cicerone imposter wrote:I believe this is relevant:
The Origin of Life On Earth; Scientific American Magazine; October 1994; by Orgel; 8 Page(s)
When the earth formed some 4.6 billion years ago, it was a lifeless, inhospitable place. A billion years later it was teeming with organisms resembling blue-green algae. How did they get there? How, in short, did life begin? This long-standing question continues to generate fascinating conjectures and ingenious experiments, many of which center on the possibility that the advent of self-replicating RNA was a critical milestone on the road to life.
Before the mid-17th century, most people believed that God had created humankind and other higher organisms and that insects, frogs and other small creatures could arise spontaneously in mud or decaying matter. For the next two centuries, those ideas were subjected to increasingly severe criticism, and in the mid-19th century two important scientific advances set the stage for modern discussions of the origin of life.
Hi CI,
I couldn't agree more. The conjectures are fascinating. But that's about all they are.
There are considerable problems to be addressed when postulating living organisms generating themselves out of non-living matter. The wishful thinking from those who suppose that it MUST have, is really nothing more than that because they haven't provided one sliver of proof that such a thing has EVER occurred.
Let's look at just one of many of the problems.
Picture the simplest 'living' thing imaginable (and nearly all would grant that such a simplistic thing as I'm proposing could not exist, but for the sake of argument ....) a single self replicating molecule , an xNA molecule of some simple variety, surrounding by a very simple membrane or protective layer. It can't get any simpler. One molecule, one membrane.
Now before this thing formed, what did we have? A self replicating molecule alone which has just formed.
And moments later, it is surrounded by a protective membrane. How do we suppose this happened?
(We will assume for the moment that the xNA of sufficient complexity to perform basic life functions could have formed itself. By no means is this proven in reality, but let us assume...........)
a)Did this molecule, as it was forming, already contain the code to generate a membrane around itself?
Or
b)did the membrane/protective layer do this of it's own accord?
Let us suppose that a)
the xNA had the code to generate it's protective layer. Where did the information (code) come from to form this layer? Did it just appear accidentally as the xNA formed for the first time? Information doesn't just show up, does it?
And if this xNA does not have the code to generate it's own protection, how long do we suppose it could 'survive' intact in the chemical environment that supposedly produced it without degrading?
Or let us suppose that b)
the xNA did NOT have the code to generate it's protective membrane/layer.
The membrane formed independently of the molecule and surrounded the xNA molecule of it's own accord.
How a simple membrane, (semi-permeable enough to be functional and useful in obtaining nutrients and disposing of waste while protecting it's cargo of xNA from chemical annihalation) manages to do this, of course, is another fairy tale for grownups in itself. But let us assume......
Since the xNA lacks the ability to reproduce the layer in the next 'generation', this is doomed to be a one-time phenomenon.
The xNA will replicate itself, the new molecule will have no membrane and we are going backward instead of maintaining or moving forward.
It's a classic chicken or egg question which the proponents of this marvelous spontaneous generation must answer. Which came first the molecule, or the membrane?
As I said, this is one of many such hurdles that are 'assumed out of existence' by those who insist that it MUST have happened, because they desire it to be so. Not that there is any evidence to support that it HAS happened. There's not.
