How could the first living cell have evolved?

Originally posted by thegameisup

Originally posted by Chrisfishenstein
reply to post by jiggerj

 

Or maybe the easier answer to all of everything. There is actually a God who created us.

I know, I know, you don't want to hear that......But regardless of what people think about evolution, you can't have something alive from nothing unless something or someone in this case created it.

Sorry for all of you non creationists, but god is real....

Who created god, and who created the entity that created god, and so on.....

It's infinite, there is not start point.

This thread should stay away from God and focus on how life came into existence from a scientific standpoint.

Originally posted by masterp
reply to post by jiggerj

 

Life is nothing more than a chemical process. Put the right ingredients in, and out comes life.

What are the minimal ingredients required, what are the odds they would ever come together by random chance?

Originally posted by Aim64C
reply to post by jiggerj

 

Any thoughts on this?

A book you may be interested in reading; titled: "Signature in the Cell" - by Stephen C. Meyer.

To be clear, the author makes the design argument for the origin of life from a standpoint of statistical analysis.

I know some people here will throw a fit over it - but the reality is that their best theories are incapable of ruling out the design hypothesis. Though how far one wants to take the design hypothesis with regards to the process of natural selection is a separate issue.

Basically, it boils down to statistics. I won't break it all down in the forum, but it includes a lot of work done by Bill Dembski - someone of prodigy in statistics.

The book is not a typical "design vs evolution" argument. It breaks down much of the biochemistry within the primary systems of a cell and the history (and controversy) leading up to these studies. It's as much a historical work as it is a proposition for the design hypothesis.

I would, honestly, recommend it as a read to anyone interested in biology or its related fields. Just like I recommend reading "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature." - While not necessarily opposing views (the author of The Red Queen largely takes a pure-evolution stance - presumably to include the origin of life, while the author of Signature in The Cell makes the design argument largely for the origin of life). Both books are great reads and contain a lot of information along with interesting tid-bits of history and plenty of thought-provoking view-points.

Then read The Seven Daughters of Eve... that will really get your mind stirred up in a tizzy if you read it in conjunction with the other two.

Some good books, although Seven Daughters of Eve does have a design flaw which he never accounts for.
hmg.oxfordjournals.org...
mtDNA recombination does occur theoretically in humans, and has been observed actually occuring in invertebrates. Since it is a known phenomenon and it is possible in humans, it is only wise to assume it indeed has occured.

Originally posted by micmerci

Originally posted by masterp
reply to post by jiggerj

 

Life is nothing more than a chemical process. Put the right ingredients in, and out comes life.

If this is so, why haven't we been able to replicate it? Has anyone been able to "put the right ingredients" (ALL NON-LIVING) together and come up with a living organism?

There have been experiments to replicate it. The classic example is the Miller-Urey experiment which proved life can not happen by random chance.

reply to post by Aim64C


Nevermind the fact the Miller experiment created well over 20 amino acids (a fact he hid when he published), and did not discriminate in favor of left handed amino acids. It's nice to see someone who has a clear head and a clear understanding of the science.

reply to post by Chrisfishenstein


Whom created God?

Nothing? It's a faulted argument.

reply to post by jiggerj


When you put a car together, you didn't start with something that could drive you to work. The pieces had to come together, and fuel added to make it work. It's no different for cells, except that properties of chemicals allowed the instance in which they could come together with none to assemble them.

Originally posted by bias12
reply to post by Aim64C

 

Rather than using the argument of the lowest common denominator, use a positive argument. List the evidence in favor or your argument, don't simply say I can't prove mine.

I think you missed AIM64C's point. Those who use a faith based explanation understand they can't prove it, they take it on faith.
Those who believe it is a pureply physical process can not prove it. If they believe it without proof, what is that other than faith?

His point is that both camps, at this moment in time, believe on faith, not facts. A religious person may say science tells us that absence of evidence is evidence all by itself. That is their evidence. If there are two peices of paper one labelled X and one labelled Y and we are both given one peice of paper, and I look and see mine is labelled Y, I know yours is labelled X. Likewise if a physical process capable of creating life is never discovered, is that not evidence for a supernatural process?

Originally posted by Cole87
reply to post by Chrisfishenstein

 

"Or maybe the easier answer to all of everything. There is actually a God who created us."

Really.... Highlight the word "easier" - By that logic God made us - then what made God? and what made whatever made God? and what made whatever made whatever made God? Do you see me point - maybe we don't understand the beginning because we look at everything linear - as our perception of time is linear - so we search for a beginning, a start, thus a creating a creator - but that view as whole is skewed. Maybe there was never a beginning and there will never be an end, just a circle.

"The more we learn the more we realize we know nothing" - (cant remember)

Even if there is no beginning or end there is still order and a kind of code all matter/energy follows.

I'm agnostic, but I believe that "code" is what many interpret as God. That doesn't mean the code is separate from matter, but coupled with matter. You can't have matter without the code and you can't have code without matter. It's a lot like with and without, nothing and something, light and darkness, genetics and environment. One can't be defined without the other. The code is the foundation of matter, but without matter the foundation is nothing.

And consciousness is the result of the two interactions. That means consciousness permeates through matter at all levels, which, more than likely, is much bigger than we can comprehend. Humans, like I stated above, are a highly complex form of consciousness (well some of us anyway), just as a cell is a more complex form of consciousness than an atom. But on the other hand, we can't possibly be the highest form of consciousness in the universe... Or multiverse. And nothing can be beyond the code. Hence the idea of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence.

"Living" cells developing out of this code is no more mysterious to me than quarks coming together soon after the big bang to form atoms, and atoms coming together to form molecules. Everything that exists follows the code and the code is in everything that exists., including us, which is a beautiful thing if you think about it.

The kingdom of heaven is within.

Originally posted by Miraj
reply to post by jiggerj

 

When you put a car together, you didn't start with something that could drive you to work. The pieces had to come together, and fuel added to make it work. It's no different for cells, except that properties of chemicals allowed the instance in which they could come together with none to assemble them.

Good anology, so how did those car peices begin? Did they get manufactured or did the peices randomly assemble? Because much like the car parts, the peices of the cell can not randomly be created, it's impossible.

reply to post by Reflection


Explain how amino acid chains form proteins using this code.

The definition of life is a long list of qualities and abilities that include
reaction to the environment
growth
reproduction

Probably the first thing that was alive had its "food" come to it, so it only needed to reproduce and grow. The "Food" was actually the chemicals that are found in blood or sap, and those chemicals were floating around in the water next to the first living thing. Most of the chemicals found inside of cells were in the environment also, like enzymes and sugars

Various things (phospholipid membrane bubbles with chemicals inside) were reproducing chemicals like prions do, but were always one offs, or ad hoc. Then enzymes (coincidentally inside of a phospholipid membrane bubble) "read" RNA, and when the RNA string had good results it was read more often. Eventually RNA or DNA had enough good info to store the recipe for and organism and it could reproduce. That would be one first way to make an organism.

Maybe the simplest life doesn't need DNA or RNA and can reproduce and grow with only enzymes, that is to say protiens making copies of protiens and phospholipids naturally emulsifying around them.

Originally posted by Semicollegiate
The definition of life is a long list of qualities and abilities that include
reaction to the environment
growth
reproduction

Probably the first thing that was alive had its "food" come to it, so it only needed to reproduce and grow. The "Food" was actually the chemicals that are found in blood or sap, and those chemicals were floating around in the water next to the first living thing. Most of the chemicals found inside of cells were in the environment also, like enzymes and sugars

edit on 13-7-2012 by Semicollegiate because: (no reason given)

Here we have a problem, sugars, like amino acids, come in two forms. Life can ONLY use a form that is completely one form or another, in the case of Earth life ONLY pure right handed sugars can be used. Random chance will always create a sugar with a mixture of both left and right hands in equal quantities. It is a mathematic impossibility for this to occur.

Originally posted by OccamsRazor04
reply to post by Reflection

 

Explain how amino acid chains form proteins using this code.

Obviously I can't explain the step by step process or I would own a Nobel Prize, but again it's no different than quarks forming atoms and atoms forming molecules, except on a more complex level. When certain conditions come together it happens.

I assume you are implying it's the act of a creator, but I'm not attempting to prove or disprove that.

Personally, I like the idea of a creator and reject that it's some random act of atoms smashing together, but my views about "creation" are probably vastly different than Christians, Jews and Muslims.

That said, I don't like to say I believe in creation because it's usually interpreted as the biblical story of creation. I prefer to be open to new information and reserve the right to change my mind.

It's the scientist in me. I can't help it!

It is puzzling to me that people find it easy to believe that a creator magically "poofed" everything into existence yet hard to believe that simple life spontaneously arose from organic molecules. Believing neither happened and you simply admit that you don't know would be more understandable than defaulting to the creation myth. It is okay to not know how an event happened, it really is.

Originally posted by jiggerj

Sorry, I don't see consciousness as possible without form, without some kind of machine to generate thought. Also, if life were the ultimate goal, we'd have aliens waving to us from every planet. We would have picked up radio transmission from every point in the universe.

Or, the machine you are talking about (the brain) is actually an interface which allows consciousness residing somewhere else , to interact with physicality.
In the same way, someone who doesn’t know anything about how TV works, assumes that the little men he see at TV are actually inside it.
A friend of mine, told me that, at some time, he was running at a marathon, he passed out, and he “left” his body, he find himself above his body, watching the efforts of the others to wake him up. “Something” left his body, his brain and body was shut off, and that “something” was able to see, think and hear perfectly without the aid of the body.

Originally posted by jiggerj
Also, if life were the ultimate goal, we'd have aliens waving to us from every planet. We would have picked up radio transmission from every point in the universe.

They do, but you choose to believe the “talking heads” in mainstream TV and people in power, and not the innumerable witnesses, who are people like you and me, and claim to have seen UFOs and even aliens.

reply to post by Reflection


I haven't brought a creator into this, I would prefer to stick with the science. You mention quarks and atoms. I think it is a good analogy, as we can predict what will happen, even before we find particles we predict they are there and how they will act.

We can do the same with proteins and amino acid chains. We can predict that amino acid chains form in a 50-50 right to left handed mix in a neutral random scenario. We can game the system to favor one type over the other in ways that could happen naturally. There are NO conditions where amino acids will form 100% right or 100% left handed chains in nature. There are NO conditions where you get 100% right handed sugars in nature. This is the science forum, what I would like is science, an answer to how the impossible could happen, how does the impossible become possible. Saying time and conditions will not work, there are no conditions that make it possible and there is not enough time for it to be possible.

Originally posted by Orderamongchaos
It is puzzling to me that people find it easy to believe that a creator magically "poofed" everything into existence yet hard to believe that simple life spontaneously arose from organic molecules. Believing neither happened and you simply admit that you don't know would be more understandable than defaulting to the creation myth. It is okay to not know how an event happened, it really is.

How does life spontaneously arise? How do proteins form from Amino acids spontaneously? What are the very, very basic things that would be needed for abiogenesis, and how could it happen naturally? Research that.

reply to post by OccamsRazor04

The monkey and the works of Shakespeare

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In this context, "almost surely" is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the "monkey" is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces a random sequence of letters and symbols ad infinitum. The relevance of the theory is questionable—the probability of a monkey exactly typing a complete work such as Shakespeare's Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time even a hundred thousand orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low (but not zero).

I guess its like the 'there are more even numbers then there are numbers... '
thought i would post that as the poster who brought it up clearly forgot most of the info on it lol

just a interesting piece of OT knowledge

reply to post by OccamsRazor04


I apologize, I shouldn't have assumed your were implying an act of a creator.

Again though, I have to go back to the idea of a built in code or underlying intelligence to nature at every level down to the quark.

Although there is no proof of this yet, it's not an unscientific theory. Many of the greatest scientific minds, including Einstein, believed in some form of universal intelligence.

It's almost as though matter "wants", for lack of a better word, to form or evolve into more and more complex forms. IMO, the only way quarks can come together to create something as highly organized as amino acid chains is from some underlying intelligence or code. It can't happen randomly.

Consciousness is a big part of science now. I think the more we understand consciousness, the more we will understand how these highly organized systems come to be.