Theories of Abiogenesis

[pantheory]

I answered a question in the Lion's Den and thought my reply also belonged in this  Science vs. Religion forum so I posted it here. It is true that a major problem fundamentalist Christians have with Evolution theory is that there is no abiogenesis theory within it. They rightfully ask how did life start? Science has many related theories but little or no real evidences so far to support any of these theories over the multitude of others. For this I think one should be familiar with some of these theories to explain the possibilities of abiogenesis to any who might be interested.

Justus quote: (from Lion's Den)

 " ......I have 0% doubt they you don't know of any plausible theory for abiogenesis seeing that living matter can not evolve from non-living matter."

 My answer:

There are a great many different theories of abiogenisis. Nearly all mainstream related theories relate to life first evolving here on Earth roughly 3.8 billion years ago. The oldest fossilized microbial life was determined to be about 3.6 billion years old. The Earth itself has been determined to be about 4.543 billion years old. The most well known abiogenisis theory involves life forming from organic compound chemistry such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, water (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, etc.and other hydrogen compounds, the precursors of lipids (fatty cell walls), carbohydrates, (sugars, cellulose), amino acids (protein metabolism), and nucleic acids, the basis of RNA life -- viruses are a prime example. In some classifications viruses are not life because they cannot intake food or replicate without parasitic metabolism and proliferation inside cellular DNA life

The oldest abiogenisis theories related to life evolving in relatively quiet tidal pools having all the necessary chemistries of the oceans and atmosphere in those beginning times here on Earth.  Some of these compounds accordingly rained down from atmospheric interactions involving lightning and combinations of atmospheric gases that do not exist in today's atmosphere. There are many variations of this theory. Another theory involves life evolving around volcanic vents involving sulfur and water, either on land, or in the ocean. These are a more modern theories.

The abiogenisis theory that I think is more likely involves life forming off the Earth within large comets, or inside matter within interstellar clouds, the precursors of the sun. These theories where the origin of life was created somewhere other than the Earth can collectively go by the name Panspermia, even if it was a more local rather than a universal occurrence.  The advantage of these theories is that it allows much more time, billions of years longer, for life to have evolved within interstellar clouds so that beginning life already would have been long established in its most elementary form before it rained down on Earth during the formation of our solar system.

Another interesting abiogenesis theory that I like involves another planet the size of Mars that pre-existed the solar system in interstellar space. It would have been a primarily icy planet on its outside. Here life accordingly could have formed in its interior in a warmer region around a long-expired star or within interstellar clouds. It could have been a planet from a stellar system much older than the sun. The material from which it came coalesced  to form our sun and solar system. Because this planet was far older than Earth, life could have first evolved on it, which could allow possibly twice as long for life to form and evolve in the first place. In the formation of our solar system this planet could have collided with the newly forming Earth, raining down its water and life onto the volcanic Earth's surface creating much of the surface oceans and seeding it with beginning life. The material from this collision formed the moon. Such a collision of a Mar's sized planet with the early Earth is now the prevailing theory concerning the formation of the moon. If this theory is valid evidence for early life should also exist on the moon's interior, far enough away from its surface where the sun's unblocked radiation could destroy it. Such evidence should also be found on the interior of Mars because it too is close enough to have been bombarded with some of this beginning life from such a relatively nearby collision. At that time Mars had water oceans and a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide, fruital grounds for beginning DNA microbial life.

Even though possibly many theories in modern biology and physics may have flaws in them or be generally wrong, when you look at the odds for one of the major or minor theories of abiogenesis being valid, the odds go up greatly that one of the countless version of abiogenesis would be correct. 

The god of the gaps just does not cut it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

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

[wellnamed]

3 hours ago, pantheory said:

The abiogenisis theory that I think is more likely involves life forming off the Earth within large comets, or inside matter within interstellar clouds, the precursors of the sun.

 

Just curious, what makes you think this is more likely? I'm mostly ignorant but just from basic chemistry it seems like you just need the opportunity for various elements (and eventually compounds) to come into contact under the right conditions, and it's not clear to me why those conditions should be more likely off-planet. I guess I could imagine certain chemical combinations needing conditions that might be easier to arrange within stars or nebulae or whatever, but is there evidence for that regarding the specific compounds needed for abiogenesis?

[pantheory]

3 hours ago, wellnamed said:

 

Just curious, what makes you think this is more likely? I'm mostly ignorant but just from basic chemistry it seems like you just need the opportunity for various elements (and eventually compounds) to come into contact under the right conditions, and it's not clear to me why those conditions should be more likely off-planet. I guess I could imagine certain chemical combinations needing conditions that might be easier to arrange within stars or nebulae or whatever, but is there evidence for that regarding the specific compounds needed for abiogenesis?

 

You're right. Most biologists and theorists in this field think that life first evolved here on Earth. Why? because it seems like the simplest explanation. The reason why I have doubts about this is that the simplest life we know of today is still very complicated. An example is prokaryotes. Prokaryotes include the simplest of bacteria and cyanobacteria. They are a group of microscopic single-celled organisms that have no distinct nuclear membrane or other specialized organelles. Although they are relatively simple compared to other single celled organisms they still are extremely complicated when one looks at all of its individual parts, their specialized functions, and its organized functions. It seems to me and a number of others that propose panspermia ideas, that for life to have formed in comets long before our solar system or from interstellar cloud matter of our galaxy, could provide as much as twice the time for the simplest of life to have evolved all the complications that we can now observe and still can't explain the full extent of their metabolic and other life functions involved.

As far as chemicals needed, the organic compounds that make up life on Earth have been observed in other parts of the solar system and around other stars, and in other galaxies to some extent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_evolutionary_history_of_life

 

But as I said above, I particularly like the idea that the Mars sized planet or proto-planet that according to theory collided with the Earth to create the moon, was the place where well-developed single cell life already existed and had maybe billions of years to develop their complications before that planet collided with the proto-Earth to create our moon. Do I think this is the right answer?  probably not but the idea seems intriguing.

 

 

  

[♦ Fuego ♦]

The imagery of life coming from a comet to Earth reminds me of the sperm and egg, though clearly not an exact kind of match.

 

[Justus]

 

 

On 3/5/2019 at 4:38 PM, pantheory said:

Justus quote: (from Lion's Den)

 " ......I have 0% doubt they you don't know of any plausible theory for abiogenesis seeing that living matter can not evolve from non-living matter."

 

Of course, that doesn't mean that living matter couldn't have evolved out of non-living matter but it does mean that the odds that it did are the same that Jesus  could have spontaneously became living matter out of non-living matter after his death.  

 

While it would seem impossible to say that one could be true and the other false,  I have 0% doubt it is. 

 

[pantheory]

2 hours ago, Justus said:

Of course, that doesn't mean that living matter couldn't have evolved out of non-living matter but it does mean that the odds that it did are the same that Jesus could have spontaneously became living matter out of non-living matter after his death.  

 

While it would seem impossible to say that one could be true and the other false,  I have 0% doubt it is. 

 

 

My favorite trick was his turning water into wine. I'd surely like to be able to do that. But the multiplication of fish in a basket to serve the multitudes was also a very good hat trick too. And curing the lepers, enabling the crippled to walk and bringing back the dead were also tricks worthy of mention. And you're right. Jesus himself rising from the dead also deserves an honorable mention. And as you might realize, I would not be disappointed if at least some of this were possible.

 

[wellnamed]

1 hour ago, Justus said:

Of course, that doesn't mean that living matter couldn't have evolved out of non-living matter but it does mean that the odds that it did are the same that Jesus  could have spontaneously became living matter out of non-living matter after his death. 

 

There are two important differences between these two propositions: The amount of time over which we are measuring the possibility of some outcome occurring and the difference in specificity between "living" and "non-living" as categories of matter and "alive" and "dead" as states of an individual.  But really there's close to being the same difference.

 

So, the odds of abiogenesis taking place over some short period of time in some specific place (say 3 days in Jerusalem :P) is vanishingly small, but we have a lot more than 3 days and a much wider possible context, and the processes involved aren't expected to be at all similar to what one would imagine a resurrection would look like, because abiogenesis is not about changing the state of a pre-existing complex organism, it's about the possibility of slowly increasing complexity over a long period of time.

 

 

[disillusioned]

On 3/6/2019 at 9:06 PM, Justus said:

 

Of course, that doesn't mean that living matter couldn't have evolved out of non-living matter but it does mean that the odds that it did are the same that Jesus  could have spontaneously became living matter out of non-living matter after his death.  

 

While it would seem impossible to say that one could be true and the other false,  I have 0% doubt it is. 

 

 

Justus, isn't your position that Jesus' resurrection was an actual, literal, miracle? As such, isn't it supposed to be something that couldn't happen without divine intervention? So the odds of it happening spontaneously, on your position, if I understand it correctly, should be zero. Otherwise, why call it a miracle? But here you seem to be saying that it has a non-zero probability of happening naturally. Well, which is it? A miracle, or a natural event?

 

It seems to me that arguing that Jesus' resurrection may have happened naturally would be counterproductive from a Christian perspective.

 

Also, abiogenesis is altogether different from what you propose here, as wellnamed has pointed out.

[LogicalFallacy]

On ‎3‎/‎7‎/‎2019 at 5:11 PM, pantheory said:

Jesus himself rising from the dead also deserves an honorable mention.

 

Kind of an aside to the topic, but Jesus resurrection is only 'bigly' if you already accept it so.

 

What about Lazarus, the man who was thrown into a cave with the prophets bones that lived again, all the people who rose and walked about Jerusalem?

 

Apparently Jesus resurrection proves he was God.... sooo what about Enoch - that guy didn't even die, neither Did Elijah… are they super gods?

[pantheory]

Here is another related link. This is not necessarily a theory of abiogenisis but it would considerably lengthen the time for life to evolve by more than a factor of 2. If elementary life evolved here on Earth, the present mainstream theory, then it only had no more than a few hundred million years for its genesis. If instead it evolved somewhere else beyond the Earth it could have seemingly had plenty of time to evolve into the great complexities that exist in the simplest of present-day elementary life. In my opening post I discussed such possibilities, but this is another possibility that I don't recall mentioning. Earth-life could have evolved within or around another star system, now burnt out, or in outer space in a stellar free comet or asteroid created from such an expired stellar system. In these scenarios life would have seemingly had plenty of time to evolve the great complexities we now observe in the simplest of life forms.

 

https://www.space.com/interstellar-panspermia-earth-life-oumuamua.html

 

 

 

[Justus]

On 3/5/2019 at 4:38 PM, pantheory said:

Justus quote: (from Lion's Den)

 " ......I have 0% doubt they you don't know of any plausible theory for abiogenesis seeing that living matter can not evolve from non-living matter."

 My answer:

 

Well, I take your answer to be yes it can.

 

However, my point was that matter, being either the individual atom having mass or substance formed by atoms is neither living nor non-living and in such there is no point where atoms became living matter.   Life isn't the result of non-living matter becoming living matter but is the manifestation of a living system in matter.  

 

[Justus]

On 3/6/2019 at 10:14 PM, wellnamed said:

and the difference in specificity between "living" and "non-living" as categories of matter and "alive" and "dead" as states of an individual.

 

So would you give your definition of 'living' matter?  Since there are individual organisms are they not considered to be alive?