Abiogenesis?

Question

No one explained yesterday how you can take some inorganic elements, add some energy and time, and poof, end up with life. Know why no one gave an answer?.............it can't be done. There's a missing ingredient, information. Without information, you can't get life. And the information has to come from an intelligence.

If someone can explain the emergence of life, and leave God out of the equation, I would like to hear it. And please put it into your own words, without cut and pasting half a book or saying to go to www.blahblahblah.com

Captain Bunkum.........You're right about the Miller experiment, he too Ammonia, methane, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and sparked it, and came up with some amino acids. One of his problems, he had 50% each of left and right handed amino acids, which are mirror images of each other. All life has 100% left handed amino acids, a right handed amino acid would be fatal. No scientist has been able to figure out how you get all left handed amino acids out of a pool containing both.
You were also right about a reducing atmosphere. Miller knew that oxygen would oxidize the early cells, making life impossible. But with no oxygen, there's no ozone, so the radiation would have destroyed all life. You can't have life starting with or wothout oxygen.
The primordial soup is mainly water. Water breaks down protein. You can't have amino acids forming into protein chains in water.
Plus, you can't have life starting without information. Where did the information come from?

Answer 1

What we need to understand is how a self-replicating molecule could come into existence. To get that, you need raw materials, energy, and time. Various combinations of these raw materials will take place due to chemical processes in a random fashion. Eventually, the right ingredients come together in the right way, and the self replicating molecule emerges. This combination is extremely unlikely, but that's ok, because you have "experimental combinations" going on all over the world simultaneously, and you have eons of time for the process to continue. We are not used to thinking about such low probability occurrences, such massive parallelism, or such extended timeframes. Given enough time, though, even tiny probability events have the opportunity to emerge.

Once we have that self-replicating molecule, it will make copies of itself, and there will be many more of them. If the replication process is anything short of perfect, then some of those copies may differ slightly from the original. The copies that have an increased ability to survive and replicate will tend to predominate, at the expense of the copies that are less well adapted to their environment.

Under those circumstances, time and natural selection will lead to the emergence of life. On earth, it took a billion years for the first life to emerge, and billions more for higher life froms to evolve.

Turning the question around, though, I have to wonder where God could have come from. What was the source of information that would lead to the creation of an intelligence capable of creating life? Did that have to come from another intelligence too? If you go with the usual answer that "God is eternal" or that "God exists outside of space and time", then you are really evading the question altogether. You are assuming God, and then using the assumption as proof of his existence.

Answer 2

What you don't seem to realize is that the differences between different atoms, and different configurations of atoms, constitutes information. Information is simply a shorthand way of saying that chemicals (and other structures) carry a record of how the universe is at some time. This is done in many ways in living systems: from the concentration of some chemical, to the configuration of a protein, to the sequence of nucleotides in DNA. All are chemical in nature.

Another HUGE problem is the issue of what, exactly, it means to be live. Are viruses alive? Why or why not? Is life simply the ability to reproduce (with variations)? What else has to be present in the environment? Some of these questions are philosophical, not scientific, while others are supremely scientific. God, however, has no place in the discussion.

No, we don't know the details of how life originated on earth. Since any record of the event is probably eroded away, we may never be absolutely sure how (out of several possibilities) it happened. But, we know that the key is the development of structures that allow catalytic activity and allow the maintainance of homeostasis. Since this forum is way too limited for a complete discussion, I would suggest you look at the book 'The Origins of Order' by Stuart Kaufman.

Answer 3

Actually I imagine no one gave an answer (by the way I've checked and that's either an exaggeration or a lie) because you asked about a very complex area of science in the Religion and Spirituality section, and instructed answerers not to refer to any websites. Oh, and the confrontational straw man argument probably caused anyone with any real knowledge of the subject to turn away from your question in disgust. It was pretty obvious that you had no interest in hearing anyone's opinion but your own.

If you actually want to learn about abiogenesis then I suggest either asking in the appropriate category or doing some research. It isn't the sort of thing that can be easily compressed into four or five sentences.

Answer 4

There were answers. Just not the ones you wanted to hear.

It's currently trendy to interpret physical phenomena in terms of 'information'. Just as it used to be 'energy' or the 'watch-maker'. What we call it doesn't change the reality.

Semi-permeable membranes form naturally and frequently. When molecules are contained within a membrane, they are more likely to interact. Amongst the results of these interactions are the molecules we call amino acids. Certain amino acids (DNA and RNA) are able to replicate themselves. And that is the basis of life. No watch-maker necessary.

Answer 5

Okay, I'll say this again as simply as possible.

1. You claim that all life must come from information, and the information must be created by life.
2. You claim that God is the intelligent being who created life.
3. You do not explain where God came from. His very existence contradicts (1).

You also have no information to back up your claim that the creation of life requires intelligence.

Answer 6

1) Just because we haven't done it yet doesn't mean it can't be done.

2) It's happened at least once that we know of, so it CAN be done.

3) We've constructed viruses in the lab - life from non-life.

4) You're misunderstanding information theory.

Answer 7

Go back to your Discovery Institute pamphlets. The only people who use the term 'information' are those creationists who don't understand either physics or biology.

Oh and that argument, even on its own nonsensical terms, collapses into a reduction ad absurdam chain immediately if you consider how much 'information' god would have to have compared to a simple replecating molecule.

Answer 8

Alexander Ross (c.1590-1654) wrote ""To question this (i.e., spontaneous generation) is to question reason, sense and experience."

Then again that was that aphids arise from the dew which falls on plants, fleas from putrid matter, mice from dirty hay, and so forth.

Real science finally proved this nonsense wrong in 1862 ... remember Louis Pasteur.

One alternate theory to abiogenesis is panspermia, but that only passed the buck to 'aliens'.

Answer 9

Well it can and has been done:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_29/c3792082.htm http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1072266v1

That gets you as far as a virus and that is your start. They can also tear bacteria clear apart and rebuild it with new DNA and make it a completely different type of life. They just need to figure out some of the membranes to do it clear from scratch.

Answer 10

Information is stored on DNA. There is more information stored on human DNA than there is in the entire Encyclopedia Britannica 10 times over. How much more information do you want?

Emergence of Life (simplified and abridged version)
For at least the first 1.5 billion years of the Earth's existence it was covered in an atmosphere that chemists call a "reducing atmosphere", which consists of gases such as ammonia, methane, nitrogen and carbon dioxide with no free oxygen present. There was also plenty of liquid water. In such an atmosphere, when subjected to geothermal heat and/or lightning many basic organic compounds are formed, such as amino acids (the building blocks of proteins), long chains of carbon compounds (oils) and nucleotides (the building blocks of RNA and DNA).

Over time these basic compounds become fused together to form short chains of protein and RNA (all of this has been demonstrated in numerous laboratories since the 1960s).

RNA is a replicator - it has the ability to act as a template for making more copies of itself, particulary in the pressence of certain catalysts, both organic (enzymes - which are made of protein) and inorganic, such as zinc which would be freely available.

The formation of RNA may have been in itself a highly improbably event (as some people argue), especially if it also required the formation of a replicase enzyme but the thing that most people cannot grasp is that in 1.5 billion years even the most improbable things become a certainty. To give an example, in an adult human there are 40 million million chemical reactions taking place every second - and that's just in the creation of heamoglobin molecules in a volume of less than 4 pints of bone marrow. If you consider the total volume of all the liquid water on Earth, the number of possible reactions that would occur in all that water and the timespan of 1.5 billion years it will become obvious that the formation of a basic replicator system is all but inevitable.

Such replicators would "compete" by out-replicating each other and causing the breakdown of the less successful replicators to yield raw materials for their own replication (again demosntrated in laboratories). Any replicator that found itself inside a blob of oil would be protected from the predations of others whilst being able to obtain the smaller molecules it needed for it's own reproduction. This, in effect, is the first living cell - a primitive bacterium.

Replicators which were able to increase the accuracy of their replication would fare better than those which did not. The coiling of two RNA-like strands together so that each would, in effect, proof-read the other would greatly enhance this proofreading process and would therefore be favoured in any competion for molecular survival; this is DNA.

The trick of protecting from predators by becoming enclosed in further coats of oily membrane has been duplicated when bacteria surrounded themselves by further membranes which contained colonies of bacteria thus producing eukaryotic cells. This has in turn been repeated by cells acquiring organelles such as mitochondria which are now known to be symbiotic bacteria containing their own DNA and reproducing independently.

Now that I've given you a brief account of the emergence of life without the need to mention god and which has been supported by scientific evidence for around 50 years, perhaps you would return the compliment by demonstrating the existence of god to the exacting scientific standards of proof to which evolution has been subjected without once mentioning the bible.

UPDATE: Life had a billion years to evolve bacteria that metabolised one form of amino acid into the other or destroy it to produce energy - when the supply ran out then so the bacteria went extinct or evolved to utilise some other form. Your view is too rigid - bacteria are capable of adapting to any chemical environment. The mere fact that right handed amino acids aren't found in nature today illustrates that an evolutionary process has occurred to alter what would otherwise be a mathematically anticipated balance. In effect the right-handed amino acid replicators lost the evolutionary race in favour of their left-handed competitors.

The absence of ozone in the early period of Earth's existence would result in greater amounts of UV falling on the Earth's surface. This would provide exactly the required environment for early evolution by increasing the mutation rate. In any event, many theories for early evolution now favour the early stages ocurring deep underground where UV is not an issue. Even today bacteria are found more than 2 miles down in minute crevices in otherwise solid rock.

Many forms of life do not require oxygen for life... for example sulfur bacter. All early plants would have regarded oxygen as a toxic waste product until bacteria known later as mitochondria found a use for them and became symbiotically associated with eukaryotic cells.

I repeat my challenge for you to now demonstrate the existence of god to the same standard.

You persist in requiring "information"... what exactly do you mean? - all the necessary "information" required is stored in RNA and DNA today as it always has been.