The Origin of Life

[Fort Fun Indiana]

Given the complexity of life

Life is not necessarily so complex as, say, a single-celled creature. So now you're running to a position where you are forced to define, "life".

The idea "other life" started it here is panspermic

No it's not... that would still be life originating here

and is evident from all indications that the complexity of even the simplest first life is far beyond what naturalism can account for in the origin of life.

This is meaningless, authoritarian, and unsupported by any sound argument or empirical evidence. Go ahead, try the argument (you shouldn't bother with the empirical evidence, there isn't any). You'll be locked into a circular fallacy faster than you can blink...
.

 

[The Irish Ram]

Singled celled organisms have had complex DNA from the beginning. Who created that code?

 

[DOTR]

Singled celled organisms have had complex DNA from the beginning. Who created that code?

A single celled organism is an incredibly complex thing in itself.

 

[DOTR]

As far as life outside earth we are in the same situation scientifically as we are with the origin of earth life. The only evidence we have is a lack of evidence of any extraterrestrial life. (NASA paper with thesis FACT A: THERE ARE NO EXTRATERRESTRIALS VISIBLE) We have all been inculcated, most visibly by Carl Sagan, with the "mediocrity concept". These arrogant anti-theists delight in saying "we are unremarkable, on an unremarkable planet". But thats simply not true by evidence and leads to the Fermi Paradox. Using the scale of the Principle of Mediocrity...

(1)"there are an estimated 200–400 billion stars in the Milky Way (2–4 × 1011) and 70 sextillion (7×1022) in the observable universe."
(2) Mediocrity, plugged into the Drake Equation says the chances of humans being the only intelligent life are 2.5×10−24. In other words there must, by probability, be other life.
(3) the universe is ~13-14 billion years old. There are much older planets than ours. We have confirmed planets (Kepler 425B for instance) in habitable zones which are 1.5 billion years older than Earth and that is just what we have observed directly.
(4) a civilization which expanded into space at just 1% the speed of light would cover the galaxy in 20 million years...a minuscule drop in the bucket in the head start planets like Kepler 425b have over Earth...never mind accounting for the more ancient planets or the multitude of civilizations we have been told must exist... link

This led Fermi to ask..."if these suppositions are true then where is everybody?". The last link I gave gives some interesting possibilities such as the Great Filter but again that leaves us as remarkable for having survived it apparently alone...(unless that filter is in our future.)

Looks to me like past,present or future..here or elsewhere in the Universe..we are it.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

Singled celled organisms have had complex DNA from the beginning. Who created that code?

Nobody, silly...humans weren't around for almost 4 billion more years. Selection created DNA.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

A single celled organism is an incredibly complex thing in itself.

So is a snowflake. So is metamorphic rock. "Complex" is relative and is a human construct, created by finite brains.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

The only evidence we have is a lack of evidence of any extraterrestrial life.

That's not completely accurate. While we may not have empirical evidence of extraterrestrial life, we have plenty of theoretical evidence that says it is extremely likely to the point that it not existing is of negligible probability.

This led Fermi to ask..."if these suppositions are true then where is everybody?"

The universe is a huge place. While life may be common, intelligent species that survive long enough to explore every corner of the universe is no doubt much less common. It would not be surprising if no two intelligent species ever met, given possible separation in distance and time.

 

[ding]

Singled celled organisms have had complex DNA from the beginning. Who created that code?

Nobody, silly...humans weren't around for almost 4 billion more years. Selection created DNA.

How exactly did selection create DNA in the first single celled organism?

 

[ChesBayJJ]

Singled celled organisms have had complex DNA from the beginning. Who created that code?

Nobody, silly...humans weren't around for almost 4 billion more years. Selection created DNA.

How exactly did selection create DNA in the first single celled organism?

I think we need to be careful about how we define the first organism and start with a definition of life. I don't think we needed a fully formed DNA molecule with hundreds or thousands of base pairs (amino acids). Just a small, self-replicating grouping of amino acids could be enough. And there is a lot of evidence for the spontaneous formation of amino acids.

 

[ding]

Singled celled organisms have had complex DNA from the beginning. Who created that code?

Nobody, silly...humans weren't around for almost 4 billion more years. Selection created DNA.

How exactly did selection create DNA in the first single celled organism?

I think we need to be careful about how we define the first organism and start with a definition of life. I don't think we needed a fully formed DNA molecule with hundreds or thousands of base pairs (amino acids). Just a small, self-replicating grouping of amino acids could be enough. And there is a lot of evidence for the spontaneous formation of amino acids.

Sure, how much code does that require?

 

[ChesBayJJ]

Singled celled organisms have had complex DNA from the beginning. Who created that code?

Nobody, silly...humans weren't around for almost 4 billion more years. Selection created DNA.

How exactly did selection create DNA in the first single celled organism?

I think we need to be careful about how we define the first organism and start with a definition of life. I don't think we needed a fully formed DNA molecule with hundreds or thousands of base pairs (amino acids). Just a small, self-replicating grouping of amino acids could be enough. And there is a lot of evidence for the spontaneous formation of amino acids.

Sure, how much code does that require?

I have no idea. I don't have a degree in this kind of stuff and read about it. Base pair triplets define the 20 amino acids that make up the proteins that build our bodies. I'd say it could be some small multiple of three.

Nucleic Acids to Amino Acids: DNA Specifies Protein | Learn Science at Scitable

 

[ChesBayJJ]

Maybe this is the minimum level of simplicity

The Simplest Living Organism Ever Has 437 Genes and Was Made in a Laboratory

The work, published Thursday in Science, describes a self-replicating bacterium invented by Venter and his team that contains just 437 genes, a "genome smaller than that of any autonomously replicating cell found in nature," according to the paper. The work sheds light on the function of the individual genes necessary to have life, and it also shows us just how little we actually know about specific gene functions.

The Simplest Living Organism Ever Has 437 Genes and Was Made in a Laboratory

And it is difficult to imagine something that complex could arise spontaneously. But I am still a believer that life arose here on earth and was not the creation of a supreme being .

And I gotta depart

 

[ding]

Singled celled organisms have had complex DNA from the beginning. Who created that code?

Nobody, silly...humans weren't around for almost 4 billion more years. Selection created DNA.

How exactly did selection create DNA in the first single celled organism?

I think we need to be careful about how we define the first organism and start with a definition of life. I don't think we needed a fully formed DNA molecule with hundreds or thousands of base pairs (amino acids). Just a small, self-replicating grouping of amino acids could be enough. And there is a lot of evidence for the spontaneous formation of amino acids.

Sure, how much code does that require?

I have no idea. I don't have a degree in this kind of stuff and read about it. Base pair triplets define the 20 amino acids that make up the proteins that build our bodies. I'd say it could be some small multiple of three.

Nucleic Acids to Amino Acids: DNA Specifies Protein | Learn Science at Scitable

It's pretty staggering. It does not lend itself to random chance.

 

[ding]

Maybe this is the minimum level of simplicity

The Simplest Living Organism Ever Has 437 Genes and Was Made in a Laboratory

The work, published Thursday in Science, describes a self-replicating bacterium invented by Venter and his team that contains just 437 genes, a "genome smaller than that of any autonomously replicating cell found in nature," according to the paper. The work sheds light on the function of the individual genes necessary to have life, and it also shows us just how little we actually know about specific gene functions.

The Simplest Living Organism Ever Has 437 Genes and Was Made in a Laboratory

And it is difficult to imagine something that complex could arise spontaneously. But I am still a believer that life arose here on earth and was not the creation of a supreme being .

And I gotta depart

"When it comes to the origin of life, we have only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility...Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved one hundred years ago by Louis Pasteur, Spellanzani, Reddy and others. That leads us scientifically to only one possible conclusion -- that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God...I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation arising to evolution." - George Wald, Scientific American, August, 1954.

 

[ding]

"I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence...

Believe me, everything that we call chance today won't make sense anymore. To me it is clear that we exists in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance." Kaku

 

[ding]

 

[The Irish Ram]

Singled celled organisms have had complex DNA from the beginning. Who created that code?

Nobody, silly...humans weren't around for almost 4 billion more years. Selection created DNA.

Ask Bill Gates if digital codes can invent themselves. A code has a coder.
We have our alien life force. He has been here before. He seeded this world. He is called God Almighty in His world. We are His children. And He promised that if you seek Him, you will find Him. Seek Him...

 

[IsaacNewton]

Keep in mind, odds and probabilities are only predictions. You could pick up a penny and flip it a hundred times and get heads a hundred times. There is nothing to say an event needs billions of instances to produce something. One may have been enough, or fifty. It is most likely there were pools with trillions of amino acids floating around, which are produced naturally in the universe, where countless interactions could have occurred to produce self-replicating life.

But the point is it could have happened with the first interaction as easily as the trillionth. It may have taken one day or a million years of chemical reactions, bonds, broken bonds, reformed bonds, over and over. It may have happened and that life died the same day. The reactions continued until it happened again. All is possible. The only thing we know is at least one of the events led to a never ending self-replicating single prokaryote cell with no nucleus, just chemicals in an enclosed reaction that replicates itself.

 

[DOTR]

A single celled organism is an incredibly complex thing in itself.

So is a snowflake. So is metamorphic rock. "Complex" is relative and is a human construct, created by finite brains.

Are you kidding me? Of course it is a construct. We construct words to convey ideas. "complex" has a meaning and being relative doesn't make it less meaningful. "Warm" is only relative to some temperature.
You know what isnt a construct? A single celled organism.

 

[Mousterian]

We struggle to understand how life arose on Earth, because our puny brains cannot handle huge numbers, like 4 billion years, gazillions of chemical transactions, and the possibilities of a complex environment.
So we cling to a god invented by ignorant goat-herders, who did not understand simple physics.