How did the first form of life on earth come to be?

No one knows.

Me too, however, I think that youve steeredGunga away because his openings are less speculative and more assuring in his world view.

We have HYPOTHESES, we dont have any good theories yet. I can point you to som resources on the subject, most of which are geochemical cookbooks" but fail in all cases to ascribe the neergy transfer that turned organic chemistry to biochemistry.

I ddint catch the name Karl Pilkington so I looked im up to discover that hes Ricky Gervais' foil in "An Idiot ABroad". Idont think that gunga is like Pilkington, hes more like Thomas Edison AFTER he lost the AC/DC wars

heres a good accessable compilation of many of the ideas on how life began.
Its a popular science site so its not all full of backing any one.

http://www.livescience.com/13363-7-theories-origin-life.html


I favor a mix of several of these , heavily favoring the "clay and Primordial soups=on". Clays have a bait of taking the shapes of theor basic chemistry (n that case silicate hydrates). Chemicals like the entire sequence of rotatory nucleic acids will often just attach themselves to a clay body and achieve a "Spiral shape" .This is all dependent upon frequent drying and wetting in the mix.

We came from another planet. We are an alien experiment.

I've always assumed that, way back in the primordial soup days, there was far more of a blurring between the animate and inanimate. It's hard for us to imagine similarity between a slug and a piece of coal, let alone a human and a piece of coal. Even a bacterium and a chemical element are miles apart for us.

When I read Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable, he made it sound like, way before even the bacteria stage, "life" at its origin was simply another chemical, a collection of various elements. All compounds, like a piece of computer code, have a basic function they wish to complete. The code of water is that it "wants" to be liquid below 100 degrees celsius and transform into gas at above 100 degrees celsius. Whatever the compound of life was/is, its want was even simpler - to split; to divide infinitely.

I can follow Dawkins' argument that all life forms subsequent to life at this chemical stage are merely protective shells for that self same chemical which still resides within us as DNA or chromosomes or whatever the exact term is. What I struggle with is how the chemical became a cell and then how cells "decided" to group together and grow a membrane. That's a collossal jump.

Farmerman - thanks for the link. I like the Electric Spark theory as lightning can potentially create amino acids - the chemical I'm talking about above. I wish I could understand the clay theory you favour but I can't grasp it as it appears in this article - perhaps you could elucidate?

As for panspermia... I'm not a fan. It's always bugged me, this idea, as, surely, microbes on a piece of rock from space would be destroyed as the rock burnt its way through earth's atmosphere - no?

More to the point, if it all comes from microbes on interstellar rocks, it still leaves the question of where those microbes came from.

clay is a swlctive adsorbent. Stuff sticks to its surface. Amino acids can form and be selectively adsorbed on a whole different batch of clays all in one location. Clay minerals look like little "pizzas" and the stack in sequences based upon their silicate chemitru an the radius of specific alkali bases that form the core of any clay. These stacked clays can adsorb and desorb based on Ph and ionic strengths of the water (look up zeta potential for a more techy explanation)
It all has to do with selective "Sticking and releasing of chemicals by clay layers" nucleic acids are easily formed in a puddle but stacking them in order to form a longer sequence of stacked nucleotides is the
trick. There are whole series of nucleic acids besides RNA and DNA, did these "build" ? to act as an intermediate compound for coding

proteins or did they just go along for the ride as Stephen Gould said.

Gould always said that DNA acted for nothing except to act as a "bookkeeper" of evolution. He argued tht so much of life my hve already been going on in simple cells and primitive multicells BEFORE Rna and DNA were even formed. Thus, he reasoned, the nucleic acids dont really DO anythong but are merely recording the state of the organism when itt evolved into that state.

Now, however weve lerned to manipulate genes and turn on and off specific trait in the phenotyep. SO maybe its both

6 but there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
7 And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

(Genisis Chapter, 2)

... only joking

Actually in the Vulgate, the word "clay" is used re: The formation of Adaam. God was a geochemist doncha know?

Just now noticed this thread, sorry for the delay.

Without a time machine the best tool we have as to natural history type conjectures is logic.

Logic indicates that the original creation of the RNA/DNA system which is the basis for all meaningful life had to be the work of a single pair of hands. Logic also dictates that it is highly unlikely that the original creation of DNA/RNA occurred on this particular planet.

Logic also dictates that an all-powerful and well-intentioned God would not create biting flies, mosquitos, ticks, chiggers, and the other creatures of Pandora's box, and that an omniscient God would not need to go through 50+ species of horses or elephants to get to the one he wanted. When you get to a point a few thousand or a few tens of thousands of years ago on this particular planet, what you see looks more like what you'd expect if the engineering and re-engineering of complex life forms had become a sort of a cottage industry with more than one pair of hands involved.

First life on this planet could mean the Cambrian explosion or whatever if anything existed prior to that. In either case such life was either created here or brought here (deliberate act), or simply ended up here via some random cosmic event (splash saltation). In the case of humns and/or Cenozoic mammals my guess would be that "brought here" was most likely.

A bold leap without any bases on which to stand. Was the first life even based on what we see today? was there a pre RNA world? how do you know?
Logic, as you must know by now, often has nothing to do with the laws of science

whereas, adaptation to a continuously changing environment WOULD produce all the myriad forms of ancestrl species.

PS, ticks ere fee living non-parasitic species in the lower Cenozoic, they just adapted to changing environments and hosts (We have lots of evidence that allows such a conclusion)

"Splash saltation" would not have a genetic history associated with a "Splashee". Yet, it must be noted that almost all ancient forms of organisms, (either animals or plnts" hve much longer totl genomes than do their modern derived forms.

The experiments with fruit flies say no. You'd get adaptation within different kinds of creatures, but not new creatures. I'd have to see what evidence you might have for non-parasitic ticks and there's no way to picture a mosquito living otherwise than he presently does.