Evolution? What did the first living cell evolve from and what gave it life?

Question

Do you believe that the very first living matter was jump started like in a bad Frankenstein movie? What is the origin of life and if science knows, why can't they re-create it?

Answer 1

You know, it is strange that science can not re-create biogenisis in the lab, and prove once and for all, life did not happen by chance.
(Of course if, scientist did re-create life in the lab, would not that prove the creation story?)

Answer 2

The recipe for life is not that complicated. There are a limited number of elements inside your body. Most of your mass is carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, plus some nitrogen and phosphorous. There are a couple dozen other elements that are in there in trace amounts, but to a first approximation you're just a bag of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.

Now, it turns out that the atmosphere is a bag of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen as well, and it's not living. So the real issue here is, how do you take that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (or methane in an early atmosphere) and water vapor and other sources of hydrogen—how do you take those simple, inorganic precursors and make them into the building blocks of life?

There was a famous experiment done by Stanley Miller when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s. Miller essentially put methane, or natural gas, ammonia, hydrogen gas, and water vapor into a beaker. That wasn't a random mixture; at the time he did the experiment, that was at least one view of what the primordial atmosphere would have looked like.

Then he did a brilliant thing. He simply put an electric charge through that mixture to simulate lightning going through an early atmosphere. After sitting around for a couple of days, all of a sudden there was this brown goo all over the reaction vessel. When he analyzed what was in the vessel, rather than only having methane and ammonia, he actually had amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. In fact, he had them in just about the same proportions you would find if you looked at organic matter in a meteorite. So the chemistry that Miller was discovering in this wonderful experiment was not some improbable chemistry, but a chemistry that is widely distributed throughout our solar system.

Answer 3

They have created life. They did in the 1950's and it has been repeated many times. It would take a billion years and a trillion times the size of the experiment to actually create the primordial soup one celled animals evolved from, but they have created the basic building blocks of life. But the fundies say that since you can't create a human from a basketball sized experiment of primordial soup in a couple of days, it can't be done. But that is where the rational intelligent thought processes come in.

Answer 4

They can do viruses and there is your start:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_29/c3792082.htm http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1072266v1

But even without the slightest idea, that wouldn't provide evidence that it was magic which is what you are implying. In the middle ages they decided that illness was evidence of demons, now we know it is just germs. And that is the type of thought you are advocating.

Answer 5

I don't know. Yet. But not knowing doesn't invalidate the theory.

How is your creationist flu vaccine coming along?

Answer 6

the first living thing had life breathed into it by God... try the Bible. science is true to an extent but the things God did ... they try to pretend they can prove wasnt God bu tsince they cant they cant tell you

Answer 7

Here is one explanation...