Abiogenesis - what are the chances, really?

[norseamd]

Sitting at my computer I am not moving

You are in movement however. Not only you going over a hundred kilometers per hour in one consideration that does not even take into account the galactical orbiting of Sol around the Milky Way galactic core.

 

[Paul98]

You are in movement however. Not only you going over a hundred kilometers per hour in one consideration that does not even take into account the galactical orbiting of Sol around the Milky Way galactic core.

No, it's purely relative, that frame of reference is just as real and valid as the frame of reference where I am not moving, or where I am moving at .99c

So yes in that frame of reference I am moving at some velocity. But in my own frame of reference I am not moving and those galaxies, the sun,... are moving.

What is moving and what isn't is relative not absolute, so you can't just say I am in movement, you would have to specify with respect to what. And even then it's that they are in relative movement to each other, not that one is moving and one isn't, that depends on the frame of reference.

 

[Moonbeam]

While reading this thread I ate several Fig Newtons or at least I think I did.

 

[Moonbeam]

Humans: experimenting with this stuff over a few decades. Maybe a few millions of test tubes. Maybe.

Earth: even at 1 test tube worth of "stuff" per year, over the first million years, that's a million opportunities. No life on Earth for the first 700 million years. That's an awful lot of time. Now, if we hypothesis that life began in the ocean (not necessarily true, but let's say it did) - and it probably occurred near the surface where there's sunlight; say in the top 20 meters. Or, maybe it occurred near volcanic vents. But, let's say surface. Surface area of the Earth is 510 million square kilometers. 5.10x10^6 sq km. Ocean is 2/3 of the surface, so roughly 3.4 x 10^6 sq km of ocean. Volume; multiply by 20 meters, so 3.4x10^6 * 10*3 *10*3 sq meters, times 20 meters = 6.8 x 10^13 cubic meters. A typical test tube is 25ml; let's fill it 60% full = 15ml. A ml is 1cm by 1cm by 1cm. 100 cm in a meter, so there are 100^3 cm in a cubic meter = 1x10^6 test tubes worth of "stuff" in a cubic meter.

So.. in the first 700 million years, just considering the conditions in the top 20 meters of the ocean, there have been 6.8x10^13 * 10^6 * 7 * 10^8 test tubes worth of "stuff." That's 47,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 "experiments."* Billions upon billions of lightning strikes in all sorts of varying conditions, thermal vents for sudden heat, various concentrations of different elements and molecules from run-off, etc.

*I probably screwed up somewhere.

Yup, all of the things that could have happened did so long before test tubes were invented and I'm not even sure there's enough sand on the Earth to make that many.

 

[Greenman]

Humans: experimenting with this stuff over a few decades. Maybe a few millions of test tubes. Maybe.

Earth: even at 1 test tube worth of "stuff" per year, over the first million years, that's a million opportunities. No life on Earth for the first 700 million years. That's an awful lot of time. Now, if we hypothesis that life began in the ocean (not necessarily true, but let's say it did) - and it probably occurred near the surface where there's sunlight; say in the top 20 meters. Or, maybe it occurred near volcanic vents. But, let's say surface. Surface area of the Earth is 510 million square kilometers. 5.10x10^6 sq km. Ocean is 2/3 of the surface, so roughly 3.4 x 10^6 sq km of ocean. Volume; multiply by 20 meters, so 3.4x10^6 * 10*3 *10*3 sq meters, times 20 meters = 6.8 x 10^13 cubic meters. A typical test tube is 25ml; let's fill it 60% full = 15ml. A ml is 1cm by 1cm by 1cm. 100 cm in a meter, so there are 100^3 cm in a cubic meter = 1x10^6 test tubes worth of "stuff" in a cubic meter.

So.. in the first 700 million years, just considering the conditions in the top 20 meters of the ocean, there have been 6.8x10^13 * 10^6 * 7 * 10^8 test tubes worth of "stuff." That's 47,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 "experiments."* Billions upon billions of lightning strikes in all sorts of varying conditions, thermal vents for sudden heat, various concentrations of different elements and molecules from run-off, etc.

*I probably screwed up somewhere.

Certainly a sensible approach to understanding the limits of experimentation, but you left out intelligence. The experiments being done now aren't random as they were a few billion years ago, they're directed in search of a particular outcome, an outcome that we understand, reverse engineering is always easier than developing the prototype. That we can't crack the code even with billions of working models makes me think there is something fundamentally wrong with the theory. Somehow the breath of life eludes us, though we think ourselves masters of it.

 

[Moonbeam]

Certainly a sensible approach to understanding the limits of experimentation, but you left out intelligence. The experiments being done now aren't random as they were a few billion years ago, they're directed in search of a particular outcome, an outcome that we understand, reverse engineering is always easier than developing the prototype. That we can't crack the code even with billions of working models makes me think there is something fundamentally wrong with the theory. Somehow the breath of life eludes us, though we think ourselves masters of it.

I believe we have already created a synthetic DNA for a living thing from parts.

 

[Mark R]

Every single living thing on earth shares the same fundamental genetic code. 3 DNA "letters", read in groups of 3 to form 22 distinct codes.

This fact suggests that whatever prompted life to form happened only once (or at least, it survived only once).

If there was only 1 single abiogenesis event on earth in its history, whatever event it was must have been fantastically improbable.

 

[IronWing]

Every single living thing on earth shares the same fundamental genetic code. 3 DNA "letters", read in groups of 3 to form 22 distinct codes.

This fact suggests that whatever prompted life to form happened only once (or at least, it survived only once).

If there was only 1 single abiogenesis event on earth in its history, whatever event it was must have been fantastically improbable.

Not necessarily. Once widespread replication gets rolling, the process hogs resources preventing similar events from producing similar results. Later occurrences would have little material to work with. Dawkins' The Selfish Gene covers this extensively and is worth reading.

 

[Greenman]

I believe we have already created a synthetic DNA for a living thing from parts.

But not life, that's my point. Many claim to have the inside track on how it happened, but none have been able to create a living cell from the primordial muck.

 

[SMOGZINN]

I think people somehow think that life started all at once. Like there was a sudden *BAMF* and a yeast cell was floating around a lifeless ocean. That is not what happened. There was lots and lots of little events that occurred. Many of these events happened separately from each other and then combined at a later date to create life.

We have to first learn to re-create each of these events, and when we have done that we will still have to learn how to put them together to make life.

 

[JEDIYoda]

Yeah stuff like that, but I don't find much merit in silly comparisons like that. They attempt to sell their ideas that way and I don't find it impressive. I am more impressed by someone simply explaining the things that would have to happen, and in what order, for the simplest first step toward life to take place and then giving a probability for that. I am under the impression that its still one hell of a long shot, even if not as hard as making a 747 in a junk yard or something like that.

And if somebody could do that you still would find a reason to not believe.....so please stop being disingenuous.............

 

[norseamd]

And if somebody could do that you still would find a reason to not believe.....so please stop being disingenuous.............

When did he ever say anything at all about god?

Would be nice if you could not pollute this discussion with any mad hatting.

 

[flexy]

You see, this is exactly what has me thinking. Stuff like this. I think about these things and I think about the religious when they say "silly" things like the 747-whir wind thing, or God creating humans from clay or dirt. I used to write those things off as silly, but at the same time I believed things like what you said above, a cloud of hydrogen giving rise to all we have now.
I know there are explanations, physical explanations for these things. But that doesn't make me any less suspicious that I might have been missing something really big.
If taking the universe at face value today and comparing our experiences to a cloud of hydrogen, you see an amazing contrast between the two. Using time as an excuse, and chance as a magic wand, the creation somehow seems less impressive, but not to me. I look at the two pictures side by side and I realize that there is something I've been missing. There is something alive about reality. There is something conscious and intentional happening. Dead matter isn't dead. If you take "time" out of the equation and take things at face value, then that cloud of hydrogen has all the handiwork of God.
It would all be matter in motion and nothing but chance happenings if not for my ability to speak on the contrary. These things are special because I say they are. A creation that speaks to itself, sings to itself, thinks about itself and loves itself is not a dead creation. It is alive...all of it.

The "backwards logic" by creationists I think as incredibly annoying.

From that P.o.V, for example this thread, in its uniqueness of a certain arrangement of letters and words. would be "mathematically and statistically almost impossible", before it came into existence. But of course this doesn't make the existence of this thread a "magical event".

(Or another example I always like to visualize, if you throw a glass at the floor and it shatters into 1000s of pieces all in a unique position. A one-time event which certainly cannot be reproduced 1:1 since every glass will shatter differently).

I don't have a problem with the idea of life being created from "nothing", eg. inorganic --> organic, because it DID happen. Even it was an extremely "unlikely" freak thing to happen, the universe is big enough so I am certain it happened many, many more times as well.

Not wanting to run danger talking New Age blahblah, but "things in the universe" have a tendency to organize itself. (Or at least what our human perception recognizes as "order" as opposed to "chaos").

For example, galaxies, star systems, planets. It's not just a pile of dirt floating randomly through the universe..there is "order" and sense in things like planetary systems, gravity, whatever.

And from that point of view it also makes sense that inorganic matter at some point became "higher organized" in a sense that life (and then from it also MIND) was borne.

Isn't, for example, a galaxy where stars and the planets have a relationship to each other and form sort-of an "entity" also almost behaving like an organism? What about nebulas where stars "are born" or the life cycle of stars? I mean all this is already THERE. The jump to "organic life" doesn't seem that large a jump any more.

An universe with an order (where things tend towards order) IMHO makes more sense and is probably also more likely than an entirely chaotic universe where nothing is in relation to anything else.

 

[Caravaggio]

Every single living thing on earth shares the same fundamental genetic code. 3 DNA "letters", read in groups of 3 to form 22 distinct codes.

Err...How exactly would base-pairing work if there were only three units?
There are four 'units':

ADENINE
CYTOSINE
GUANINE
THYMINE.

A pairs with T, C with G, hence " Base Pairs". It is that basic.


Uracil can be regarded as a breakdown product.