How did organic life spontaneously spring from inorganic matter? How did the very first organism come to be?

Question

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Anywhere in the entire universe, how did a spntaneous "expansion" which burned at 40,000 degrees f create living organisms?
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darling (below) Nice try. Unfortunately you fail to explain how an organic "primordial ooze" (which is a hypothesis at best) was generated by inorganic matter.
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tawaen (below) - Abiogenesis - is yet another educated wild guess posing as a theory. Even the top scientists are merely speculating on the possibilty such a process occuring out of nowhere..

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Lucan (below) BRAVO!!!! Finally someone has the courage to say "I/We don't know".

Instead of quoting wild guesses published in some magazine, Lucan was the first non-believer to admit the truth in response to this post.

WELL DONE

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Answer 1

150 years ago, we didn't know about bacteria. No clue. It wasn't understood until Louis Pasteur determined that germs caused disease.

You are asking the same questions that scientists ask. You have, however, asked this in the Religion & Spirituality section, where we are mostly humanities majors, not biologists or physicists. Would you come to R&S to find out what opus number was Mozart's 40th Symphony? I think not. You're asking us to play to our weakness. Quite frankly, you're being unfair.

So let me suggest two things:

1. If you are serious about wanting to know the current evidence-based understanding on the origins of the universe and on evolutionary theory, there are excellent descriptions found at http://www.talkorigins.org .

2. Consider that you are proposing (not so subtly) that anything that is not explained is a place for God to be discovered. This is commonly referred to in ontology as "the god of the gaps" theory. It typically assigns God to any blank space that science has not yet reached useful conclusions. Remember what I said about disease? Before bacteria were discovered, it was assumed God was punishing the ill, or that they were demon possessed, or some other supernatural phenomenon caused sickness. This is the same god of the gaps.

Science never assumes, and should never assume, anything is supernatural. The purpose of science is to discover through measured observation, testing, and repetition what natural causes lead to our natural world. If you impose a statement "God caused it," then this stops the search for knowledge, because God is ultimately unknowable. This is the reason that the "god of the gaps" theory is discounted among learned ontological academicians, and is ignored by science.

^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^ ^v^

Answer 2

Abiogenesis. You'll need a few classes in biology and physics to understand much about it...

http://hometown.aol.com/darwinpage/abiogenesis.htm

Edit: yes, it's still a hypothesis, but scientists have been able to create the building blocks of cellular structures now in a laboratory. It's possible that in the not-too-distant future they'll be able to create organic life, at least at the cellular level. This show that it CAN be done, making life from non-life. And if the proper conditions were present on earth, it shows that it could have happened spontaneously. A better guess than, "Goddidit."

Answer 3

In 1957 a biology student named Stanely Loyd took the basic gasses of the early universe, the most common elements in the universe, hydrogen, methene and carbon, and put them in a container and passed an alectric spark across it. A few weeks later he took the system apart and discovered he had created amino acids, the basic building blocks of life. All of that in a container about the size of a basketball. The experiment has been repeated hundreds of times under the most strenuous and clinical conditions and the results have been the same. If they mimic the conditions on earth, including volcanoes and lightning, they get life. You can tap dance all day long about what you THINK and what your BELIEFS are but the FACTS are that life can be created. You multiply those experiments trillions upon trillions of times in a primordial soup of the entire oceans of the world over billions of years and you get life. See how simple that is.

Answer 4

No one's too sure as yet.

All the chemical experiments using the elements available on the early earth can be coaxed with a little electricity (lightning, doncha know) into producing organic molecules. But the little beggars just sit there. They don't reproduce. They don't eat. They NEVER throw a party.

So I guess maybe that's where God stepped in and told 'em to, "Get a move on shorties. I ain't waitin' forever for Saturday Night Live, ya know." Then He gave those brand new little organic molecules the divine equivalent of an evolutionary kick in the pants and they were off and running!

Answer 5

Did you know that the building blocks of life - amino acids - form naturally in interstellar dust clouds?

It's not unusual for religious folks to dismiss the possibility of life arising spontaneously as a result of natural chemical processes, but we do know that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins in living organisms, are formed as a by-product of chemical processes that take place naturally in interstellar clouds of gas and dust. It is in the nature of atoms and molecules to bind together into more complex molecules in the presence of a source of energy - In this case, UV radiation. If amino acids can form spontaneously, by common chemistry, then why not more complex organic molecules? Why not, by chance, a self-replicating molecule? Why not, ultimately, life? Even if the chance occurrence of a self-replicating molecule is a very low probability event, what does that matter in a universe of a billion trillion suns and billions of years for chemistry to have its effect? And one such event might be all that's needed to kick-start life.

Think about this though: What's the alternative? If life didn't start by an unthinking, undirected natural process then it had to be the result of an intentional act by an intelligent entity that *already exists* with absolutely no cause, no origin, no explanation, no history, no antecedents of any kind, and that possibility is infinitely more improbable than a particularly complex form of the chemistry that we already *know* exists.

For more information about abiogenesis, start here:
http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/vrchemistry/chapter26/page01.htm

Answer 6

Darkling Mitochondria are eukaryotic cells, by Evolutionary standards they are far too advanced to have been the first things out of the oooze, which is why single celled organisms like amoeba don't have them

The difficutly from understanding how you get organic material from inorganic rock is because you cant

It's a bloody lie,

Which is why they keep on attaching millions of years to everything to make it more likely......

am i going on a date with pamela anderson...sure in about a million years time

Darwin repented on his death bed as he was a little unsure as to where he would spend eternity for telling so many about a fib he made earlier

the real name of the book is Natural selection preservation of the favoured race, yes the favoured race being white people, the unfavoured race being black people,

and guess what they did to those poor aborignoes who didn't fit the description of the favoured race?

all in the name of Science of course

Answer 7

it is greater like asserting soda can no longer come from extreme fructose corn syrup, caramel coloring, water, CO2, and a can. Or greater proper yet, it could no longer come from a stalk of sugar cane, a nicely, air, and iron ore. Nature would not basically a by coincidence make Coca-Cola. There needs to be clever intervention for soda to be made. sure, you could theoretically rearrange molecules to produce existence, yet realistically you do no longer see it take place. The argument is that nature can not produce existence from inert count number.

Answer 8

look up ribozymes/self replicating RNA, I think this is regarded as the currently most likely scenario.

PS. speculation/trying to find a solution to a question based on experiments does seem to me much more satisfying than answering it by "it must have been a single intervention by a supernatural force". At least the success rate of modern medicine is clearly higher as the success rate of prayer.

Answer 9

Simple answer - we don't know. There are many possibilities, though, which are being looked into by the scientific community, and I hope I live long enough to see something emerge as a leading theory. Not holding my breath though.

Answer 10

Why are you asking this here? It is not a religious question. Are you afraid to ask in the science section in case you get an actual answer from a scientist?

Why are we expected to have all these answers?