What caused elements to form into organisms?

[crazykilla]

Hello, I'm a mainly self-educated scientist at the age of 16.

 

I have a biological question, what caused all those atoms such as hydrogen, carbon and oxygen to combine together and form an organism?

How did these atoms communicate with each other to evolve, to create muscles and store fat when all they ever needed is to sit around as oceans or gases?

How did these inanimate elements that we see daily come together to form life? I find it difficult to understand why something with nothing remotely resembling life can come together with other elements and see the need to eat, reproduce or anything.

Does this basically mean that every atom has a mind of its own? Is all that we see inanimate not so inanimate after all?

 

This is hard to ask and to answer I'm sure.

[Strange]

This is an open area of research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

 

It is generally assumed to be some sort of "chemical evolution" where, at some point, particular sets of chemical reactions become self-sustaining and then were able to combine with other chemicals (e.g. those that could form a membrane to protct it from the environment).

 

Most hypotheses require some specific external factors. For example, some models suggest that the structure of clay could have provided the right environment. One of the most intriguing ideas (to me) is that the availability of free protons (hydrogen ions) at deep see vents provide a source of energy that could have been exploited by the pre-life reactions. This is consistent with the biochemistry of all known cells and the DNA evidence.

 

 

Does this basically mean that every atom has a mind of its own?

 

There is no reason the think that is the case.

Edited October 4, 2014 by Strange

[Delta1212]

Evolution, and life in general, is a chemical process. It isn't intelligent. Despite the metaphor inherent in common parlance, your body doesn't "know" to store fat. It stores fat under certain conditions as a natural consequence of its structure in the same way that ice melts under certain conditions (i.e. Heat) without needing to "know" that it should be liquid water.

 

Similarly, the early chemical reactions that lead to the formation of life wouldn't have been the result of atoms "deciding" they needed to form the structures that would develop into life. They would have been molecules that were created naturally and had some degree of ability to replicate themselves in the conditions they were under. Once self-replication starts, evolution occurs and the molecules that were best able to replicate, those that made better copies of themselves more frequently, would have outpaced the rest and eventually developed all of the complex structures that we associate with modern life.

[s1eep]

Evolution, and life in general, is a chemical process. It isn't intelligent. Despite the metaphor inherent in common parlance, your body doesn't "know" to store fat. It stores fat under certain conditions as a natural consequence of its structure in the same way that ice melts under certain conditions (i.e. Heat) without needing to "know" that it should be liquid water.

 

Similarly, the early chemical reactions that lead to the formation of life wouldn't have been the result of atoms "deciding" they needed to form the structures that would develop into life. They would have been molecules that were created naturally and had some degree of ability to replicate themselves in the conditions they were under. Once self-replication starts, evolution occurs and the molecules that were best able to replicate, those that made better copies of themselves more frequently, would have outpaced the rest and eventually developed all of the complex structures that we associate with modern life.

What if it's own type of intelligence is purer or higher, on a different level altogether; water does not turn to ice, because it decides to, you are right, it has no recollection of self, it doesn't determine things by thinking about them beforehand like humans, but, the atoms that make-up water, have certain personality. and together even more, they do not think about turning to ice, as you say, they turn to ice---the effects water has with other things are predetermined, it's self is automatically, or mechanistically, doing the things it would do if it met other things, it makes it own mark in nature by playing a certain role that other things, matter and energy, inter alia, formulated.

Edited October 4, 2014 by s1eep

[Sensei]

What if it's own type of intelligence is purer or higher, on a different level altogether; water does not turn to ice, because it decides to, you are right, it has no recollection of self, it doesn't determine things by thinking about them beforehand like humans, but, the atoms that make-up water, have certain personality. and together even more, they do not think about turning to ice, as you say, they turn to ice---the effects water has with other things are predetermined, it's self is automatically, or mechanistically, doing the things it would do if it met other things, it makes it own mark in nature by playing a certain role that other things, matter and energy, inter alia, formulated.

 

Water doesn't turn to ice, because it's surrounded by materials that have room temperature ~20 C or so.

If water will touch something colder, like f.e. piece of metal on which there is dry ice, or liquid nitrogen, energy will flow from water molecules to metal, then to dry ice. Metal and water will be cooled down, dry ice will be heated. And water will freeze in seconds. Once all dry ice, liquid nitrogen is gone (vaporize), metal piece and water will be heated by surrounding it materials (like air), back to ambient temperature.

There is no intelligence, nor personality in this process. It's simply flow of energy to equilibrium, when energy is spreading equally in all materials.

[Moontanman]

Hello, I'm a mainly self-educated scientist at the age of 16.

 

I have a biological question, what caused all those atoms such as hydrogen, carbon and oxygen to combine together and form an organism?

How did these atoms communicate with each other to evolve, to create muscles and store fat when all they ever needed is to sit around as oceans or gases?

How did these inanimate elements that we see daily come together to form life? I find it difficult to understand why something with nothing remotely resembling life can come together with other elements and see the need to eat, reproduce or anything.

Does this basically mean that every atom has a mind of its own? Is all that we see inanimate not so inanimate after all?

 

This is hard to ask and to answer I'm sure.

At it's most basic, life is chemistry and chemistry occurs due physics...There is no mind involved..

[crazykilla]

This is very interesting.

I find it amazing how such lifeless things can create something like a human through chemical reactions. How it responds to light and sends signals to the brain which then decides how to react to them.

How emotions such as surprise can cause reflexes such as blinking.

But then again there must be some sort of intelligence?

All these atoms have come together for some sort of reason. It can't just be chemical reactions that lead these atoms to form and perform actions. It can't just be chemical reactions that forces all the species in nature to reproduce, to make more copies of itself without a clear purpose? To seek out food and water, to grow towards the light, to continue being what we call 'alive'. To want to care for a baby that might not even be it's own (Saw that in cross-species altruism thread). To pass down some important memories (such as avoid this predator or go to the other side of the south pole just to reproduce with all the other penguins without any given purpose) through DNA into their offspring.

 

If all of these are just chemical reactions then there must be no such thing as life? It's hard to believe as I sit here with the ability to see my monitor, to move my fingers across my keyboard and to smell all the aromas around me and respond to them, think about them that all of these are just the combined work of everything within my body including all the bacteria who are also just a combination of more chemical reactions.

Are we then any different to the futuristic androids we hope to create in the near future?

And then when something kills us such as a disease all these chemical reactions just end? We are dead, yet all those chemicals are still there, all those atoms and structures but they do not continue to react in any way.

One more thing that I don't understand is how the brain stores a consciousness/memory. Is it again just chemicals in different areas/states in the brain that allow us to remember things?

[Moontanman]

This is very interesting.

I find it amazing how such lifeless things can create something like a human through chemical reactions. How it responds to light and sends signals to the brain which then decides how to react to them.

How emotions such as surprise can cause reflexes such as blinking.

But then again there must be some sort of intelligence?

All these atoms have come together for some sort of reason. It can't just be chemical reactions that lead these atoms to form and perform actions. It can't just be chemical reactions that forces all the species in nature to reproduce, to make more copies of itself without a clear purpose? To seek out food and water, to grow towards the light, to continue being what we call 'alive'. To want to care for a baby that might not even be it's own (Saw that in cross-species altruism thread). To pass down some important memories (such as avoid this predator or go to the other side of the south pole just to reproduce with all the other penguins without any given purpose) through DNA into their offspring.

 

If all of these are just chemical reactions then there must be no such thing as life? It's hard to believe as I sit here with the ability to see my monitor, to move my fingers across my keyboard and to smell all the aromas around me and respond to them, think about them that all of these are just the combined work of everything within my body including all the bacteria who are also just a combination of more chemical reactions.

Are we then any different to the futuristic androids we hope to create in the near future?

And then when something kills us such as a disease all these chemical reactions just end? We are dead, yet all those chemicals are still there, all those atoms and structures but they do not continue to react in any way.

One more thing that I don't understand is how the brain stores a consciousness/memory. Is it again just chemicals in different areas/states in the brain that allow us to remember things?

This post is one long appeal to ignorance fallacy, just because something makes no sense to you or or you can't image how it was done is irrelevant. I suggest a good search engine, google seems to work rather well.

[iNow]

I find it amazing how such lifeless things can create something like a human through chemical reactions.

Indeed. I really couldn't agree with you more. I feel the same way. It is awe inspiring and amazing.

 

But then again there must be some sort of intelligence?

Well, no. Not really. That does not follow at all, actually.

 

It can't just be chemical reactions that lead these atoms to form and perform actions.

Why not?

 

It can't just be chemical reactions that forces all the species in nature to reproduce, to make more copies of itself without a clear purpose?

Of course it can. While we may understand the underlying reasons something occurs, the concept of purpose is something else entirely. I would argue that most things in nature occur without a purpose, in fact. That makes those things no less wonderful and no less fascinating, though.

 

If all of these are just chemical reactions then there must be no such thing as life?

This is illogical. It's nonsequitur and makes no sense.

 

It's hard to believe as I sit here with the ability to see my monitor, to move my fingers across my keyboard and to smell all the aromas around me and respond to them, think about them that all of these are just the combined work of everything within my body including all the bacteria who are also just a combination of more chemical reactions.

I absolutely agree. It is hard to believe, and it's profoundly beautiful, too, isn't it? Edited October 5, 2014 by iNow

[Delta1212]

This is a big, complex area but I'll try to address as much of it as I can.

This is very interesting.

I find it amazing how such lifeless things can create something like a human through chemical reactions. How it responds to light and sends signals to the brain which then decides how to react to them.

How emotions such as surprise can cause reflexes such as blinking.

But then again there must be some sort of intelligence?

 

I'm not going to say that we can definitively rule it out, but if you start delving into subjects like emergent complexity, you'd be amazed at the kinds of behaviors that you can get from the application of some very simple mechanical rules without any intelligent input whatsoever.

 

There are a lot of things in nature that seem amazing and completely impossible without some kind of intelligence driving them until you really study the processes by which they work and suddenly, while being no less fascinating, it becomes comprehensible that this thing can be running on completely intuitive mechanical processes.

 

All these atoms have come together for some sort of reason. It can't just be chemical reactions that lead these atoms to form and perform actions. It can't just be chemical reactions that forces all the species in nature to reproduce, to make more copies of itself without a clear purpose? To seek out food and water, to grow towards the light, to continue being what we call 'alive'. To want to care for a baby that might not even be it's own (Saw that in cross-species altruism thread). To pass down some important memories (such as avoid this predator or go to the other side of the south pole just to reproduce with all the other penguins without any given purpose) through DNA into their offspring.

 

It does seem like it can't doesn't it? But from everything we know after quite a lot of study, it seems that it is. I highly, highly recommend studying how evolution works. It's a subject where, once you really "get" how it works, biology and the life sciences all make a lot more sense, and as long as you don't understand how evolution really works, there are going to be many things that are hard to really grasp on an intuitive level.

 

There's a rather famous essay on the subject that introduced the now-common phrase "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" and this is very true. If you want to understand the whys and hows of all of the absolutely amazing complexity that is life, I highly recommend tackling evolution early in the learning process.

If all of these are just chemical reactions then there must be no such thing as life? It's hard to believe as I sit here with the ability to see my monitor, to move my fingers across my keyboard and to smell all the aromas around me and respond to them, think about them that all of these are just the combined work of everything within my body including all the bacteria who are also just a combination of more chemical reactions.

 

I think that's a failure of how you (and a lot of people, frankly) define life. If you mean something special that operates on principles beyond how the rest of the universe works, then yes, there is no such thing as life. That's not how science defines life however, and there most certainly are things that grow, respond to stimuli, maintain homeostasis, reproduce, etc, so from the perspective there certainly is such a thing as life.

 

And yes, it can be hard to believe, but how easy something is to believe and how true it is aren't always related.

 

Are we then any different to the futuristic androids we hope to create in the near future?

 

Well, superficially there are plenty of differences since I don't think anyone is currently working on design robots that are built like humans down to the cellular level, but there's a reason why "biological machine" gets used to describe living things including humans.

 

And then when something kills us such as a disease all these chemical reactions just end? We are dead, yet all those chemicals are still there, all those atoms and structures but they do not continue to react in any way.

 

If you take a stool with three legs and saw one of them off, it will fall over. You can place the leg with the stool, but it still won't stand up because the configuration that allowed it to resist gravity is gone. Death is kind of like that. All the parts are still there, but the pattern that allowed the processes of life to occur has been disrupted. Sometimes the damage is internal, or in some very small but important mechanisms, so it isn't immediately apparent what the physical difference between the living and dead person is except that one is alive and the other isn't.

 

Make no mistake, though, every dead person is dead because somewhere in their body, something is as irreparably damaged as if they had their head chopped off. There isn't a magic "light switch" of life that turns off and causes you to be dead without any other physical change. If you're dead, something is broken, and if nothing is broken, you aren't dead.

 

Theoretically, if you could put everything in a dead person's body back the way it was, they'd be alive again. The problem is that, once the body has broken to the point of being unable to function, a lot of stuff that relies on the way your body works to maintain themselves start breaking as well.

 

It's akin to building a tower of wine glasses and removing a glass on the bottom row. Even if you stick it back where it was, a bunch of glasses will have started falling and shattering and getting it back the way it was gets much, much harder than just fixing the initial problem.

 

This is part of why people have been exposed to the cold are often able to be revived longer after having sustained some serious trauma. The cold slows down the chemical processes in the body, which means it takes longer for as many things to break and you have more time to fix the problem before things have gotten to the point of being unmanageable.

 

It's also why our definition of 'death' has changed over the years as medical technology has developed. The point at which a body had sustained too much damage to be put back the way it was was different 100 years ago from what it was 10 years ago, and different 10 years ago from what it is today. Someone who would have been pronounced dead may now still be savable, and we're capable of sustaining certain bodily functions even when the body has been damaged to the point of being unable to perform them itself.

 

One more thing that I don't understand is how the brain stores a consciousness/memory. Is it again just chemicals in different areas/states in the brain that allow us to remember things?

This is a complicated topic even in the context of an already complex subject. The brain is an extremely complex and highly optimized neural network. Neural networks, whether made of brain cells, electrical circuitry, computer code, dominoes or abstract mathematical equations, process information based on how they are configured, and the configuration can be altered based on feedback from experience. This means, in effect, that the neural network can learn.

 

It has proven to be a valuable tool in the field of machine learning and AI, especially as it applies to things like image recognition and language processing software where artificial neural networks have pushed the field leaps and bounds ahead of where it was at before they came into common use.

 

Your experiences, memories, emotion, personality and knowledge are all encoded in the way the network is configured. Right now there is a lot of progress being made on research into how the brain operates, to the point where we are learning to better decode brain activity. We can, to a limited degree and under certain conditions, construct an image of what your eyes are seeing based on your brain activity.

 

There was a recent experiment where they showed subjects a series of images and would ask whether the image made them think of the present or the future. Based on brain scans, after seeing the image but before the subject even knew they were going to be asked to be asked the question, researchers could predict with a high degree of accuracy which answer they would give.

 

We can also induce experiences by directly interfacing with the brain. Electrical pulses to certain areas can induces flashes of light in your peripheral vision. There's even a machine that uses electromagnetism to induce in the subject the feeling of having a profound religious experience.

 

Everything that we've learned so far about living things, including humans, has had them running on exactly the same physical principles as everything else. We're really just a very complex bundle of elements undergoing a sustained series of chemical reactions.

[/backslash/]

Okay.

 

A. By saying that we are not only chemical reactions but the result of these chemical reactions, you are only stating the obvious. I believe that this was already assumed by most people on this thread. Please keep God's body out of this. I believe in God too, but this is a biology thread. If you want to talk about God, there is a religion category.

 

B. Your experience and wisdom, as you put it, are complex patterns of neurons firing electrochemical impulses back and forth to each other. So is your imagination. If these chemical impulses were not occurring in you right now, you would be dead.

 

C. The sentence, "my chemical reactions" (which is not actually a sentence), does not mean"'chemical reaction's chemical reactions". We are not a single chemical reaction, nor do we consist entirely of the action of chemicals forming/breaking ionic bonds etc. A more accurate literal translation of "my chemical reactions" would be "a complex sequence of organic molecules' chemical reactions".

 

D. The bonding of chemicals is not an "abstract, flimsy concept". It is a process firmly grounded in reality and proved by a nearly uncountable number of highly accurate scientific experiments. If any concept is "flimsy and incomprehensible", it is yours.

 

Please, s1eep. If you are going to post your own unproved and contradictory ideas, do it in the Speculations category. Don't confuse this guy, who is asking some fair and legitimate questions for which there are already well-established answers.

Edited October 5, 2014 by /backslash/

[crazykilla]

I am pleased with all the posts on this thread as I like to have people's opinions too.

Would I be right then in saying something like the magnetic attraction between two pieces of iron is basically a simplified version of biology? An invisible attraction between things in the universe?

It does seem weird that we're just bags of chemicals, since we see everything from a single point of view as if we're in control and even the fact that the bags of chemicals are surprised to hear the idea of being bags of chemicals is even more amazing.

 

 

just because something makes no sense to you or or you can't image how it was done is irrelevant.

But I am not having trouble comprehending this, I am just trying to express my opinions of how hard it must be.

Thank you to everyone who has helped be get a better understanding in this subject.

[swansont]

!

Moderator Note

 

Various OT responses have been split off

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/85916-hijack-from-what-caused-elements-to-form-into-organisms/

 

Regardless of the formulation of the the questions in a thread, responses need to be accepted science. Non-mainstream responses are thread hijacks and have no business being anywhere but speculations. This is clearly spelled out in rule 10

 

If your response isn't based in accepted biology, it shouldn't be here.

 

[Delta1212]

I am pleased with all the posts on this thread as I like to have people's opinions too.

Would I be right then in saying something like the magnetic attraction between two pieces of iron is basically a simplified version of biology? An invisible attraction between things in the universe?

 

In the sense that biology is a specific complex subset of chemistry which is a subset of physics generally, yes. Otherwise, no, not really.

 

Biology is the study of living systems. Magnets are not alive. Science has a specific, multi-part definition to life, but when you get right down to it, the critical aspect of life is replication. Living things are basically chemical structures that are capable of making copies of themselves. Everything else that defines life is an aspect of life because it improves the system's ability to make more and better copies of itself, and those types of qualities are naturally selected for.

 

And just to cut off any thoughts of intelligence being a driving force behind evolution, because that's a common thought: let's say you have two machines, A and B. They're identical except for one thing:

 

Machine A is capable of making 9 copies of itself per hour (each of which can make 9 copies, etc).

 

Machine B is capable of making 4 copies per hour (each of which can make 4 copies, etc).

 

After 6 hours, there will be 1,000,000 copies of Machine A and less than 16,000 copies of Machine B.

 

The machines didn't know A was a better pattern and decide to become more A-like over time. A was simply better at copying itself and so, obviously, there are more of A. That's all evolution is. Traits that help an organism make copies of itself get passed down more frequently than traits that don't because, by definition, being able to make more copies of yourself means there are more likely to be more copies of you.

 

Mutation, the thing that drives variation, simply throws in new traits completely randomly. Most do absolutely nothing or wind up breaking something which is where we get genetic diseases. Those tend not to be terribly present because a broken machine is worse at making copies of itself and so, again obviously, there will be fewer copies.

 

Once in a while, some random change will actually improve the system, and the organism that has the improvement will make more copies of itself. It's important to remember, though, that any given mutation is not inherently an improvement even if we might think it is. From an evolutionary perspective an 'improvement' (or more correctly, an 'adaptation') is any trait that increases an organism's ability to make copies of itself in the environment in which it exists.

 

So, finally and still obviously, any mutation that results in an organism being better adapted will result in more copies of that organism being made, and the population of organisms will then have a larger number of those with the new adaptation until it has spread throughout the population and anyone without it has died off.

 

Let's say some day a person is born with red eyes. And they are so fabulously attractive that for some reason, given a choice between having children with a red-eyed person and a non-red-eyed person, everyone in the world would choose the red-eyed person.

 

The original red-eyed person successfully has children. All of their red-eyed children have children and so on. The number of red-eyed people keeps growing and everyone wants to pair up with a red-eyed person, spreading that trait around in the population. Given, let's just pull a number out of my rear-end, 1000 generations, everyone on Earth now had red eyes. It's a trait that is fixed in the population the same way that humans having two arms is. It's not because having red eyes is some ultimate goal that evolution had. It's because we're all descended from that one guy who was really, really good at having children. That's how evolution works.

 

(Incidentally, this example would be what is known as sexual selection, where a particular trait is selected for because it makes you more attractive to the opposite sex than those without that trait. There are other ways that a trait can be selected for, such as making you better at being not dead, what with not dead things tending to have more children than dead ones).

[andrewcellini]

I am pleased with all the posts on this thread as I like to have people's opinions too.

Would I be right then in saying something like the magnetic attraction between two pieces of iron is basically a simplified version of biology? An invisible attraction between things in the universe?

that's much too simplistic and vague, and moreover quite wrong. "life" in biology, though not completely well defined, is a property assigned to organized and compartmentalized systems like cells which have the capability to regulate their internal environment at a constant state (ion concentration for example), as well as having the ability to transform energy sources into usable forms to maintain such a state (glycolysis to make pyruvate for the krebs cycle) and response to stimuli in many ways from simpler reactions to ion concentration (such as plasmolysis in cells in a hypotonic solution) to cell signaling processes. i don't think you could call magnets alive in this sense.