Atheists---can you explain spontaneous generation to a Xian?

Question

I cannot understand how a single cell can come into existance that meets the three criteria for life---respiration, irritability, and reproduction. After that, some of the cells evolve into trees, others become a fish, some become a giraffe, or an armadillo...how does this happen in the absence of a Creator?

I mean, forget the third law of thermodynamics. How does a single cell happen? A nucleus, mitochondria, ribosomes, endoplasmic reticulum, a membrane---how did that happen?

Answer 1

Sigh.

I don't think Y!A is supposed to replace the american school system - but it's commendable that you're actually trying to learn. Thank you.

Those are two different subjects - abiogenesis and evolution.

Abiogenesis was very unlikely - but it only had to happen *once* on an entire planet in hundreds of millions of years.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/

Evolution is simple - the twin forces of mutation and natural selection are what shapes life.

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-evolution.html
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/

Email or IM me with specific questions - or just post in the relevant category.

Answer 2

respiration and irritability are not fundamental requirements. replace respiration with metabolism (of some sort), add in autonomy (a cell membrane or something similar), then i think you're talking about the fundamental requirements of life. in modern organisms these are all essentially physico-chemical processes (there is no life force). there are analogues of all three in simpler physical and chemical processes. the problem then is how they all came together in a single system. this is not an easy problem but also i see no reason to think that it's unsolvable. i don't think proposing that god did it gains us any understanding.

you're talking about the eukaryotic cell, which it is thought, evolved about 1-2 billion years ago. whereas i'm talking about a very simple organism simpler than the simplest bacteria, which must have formed at least 3 billion years ago. so you're on a bit of a wild goose chase i would say. the eukaryotic cell did not spontaneously assemble, that would really be a miracle - but to partially answer that question, the mitochondria appear to be endosymbionts, bacteria that were engulfed by the cell and never left. maybe other structures have similar origins, but their DNA 'eroded' away, subsumed by the nuclear DNA (the mitochondrial DNA itself is quite eroded).

Answer 3

Spontaneous generation is the how Christians believe God created the world (well, a form of spontaneous generation, anyway). There is no such thing in science.

There are theories on how life first occurred naturally on this planet. I'll give you the short list from www.TalkOrigins.org, an easy source to access:

1) Panspermia, which says life came from someplace other than earth. This theory, however, still does not answer how the first life arose.

2) Proteinoid microspheres (Fox 1960, 1984; Fox and Dose 1977; Fox et al. 1995; Pappelis and Fox 1995): This theory gives a plausible account of how some replicating structures, which might well be called alive, could have arisen. Its main difficulty is explaining how modern cells arose from the microspheres.

3) Clay crystals (Cairn-Smith 1985): This says that the first replicators were crystals in clay. Though they do not have a metabolism or respond to the environment, these crystals carry information and reproduce. Again, there is no known mechanism for moving from clay to DNA.

4) Emerging hypercycles: This proposes a gradual origin of the first life, roughly in the following stages: (1) a primordial soup of simple organic compounds. This seems to be almost inevitable; (2) nucleoproteins, somewhat like modern tRNA (de Duve 1995a) or peptide nucleic acid (Nelson et al. 2000), and semicatalytic; (3) hypercycles, or pockets of primitive biochemical pathways that include some approximate self-replication; (4) cellular hypercycles, in which more complex hypercycles are enclosed in a primitive membrane; (5) first simple cell. Complexity theory suggests that the self-organization is not improbable. This view of abiogenesis is the current front-runner.

5) The iron-sulfur world (Russell and Hall 1997; Wächtershäuser 2000): It has been found that all the steps for the conversion of carbon monoxide into peptides can occur at high temperature and pressure, catalyzed by iron and nickel sulfides. Such conditions exist around submarine hydrothermal vents. Iron sulfide precipitates could have served as precursors of cell walls as well as catalysts (Martin and Russell 2003). A peptide cycle, from peptides to amino acids and back, is a prerequisite to metabolism, and such a cycle could have arisen in the iron-sulfur world (Huber et al. 2003).

6) Polymerization on sheltered organophilic surfaces (Smith et al. 1999): The first self-replicating molecules may have formed within tiny indentations of silica-rich surfaces so that the surrounding rock was its first cell wall.

7) Something that no one has thought of yet.

The rest (becoming fish, trees, giraffes, armadillos, etc.) can be easily seen with a fairly simple understanding of evolution, which is much to long of an explanation to address here.

***Notice one thing about the above 7 examples for the possible natural origin of life on Earth: there is no denial of God, nor is there any inclusion of God. Supernatural things (which includes God) are not investigated through science. Science investigates the natural world, and comes up with logical, realistic, natural world explanations.

Edit: just read your additional details. The 3rd law of thermodynamics states that as temperatures approach absolute zero, all process cease and entropy becomes a minimum value. Nothing to do with evolution.

I assume you were talking about the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system that is not in equilibrium will increase over time. There are at least 3 flaws in the argument against evolution using the 2nd law:

1) Any biological system is hardly an isolated (or, more correctly, a closed) system, whether you look at the DNA, the chromosome, the cell, the individual, the population, the species, the ecosystem, the biome, or the Earth as a whole. This rules out the 2nd law of thermodynamics all by itself, almost.

2) Entropy is simply the loss of energy to an unusable form (heat). Many infer that entropy *always* means increased disorder, but that is not necessarily the case; it is not a one to one equation all the time.

3) It has been shown that, while the overall entropy of any closed system will always increase when out of equilibrium, there can always be pockets within that closed system that actually show decreases of entropy.

Hope this helps clear some things up.

Answer 4

First of all Xian is a city in China !! Where did you come up with this "term" ?? Also existence is the correct spelling !! Foolish Wonder, Are you an advocate of the "Big Bang" theorum ?? The term you seek is called "EVOLUTION". All life crawled onto land from the oceans and thusly it began some 3 billion years ago(approx.) A single cell such as the amoeba is a good starting point. Suggest you do some more research.

Answer 5

Well it'd take a while so yeah read up, but scientists have hypothesised and recreated conditions on an early earth.
It has been supposed that the hot, gaseous, electric atmosphere could have catalysed the development of organic life from inorganic substances.
Cells may have developed multiple organelles through phagocytosis and developing a symbiotic relationship.
I mean, they're theories, but to me more plausible than the 7 days fairy story....

Answer 6

part of the point of athiesm, as least as I use it, is that is doesn't matter. it's reverse logic anyway.

let's say a caveman wanders the earth and finds a nice field with a lake full of fish. he finds a cave for shelter and is well cared for there. he thinks to himself "wow, all this stuff works so well for me, someone must have put these fish here for a reason, i should pray to God". but really, he is thinking backwards. it is not the fish that were put there for him, he is just smart enough to make use of what already existed. the same is true with us. we are confused by our planet because it is unique so we feel it must have been made for us, rather than that we happened to find the right circumstances to survive, thrive, and evolve.

with the single cell thing, I suggest you read some Richard Dawkins. it is hard for creationists and christians to read, just as hard as it was for me to read "darwin's black box" without gagging. BUT, he does explain the very point you make more eloquently and simply than I could ever hope to. you can also ask the American Athiests or the Brights to explain it to you, their website may even have something about it.

Answer 7

Spontaneous generation as a theory is false, there is not such a thing.

A living cell did not just popped out of a hat. If that is what you think then you're out to lunch.

The fact that you cannot understand something, is not proof that cannot happen. You cannot imagine a universe without a Creator, that does not mean that the rest of us cannot.

Answer 8

Abiogenesis is an area we still have much to learn in. Just because we don't have all the answers is for me no reason to insert supernatural intervention. This is what humans have always wanted to do when faced with the big unknowns. It is making up an answer and it hasn't held up well as we have unraveled more and more of life's mysteries.

Answer 9

I'm afraid that my grasp of the science if this subject is poor so I cannot give you a scientific answer. However, ascribing the development of life to a 'creator' just does not hold up to any reasonable and reasoned investigation.

Answer 10

All compliment the huge, invisible magician! yet somewhat, I by no potential considered any spontaneous era of count, so i do no longer think in it till I see some info that such an experience got here about.