Problems With Scientific Explanation of Life

[-Demosthenes-]

There are many problems with the scientific viewpoint about how life on this planet started.

Spontaneous Generation:

The idea that non-life can become life. This theory was disproven by Redi and later more completely disproven by Louis Pasteur in 1864. I don't see how lifeless matter, without even proteins!, could become life. The first form of life that is suggested is the "microsphere". Even if it did exist and come alive, how would it evolve into anything else? If a change meeting of dead matter became life it would be so simple that it wouldn't have any kind of DNA or RNA or anything else needed for evolution to take place. And it would be so impossible that even if by chance one was made, which I don't even see how that is possible, it would such an unussual event that how could many of them be made? There are so many holes, I don't see how any of it could work, form the very begining in which it is suggested that these "microspheres" were created from non-living elements that were void of even protiens, even animo acids, unless lightning running through certain elements can create them (which the experiement cannot be made to work.)

(PS: I put this is psudoscience because if I didn't then sayanora would put it there )

[Sorcerer]

There are many problems with the scientific viewpoint about how life on this planet started.

Spontaneous Generation:

The idea that non-life can become life. This theory was disproven by Redi and later more completely disproven by Louis Pasteur in 1864. I don't see how lifeless matter' date=' without even proteins!, could become life. The first form of life that is suggested is the "microsphere". Even if it did exist and come alive, how would it evolve into anything else? If a change meeting of dead matter became life it would be so simple that it wouldn't have any kind of DNA or RNA or anything else needed for evolution to take place. And it would be so impossible that even if by chance one was made, which I don't even see how that is possible, it would such an unussual event that how could many of them be made? There are so many holes, I don't see how any of it could work, form the very begining in which it is suggested that these "microspheres" were created from non-living elements that were void of even protiens, even animo acids, unless lightning running through certain elements can create them (which the experiement cannot be made to work.)

(PS: I put this is psudoscience because if I didn't then sayanora would put it there )[/quote']

 

First of all, if you are going to argue something, learn punctuation and paragraphs please. Second, if you are going to quote that something was "disproven" please provide reference material, instead of just saying so, otherwise your "proof" is null and void. 1864 huh.... *sarcasm*well I guess they knew alot about this stuff back then, right.... I mean, the Bible was written thousands of years ago, and then they knew everything*end sarcasm*.

 

The first form of life suggested is actually a self-replicating molecule, RNA is most likely. These microspheres you talk of are bi-lipid membranes, and are just packages for the first form of life. "even if it did exist and come alive, how would it evolve into anything else".... well since your assumption is false, you may need to actually read something else, (that is other than your creationist propaganda), and then come back with the argument..... I think this would be a wise idea.

 

The whole last portion of your argument is based on a false assumption, where did you here this information?.... My assumption is that it was provided to you in a pamphlet handed out by creationists, is this correct??

 

According to one hypothetical scenario, the first organisms were products of a chemical evolution in three stages: (1) the abiotic synthesis and accumulation of small organic monomers, amino acids and nucleotides; (2) the joining of these monomers into polymers and nucleic acids; (3) the aggregation of abiotically produced molecules into droplets, called protobionts. The "microspheres" you speak of, are simply "casings" for protobionts, without the nucleic acids inside the microsphere there is no heredity, you are quite correct on your point that microspheres cannot evolve; but, why would scientist formulate a hypothesis, that as you point out is quite obviously flawed? Answer: they don't, and your assumption has been provided by people who like to make you think they do(provided my assumption is correct), so that their arguments will seem all the more credible. And IMHO their arguments wouldn't stand up on a non-slip surface.

[-Demosthenes-]

I'm trying to proove anything. I just want someone in the field of biology to fill in the gaps.

[Sorcerer]

I'm trying to proove anything. I just want someone in the field of biology to fill in the gaps.

 

You'd need something bigger than god to fill in those gaps.... By the way prove is spelt with one O

[swansont]

The idea that non-life can become life. This theory was disproven by Redi and later more completely disproven by Louis Pasteur in 1864.

 

You can't prove a negative.

 

I don't see how lifeless matter, without even proteins!, could become life.

 

Nature is under no obligation to live down to your level of comprehension.

[dagaz]

There are so many holes, I don't see how any of it could work, form the very begining in which it is suggested that these "microspheres" were created from non-living elements that were void of even protiens, even animo acids, unless lightning running through certain elements can create them (which the experiement cannot be made to work.)

 

The work of Urey & Miller at the University of Chicago showed that when an electrical discharge (representing lightning) was passed through a gas chamber containing methane, ammonia and hydrogen (representing the early atmosphere) in a controlled experiment complex amino acids were produced after only one week. Follow up experiments using UV radiation instead of electricity produced nucleic acids - the precursors of RNA and DNA.

 

Also the microspheres is still just a theory, but they are only made from lipids (C,H & O) and they have also been found to form under controlled experimental conditions.

 

The part that's still causes the most confusion is how the two processes actually came together, but you have to remember all this is happening over evolutionary time frames, i.e. millions of years.

[LucidDreamer]

Ok, first of all, when Demothenes says spontaneous generation he is referring to a false belief during the 1800's about life. They believed that if you left out a piece of meat that maggots could spontaneously form in the meat. I think it was Redi that showed that no maggots would form when you prevented flies from getting to the meat. Pasteur later showed that microorganisms wouldn’t form if you boiled something and then prevented anything from getting in. It was connected to another theory about how life had properties that non-life did not.

 

Demosthenes is asking a valid question. There are lots of gaps in the knowledge about how life formed from non-life. In my view, Demosthenes, you are thinking about the microspheres in the wrong way. They are not considered the first form of life; they are considered the first kind of cell. Like sorcerer said, the first kind of life was RNA or DNA-like replication system. The lipid that the organisms used to compartmentalize itself came later. But perhaps early life forms took advantage of natural formations of lipids.

 

You are also thinking that its very unlikely that amino acids could form and then come together to make long chains of proteins. It's not as unlikely as you think. In fact, amino acids have been found on meteorites that have struck the earth. We know that they are not just contaminate because some of these amino acids are not found on earth. I read a recent article about protein being found in a meteorite, but I couldn’t find the article a second time.

 

Think of viruses. They are simple constructions of DNA/RNA surrounded by a protein coat. Think of RNA based chemical reactions; an example is ATP, which provides the energy for unfavorable reactions. Think about how the formation of complex molecules becomes favorable when you add energy. Think about the thousands of mutations that have been observed with bacteria. Think about how the basic components of life have been found both in space and to occur spontaneously.

 

Is it really so hard to imagine the certain parts of the earth containing the building blocks of life when we have found them in space and seen them spontaneously form? Is it really so hard to imagine RNA forming from nucleic acids when the formation of complex molecules occurs in the presence of energy? Is it really so hard to imagine a RNA based replication system forming when we have examples of RNA replication and RNA based chemical control. Is it really so hard to imagine virus-like organisms taking advantage of chemical energy instead of relying on other organisms. Once you have gotten to this point, the well known-mechanisms of mutation and natural selection can explain the rest.

 

We don’t know exactly how any of this occurred before the times represented by the fossil record. But what do we know about exactly that occurred 4 billion years ago. Sure we can make calculations about where a few stars and a few other minor things, but that’s about it.

[Sayonara]

A piece of meat left for a week is not comparable to oceans of primordial organics covering an entire planet for millions of years.

[AL]

You can't prove a negative.

I'm not suggesting the original poster was correct with his "disproof" of abiogenesis, but why do a lot of people hold the idea that you can't prove a negative? Of course you can. The old cliche is there is no such thing as a square circle (by the usual definition of square and circle, i.e. no tricks with non-Euclidean geometries or unconventional metrics).

[swansont]

I'm not suggesting the original poster was correct with his "disproof" of abiogenesis, but why do a lot of people hold the idea that you can't prove a negative? Of course you can. The old cliche is there is no such thing as a square circle (by the usual definition of square and circle, i.e. no tricks with non-Euclidean geometries or unconventional metrics).

 

Unless you have a closed, defined system (such as mathematics), you can't prove a negative. You have to check every case individually.

[mark01970]

Maybe we need to stop thinking of life as some supernatural force that seperates us from anything else in the universe. Perhaps "life" is a false concept. Maybe we aren't any more alive than a rock floating in space. Maybe someday that rock floating in space will collide with the right object and mix up with other stuff, and its collective energies will become something else. Maybe the only thing seperating us from a tree is that our genetic material got a good jump start. Our make-up of matter and energy interacted in a much better(?) way than a plants let's say.

 

The layman,

Mark

[Sorcerer]

Maybe we need to stop thinking of life as some supernatural force that seperates us from anything else in the universe. Perhaps "life" is a false concept. Maybe we aren't any more alive than a rock floating in space. Maybe someday that rock floating in space will collide with the right object and mix up with other stuff' date=' and its collective energies will become something else. Maybe the only thing seperating us from a tree is that our genetic material got a good jump start. Our make-up of matter and energy interacted in a much better(?) way than a plants let's say.

 

The layman,

Mark[/quote']

 

You cannot live without plants, plants can kill you and plants can make you do things that you probably wouldnt otherwise want to do..... Who is superior again?

[Sayonara]

The one with the flymo.

[LucidDreamer]

Unless you have a closed, defined system (such as mathematics), you can't prove a negative. You have to check every case individually.

Technically you can't prove one, yet we rely on the negative proof all the time. When you go through a stoplight you are relying on the cars going the other direction to not suddenly slam on the gas and try to go through as well. When you launch a rocket you are relying on the fact that gravity will not suddenly reverse itself even though you can't prove that it will never happen. When you turn on your lights you are relying on the fact that the electromagnetic waves won't suddenly obtain an enormous amount of energy from the air and turn into x-rays and fry you. You can't prove that anything won't happen once, but you have to rely on the fact that it won't all the time.

You can't prove a negative, but you can say that it's very unlikely to happen and then act on that knowledge.

[Sorcerer]

The one with the flymo.

 

LoL..... I guess. So in your opinion is the predator always superior to the prey/consumer to the producer? Are fungi the rulers of the world then?

[fuhrerkeebs]

Organic material (the stuff we are formed of) can, and has, formed naturally from carbon compounds found on asteroids...so all life could have been caused by a comet coming into contact by the earth (which is rather ironic, considering alot of people think that is how it will end...)

[-Demosthenes-]

Thank you for helping me understand. I'm sorry if I sounded like I wanted to argue something, I just want to know how this could have happened, and tell you what I already know so you can tell me how these things worked out.

 

So organic material can form from non-organic material, right? And the first life was made of lipids (fat cells right?). So by chance over billions of years chemicals came together in a certain order to make a simple organism, correct?

[Sorcerer]

Thank you for helping me understand. I'm sorry if I sounded like I wanted to argue something' date=' I just want to know how this could have happened, and tell you what I already know so you can tell me how these things worked out.

 

So organic material can form from non-organic material, right? And the first life was made of lipids (fat cells right?). So by chance over billions of years chemicals came together in a certain order to make a simple organism, correct?[/quote']

 

The early sea teamed with organic molecules, these were created by reactions between carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, phosphate and sulphur which contain the constituents of life - carbon, oxygen, nitrogren, hydrogen, phosphorous and sulphur - also added to this are some metal ions, eg magnesium and iron.

 

After a while the chemicals needed for life had formed in different environments, some may have formed on the surface of oceans, some in deep sea hydrothermal vents, some on asteroids or comets in space and brought here. The main chemicals needed for life are, sugars, amino acids, lipids and nucleotide bases (including ATP). All of these come in different varieties, and there are in fact more types of these than life actually uses.

 

Amino acids can polymerise (link) into proteins (the workers of life), this can happen in a variety of ways, one is they get splashed onto clay and the water evaporates, leaving the metal ions in the clay to reduce (shorten and make linkable) the amino acids so they polymerise. The polymerisation of nucleotides can happen in a similar way, but it is required they link with sugars and phosphate before they polymerise into strands of RNA or DNA (the commanders of life). Now the link between DNA, RNA and proteins today is this, DNA holds the information to produce RNA in the right order, and RNA holds the information to produce proteins in the right order. The earliest forms of life could have easily skipped out the DNA, because if they RNA happened to come together in the right order to produce a protein which enhanced the ability for the RNA to copy itself, then that RNA strand would have been more sucessful.

 

Anyway I could go on and on and on and I don't think you could grasp it all in one go, perhaps it would be better if u just Googled - "Chemical evolution of life" and followed the links.

 

To answer your questions:

 

So organic material can form from non-organic material, right?

 

Yes, but the definition of organic need not be the one I think you are thinking of. One definition is that organic is derived from life. The chemists definition of organic is a molecule consisting of carbon chains and chiral centers.

 

And the first life was made of lipids (fat cells right?).

 

No, the first life was probably either a self-replicating protein which also catalysed the formation of RNA, or RNA which is inherently self-replicating. DNA is also another possibility, but since it is more complex it is generally thought to have come later. Viruses, one of the most simple forms of "life" (this is arguable that they are alive) are just RNA covered in a protein coat. Lipids are not "fat cells", they are fat and oils, these can spontaneously form a micelle, which is a lipid membrane. The membranes of our cells are made from a phospholipid bi-layer.

 

So by chance over billions of years chemicals came together in a certain order to make a simple organism, correct?

 

It happened alot faster than that, unless you want to count the time molecules had to form in space, but the earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and the first evidence for life is about 3.8 billion years ago (isotopes of carbon that seem to represent metabolic activity of life) and the first fossils are ~3.5 billion years old. It wouldve taken a few hundred million years for the earths crust to cool and solidify and the oceans to form, but chemical synthesis could have been going on during this time; so that leaves a few hundred million years for life to have formed (not really a short time).

 

The order in which the molecules came together may not have been too important, many of the molecules are themselves intracately linked with the others, as RNA is linked to proteins, and proteins are linked to RNA, ATP the energy carrier of the cell is a nucleotide (adenosine) with a tri-phosphate tail, and phospholipids are produced by reacting ATP with fats.

[LucidDreamer]

So organic material can form from non-organic material' date=' right? [/quote']

Yes. Organic chemicals are just chemicals based on the element carbon. Life is based on organic chemicals because there is so much variety possible with carbon-based material. Organic material can form from non-organic material outside of the chemical reactions of life. You can make organic material from non-organic material in the lab and it happens naturally as well.

 

And the first life was made of lipids (fat cells right?).

I am not sure (probably no one is) when lipids entered the scene of early life.

Lipids would be necessary to form a cell' date=' but the earliest form of life was definately not a complete cell that exists today. A cell membrane probably came fairly early, but I don't think it was part of the earliest replication system.

So by chance over billions of years chemicals came together in a certain order to make a simple organism, correct?

Don't think of the earliest form of life like you think of life today. There was no DNA->RNA->protein system, no cell membranes with transport proteins, no complex morphology, etc. The earliest form of life was just a replication system that mutated over billions of years to what we see today.

 

Under certain conditions things that are relatively rare become more common. When the right set of circumstances exist a rare event actually becomes the most likely outcome. There are rare occurrences in the observable universe that astronomers have recorded and there are also rare occurrences on earth. The elements that come together to make the rare occurrence of life possible are liquid water, abundant carbon atoms, plenty of energy, a stable environment, etc. When all these things, which may not be unusual by themselves, come together then life becomes possible. In fact, it’s likely that life becomes probable under these conditions.

 

Carbon atoms form complex yet stable molecules. When you add energy some of these molecules become much more likely. Water provides an excellent environment for these reactions to occur. The ancestor of what we consider life could have just been an RNA-based chemical reaction that replicated. This reaction was just one of many kinds of reactions that were occurring in the primordial soup. These reactions were the result of combining carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, oxygen and other elements in a liquid water environment with the addition of heat and/or other kinds of energy. It might have also relied on certain levels of amino acids and nucleic acids present to fuel its reactions.

 

The first kind of replication probably wasn’t the reproduction of an entire large molecule but just a section of RNA that was conducive for replication and the attachment of amino acids to perform chemical reactions. Once of spark of replication was introduced the elements of mutation and natural selection would work on these primitive replication molecules the same way they work on life.

 

It’s rather analogous to forming a crystal. You might have ever heard of the 3dimaging made possible by producing a crystal of a substance and then using x-rays to form an image of the substance's structure on film. If you are familiar with the procedure then you know that often the most difficult part is forming the crystal. You need a solution of the substance with just the right amount of it dissolved in solution. You need the atmosphere and temperature of the solution to be just right. In addition to the substance you are looking to form a crystal of you may also need other substances to help form the crystal. But once you have formed just a tiny sliver of crystal the crystal will continue to grow without too much effort.

 

Life is like that crystal. You need to provide just the right environment plus just the right amount of building blocks, but once you have that spark of replication it is likely to grow. Anyway, a lot of this is just my theories or opinions. Hope that helps

[Sayonara]

LoL..... I guess. So in your opinion is the predator always superior to the prey/consumer to the producer? Are fungi the rulers of the world then?

No, I was more making the point that we aren't a good thing to compare other species to in terms of relative superiority. Blame technology.

[-Demosthenes-]

This might sound like a stupid question, but on a dead organism all the stuff is in the right place, but it's dead. If a bunch of chemicals became an organism then how could it be "alive"?

[Sorcerer]

This might sound like a stupid question, but on a dead organism all the stuff is in the right place, but it's dead. If a bunch of chemicals became an organism then how could it be "alive"?

 

Not a dumb question at all. Todays life forms are more complex than the original replicating molecules which first started life. To give an example of something which can replicate and mutate and evolve but never "dies" because it never truely lives: this would be viruses. Modern eukaryotic (higher life) and prokaryotic (bacteria) organisms rely on a complex chain of events to support their metabolism (constructing internal bio-chemicals and maintaining the offset of equilibrium), if something happens to disrupt this chain, e.g. blockage by poison, or organ failure (in animals), then the chain quickly breaks down and all sorts of chaos insues. Once a chaotic environment is reached within the cell, the cell has no mechanism to revert to the original... this is irreversable death. An analogy would be this, a manufactoring plant relies on every step of the chain for the end product, we can call this end product life, along the line are the workers (proteins/enzymes), a thug(poison) breaks into the plant and knocks out one of the workers, quickly one of the products on the line builds up and floods the floor of the manufacturing plant, it procedes to interfer with work in all areas of the factory, and cleanup is impossible..... this is death.

 

Edit: By the way, all the "stuff" isn't in the right place, its all jumbled up because the cells function which keeps everything balanced, working and repaired has broken down.

[swansont]

This might sound like a stupid question, but on a dead organism all the stuff is in the right place, but it's dead. If a bunch of chemicals became an organism then how could it be "alive"?

 

Define "alive."

[-Demosthenes-]

Alive, I guess something that uses something to make energy for it self and can reproduce in some way.

So I don't quite see yet how the non-living matter can become something alive yet. Ok, there are some chemicals and by chance they form this organism, but how is it alive? How does it start? Is it so simple that all it has to have is a little energy and be alive or something like that.

[LucidDreamer]

I think what Swasont was trying to point out is that there is no absolute line between alive and not alive. There is still some debate about whether viruses are alive or not. If I took out all the other mechanisms from a bacteria besides its replication system and then mutated it so it would replicate without the other mechanisms and just rely on ATP and nutrients that I pumped in would it be alive or not? If I managed to mutate a virus that could take basic components from its environment and reproduce would it be alive? At what point of a hybrid between a virus and a bacteria does that organism stop being alive.