come to life, but I have seen dust do it.

Yeast spores do just that. They are clinically dead, nothing but dust, until animated by the right combination of moisture and heat. Animation via chemical and physical reactions. A Miracle . . . . Scratch that . . . Physics.

Answer 4

What you need to do is reverse your question to find your answer. Inanimate matter comes from animated life. If life or matter is not first concieved then they also cannot be seen. Life creates all then pretends it doesn't know hence you now have a game to play. or really just something to do.

Answer 5

Let's say we are like a computer and other machines. They kinda think and move and still inanimate matter. But the differnce one might say about us and that are that they require someone to control/program it. But we need the same thing. :) Outside stimulus triggers things which follow a network (like a computer) and something happens.

Answer 6

Read Conscioussness Explained by Daniel Dennett

Answer 7

One possibility is that there is no such thing as inanimate matter. Everything is always in motion, even that which appears to be still is composed of atoms and electrons in motion (and it really isn't the kind of motion described in newtons' first law; it's really a kind of motion that requires a force to be present). How can we explain this motion, this activity that exists at such deep levels of existence? There's always flux, there's always change...just think about that.

Answer 8

we do not know for constructive. One probability is that lipid bubbles stated as micelles served because of the fact the uncomplicated cellular shape and captured nucleotides interior themselves, allowing the nucleotides to clearly polymerise. all of us know that RNA could be catalytic so it would probable in simple terms take the dazzling polynucleotide to sort able to replicating different polynucleotides and that's if truth be told the commencing up of existence suitable there.

Answer 9

It concerns the complex adaptive properties of amino acids.