@@hattielankford4775 not really. It's just that the environment changed and now a new life would have to compete with other organisms. The original organism didn't have to compete.
Exactly, Abiogenesis is probably not going to occur once again cause there are organisms that are already there to consume any form of organic material.
@@captainstabbin5374 Abiogenesis is not [Yet] a Theory. It's currently still only a well-founded Hypothesis, with several Competing [Scientific] Explanations concerning the EXACT Methods & Processes involved in the Start of Biological Life On Earth. We don't YET have enough information to say with 100% Confidence Exactly WHICH Methods & Processes Happened and in Exactly WHICH Order. But we are Quite Very Close, and Get Closer & Closer All the Time. It has already been demonstrated that ALL of the Necessary Amino-Acids needed to form Both RNA and even DNA can form, & accrue, naturally into chains under the proper natural conditions. And it has already been demonstrated that PROTO-Cells, Pre-Biological "Life" composed of little else except Natural Lipids [in a Natural Vesicle] in an Aqueous Environment, could eventually accumulate RNA (including Self-Replicating Misfolded RNA) through Charge-Based Exchanging of Molecules, that then would have allowed it to "Change [imperfectly] Over Time" because once a Lipid Vesicle gets large enough it Naturally Splits into Two Smaller Lipid Vesicles.
@@captainstabbin5374because a scientific theory and a theory are 2 different things. Scientific theory means an explanation of a natural fact/phenomenon
There is also the fact that if abiogenesis does happen again, that new life is going to have to square off against the old life that is far more complex & developed than itself.
Yeah, imagine coming in this late to the game with no mitochondria, or derived cell wall. In short, you're going to get outcompeted in almost any niche. Even viruses have hyper simple "life" forms covered. It's like being able to choose any sport at the Olympics, but you were born that morning, and you need to get a medal to keep competing.
Yeah, it would be like dropping a small band of human infants into Africa and then being surprised that they don't construct London in a week, but instead turn into hyena poo in a day.
Probably IS happening all the time but those first steps of life can't compete immediately with the life that's already here. Having a 4 billion year head start is quite an advantage.
Yeah this seems to me to be the more plausible answer. But it does beg the question: In laboratories with stacks of sterilized Petri dishes, does life ever spontaneously emerge? If a technician picks one up and sees microbes, my guess is they just toss it out and assume it was just contaminated. What if it was new life? Haha
@@truthsmiles I wonder about this too, but then I remember that when life got started on Earth it was nothing like the agar that we usually expect to find in a Petri dish. It was very warm, there was an abundance of methane and almost no free oxygen. Those conditions don't exist any more, and they may have been essential for terrestrial life to get started. Or, maybe we have great conditions for abiogenesis (neglecting the issue of competition) but it's the kind of event that happens only once every few thousand years. Well, that's an abundant opportunity, if we're looking at half a billion years on primordial Earth, but hard to convince grad students to stay over the weekend to watch in case it happens.
@@truthsmiles it doesn't actually require just like, a petri dish, it requires a bunch of energy and heat and humidity and conditions that we do not want to create in a lab
We study microorganism a lot, you just have to take a sample of dirt and look at it. There also would be a very strong distiction between new life and conventional life, we would have seen it.
@TMGN Only if it survived. Abiogenesis might occur a couple of times a year across the planet or something (just throwing out a nonsense number for the sake of discussion), but if there are ALREADY multicellular living organisms near those locations, then it doesn't seem likely that the new life would survive for long. With pre-established life forms already adapted to consuming the same kinds of nutrients that the new life would need, the single-celled new life form would probably be completely incapable of surviving. And we know that abiogenesis works. We've watched it occur in a laboratory setting. We have evidence for it. We have no evidence for the unfalsifiable, invisible sky wizard.
If you wanted to create life in a jar, you'd probably need a few things: - Definitely a clean lab, so that there's no contamination from currently living organisms such as bacteria. - The right chemistry. - The right simulated environmental conditions. - Hot nerd™️ as head of the lab.
You need to sterilise for prions and RNA too, not just bacteria 🦠 or the experiment wouldn't prove anything, because of souls. Because: Testing requires imagination 🌈 too. If Einstein never made GR 👁⬛️ we couldn’t test 🧪 it with any data. Then the Newtonian 🌲🍎 gravity (some minor effects from unrelated phenomena would explain the discrepancies) would line up with the evidence 📑. Humans 👥👥👥👥 can (but instead usually talk 🗣 about philosophy for ages) easily form a model to predict what they should expect from a soul ⦿. 1. The soul pretty much has to be the animator for life 🏩, or they wouldn’t be able to do anything and thus may as well not exist 2. If a soul ⦿ was at any location it would either fry the circuitry 📀 of the body with its power ⚡️ output or not be able to control the whole body (or brain 🧠). This is because the units 🔐 of the body, are so small. Thus souls ⦿ must be non-local. 3. Souls ⦿ need to control their bodies somehow, so they need mini hands. These should increase in dexterity with intelligence accounting for single souls (1 soul/species) weirdness. Luckily RNA and the proteins 🥩 that form prions do that. 4. Finally you can easily test souls ⦿ with data. Notable things to look for are: • Beings valuing 💎🤑 the increasing animating power of a soul ⦿. Easiest proof by far as investing 💰💰👨💼 in this makes no sense otherwise. • Information ℹ️ across the lifeform of the soul ⦿ ignoring all spatial limits of over a long enough time. • An increased likelihood of beneficial mutations/negative mutations and retention in evolution 🏩🔂 There is proof 📑 of this (though you could suggest other explanations) in that the rate of Mosaic Down Syndrome. It is 2%, which might seem low 🐜, but it massively 🐳 above the rate of chromosomal abnormalities from mitosis, which is vanishingly rare 🔬❓.
Probably some minerals to help the RNA polymerize without hydrolysis getting in the way, too. Probably *more* water, as well, and some current to stimulate the chemistry and avoid things settling.
@@sentientflower7891 its reasonable to assume that abiogenesis happened. because life had to start at some point. and its the best and most logical explanation we have so far. we know its possible. we know things can form on their own. plus it doesnt matter how life came from non life. any way it happened would be abiogenesis
Even if a new thing came about. It would be like a model t Ford competing against modern vehicles. It would be out competed immediately probably being eaten al9ng the way.
Yes, this is the comparison I've often used - If cars were invented "from scratch", why aren't they invented "from scratch" today? New cars get built using the information learned by the car industry over more than a hundred years - anyone trying to build a car without that advantage of prior knowledge, would not get very far in selling that vehicle.
@@Nightknight1992 I've always hated the wording of "pure chance" as it's just So absurdly deceptive. Yes chance is a very real piece of evolution but calling it pure chance just... I could probably take hours to express my frustrations on that but that doesn't really go anywhere useful. In poker there is luck. It's an incomplete information game, luck is a critical piece of those. Nobody who understands the game would call it pure luck. You have knowns and unknowns and you use those to inform your next move. Natural selection is like that but in a less human way if that makes sense. We only have so many possible genetic "cards" though we don't have a deck just unlimited cards. Start ordering them and they start creating proteins. Most proteins may not do much, some are doing something you're already doing, and some will do something new for better or worse. The only deciding factor is the specific genetic sequence that coded for it. Sorry if this feels a bit ranty. It's just difficult to organize these thoughts. Evolution is a very nuanced thing and this is absurdly difficult to describe in a way that's both comprehensible and accurate
@@expertoflizardcorrugation3967 i mean sure, you can say theres a limited amount of possibilities how nature can arrange genetic code, but were most likely not even close to seeing the end of it. were pretty certain abiogenesis was the beginning of life, but how would we know that the first one that happened is the best that was possible, or if different elements could have just created a completely different way better lifeform, but never had a shot cuz the first organisms already were faster by chance. i think we can all agree that by all the planets we looked at so far that our perfect conditions on earth plus the very long time plus other small things like the prior mass extinction events lead to kind of lucky circumstances for us to be where we are now. pure chance in a general sense might be wrong, but when it might come to a new abiogenesis maybe becoming a dominant species in 1 million years id call it that.
@@Nightknight1992 on the bit on limited genetic variety I meant more on the way you work with binary numbers. There are literally infinite numbers, but that's only with infinite length. An 8 bit integer still only has 256 possibilities though. Were probably never going to see all genetic variation the same way we're never going to see every number. As for whether or not life could've formed in some more optimal way. Probably. I'm no molecular biologist so I couldn't tell you the what how or why if it. But you're right. I never really saw that as luck, but there is no control on that. For the circumstances that allowed us to be here I both agree and disagree. It's lucky for the individual creature in these scenarios, but taking a step back to look at the whole someone was going to win that game, someone was guaranteed to get lucky, well I say one but a lot of creatures benefited massively from these events. I think my best unnecessary analogy is a coin flipping tournament. You've got 50/50 odds of winning each round but even after 33 rounds somebody would have won each and every round. For the last thing you've said I can't really make heads or tails of it. Could you explain what you meant here.
@@pflume1 first, evolution explains how life changes, how did that life started makes no difference, be abiogenesis, a god, aliens, etc. once life started it changes as evolution explains second, you should at least google what a theory means in science, its the highest rank something can have third, there is a loooot of evidence for abiogenesis, we dont have all the steps proven (we do have possible paths) whats the alternative? god? there is obviously no proof for that, so the logical thing is to stick with abiogenesis which its the most proven out of all the possible explanations.
@@pflume1 but evolution doesn't need that starting point. If tomorrow we all learn that some kind of deity seeded life on planet Earth, it still wouldn't make the theory of evolution false.
@@pflume1 evolution comes with the assumption that life exists, it’s starting point is irrelevant. In the same way special relativity doesn’t care how the universe came to exist, only that it did happen at some point in the past.
@@pflume1 Epistemologically, knowledge of the past is more accessible the more recent it is. Ergo, any scientific theory worth its salt is unlikely to "have a starting point."
It doesn’t seem impossible to me that abiogenesis DID happen multiple times. That first proto cell or whatever might’ve come together multiple times in multiple ways before one finally had the tools and the time to reproduce.
Theres evidence inside us that it did happen more than once, and that at *least* two separate autocatalytic RNA molecules began working together to produce amino acids, becoming one self reptoducing complex with *some kind of* primitive accessory protein, (possibly even the first protein to embed itself in this "protoribosome.") Thats why the two most ancient ribosomal subunits have not only the site to polymerize amino acids, but a vestigial site next to it that probably interacted with it to produce them without messenerg RNA. (And the very nature of that site *as* RNA would explain why the genome needs mRNA to get the ribosome to produce protein!)
I remember in school our teacher showed us a creationist video "debunking" abiogenisis and the way the guy debunked it was to say "that would be like opening a sealed jar of peanut butter and finding new life in it. you'd have to open billions of jars to have that happen." and then some kid just asked, "But aren't there like hundreds of billions of planets?" and we just moved on.
This is basically what my explanation for it was. It was an incredibly unlikely set of circumstances, but thankfully we have billions of planets that each had this miniscule chance of it happening. Earth was just the first one it was successful on.
People like this also mistakenly believe that places where life can form are highly unlikely to actually do it. In reality, abiogenesis is a chain of chemical reactions. If the conditions are right for those reactions, and remain right, those reactions WILL happen. They won't just randomly stop. So life is not at all unlikely to evolve. But it is not known if planets with the right conditions are common. Earth, however, clearly did have the right conditions. So there's no reason why life wouldn't evolve. At that point the only concern was extinction.
Also, it may have happened many more times than once on earth. But many of those times failed. And then many others times was over taken by other life when they encountered each other.
This isn't science, nothing is observed. He has never seen some inorganic become alive and then destroyed by current life. This is a make believe hand wave.
Honestly we should just make an exhibit somewhere so we can just let abiogenesis happen in real time, just so this question is done with instead of just answered
That would be really cool in like an art exhibit, just a projector connected to a microscope showing a growing culture of cells, and every day someone swaps it out for a new culture
Yeah...that's not how it works. Just having the right environment with the right materials doesn't mean it's even likely to happen in the time frame that anyone could possibly observe.
Biblical abiogenesis; Magic man blows on dirt and hey presto, you've got yourself a man. Yep, they even cherry-pick the kind of abiogenesis they don't believe in.
It really astounds me that the theists have slowly come around on the idea of the 'Big Bang' and tried to incorporate that into their mythology, but they can't seem to grasp the concept of abiogenesis. They're both events/processes that only need to occur once.
@Michael Turnipseed More sense than a wizard from outside the universe that we have no evidence for. We DO have evidence for abiogenesis. We've literally watched it happen in a laboratory setting. We KNOW FOR A FACT that it can occur. So, the idea that it did occur seems far more likely than the unfalsifiable, invisible wizard hypothesis.
@@michaelturnipseed2661 If you can produce a single shred of reproducible evidence then all 8 billion humans would believe in God. u Unfortunately for some of us, a few Jewish guys essentially saying "trust me bro" in a book they wrote over 2000 years isn't good enough anymore.
That's a great way of thinking about it. New life probably has formed all over the place but was just out competed by the existing life that had a head start.
Yeah same concept as when a mass extinction happens, new life forms will fill the gap, we would need to get rid of all life on earth even on a cellular level to get new life to fill the gap of current life.
I think the orgin of life is connected to evolutionary processes but not to be confused with biological evolution by natural selection and genetic mutation. Evolution within a system is just an artifact that is always present whenever you have asymmetry within the components.
@TurinTuramber But when we're talking about the process of evolution in biology we are only talking about the process in which life got to this point. Not how it began and definitely not the origin of the universe. Those are different theories.
@@atheist101 My point was evolution is always at work on everything including non life albeit with different drivers, evolution is just change within a given system. You like many just contracted the scientific theory of biological evolution by natural selection and genetic mutation into "evolution" then made an assertion. People (not specifically you) should not picture that biological evolution is a process that came out of nowhere once life began, the same mechanisms were and are always around. Evolution (not biological) is most definitely is responsible for the origins of life and everything else. I sound pedantic and know exactly what you meant, I just commented to draw attention to the bigger picture. Many Theists think of biological evolution as a fabricated special case of nature where they are free to refute it. If they would broadened their vision they would see evolution is absolutely everywhere outside of biology and within biology, it's utterly irrefutable as a description of change.
It did also take like, millions of years to happen; statistically we wouldn't see that happening all the time. For smaller steps of the process tho, we've been reproducing those in lab and field experiments for decades.
That was my first thought too. It's again the difference between using the loose meaning of the word or literally meaning perfection. But creationists always use this as an "ah ha!" moment
I’ve always wondered if it’s possible that abiogenesis has happened again, but it either died out quickly or just mixed and seems the same as other life forms
They actually theorise that at the time were our Last Universal common Ancestor (LUCA) the cell which all living things on earth today sprung out of. When it existed there could have been many types of "LUCASs" around, its just that our branch survived. Now this is kinda backed up with the fact that many viruses if not most do not share RNA with any other living or ceased life on earth today. So it is possible they are of a different single celled organism entirely and was and still is competing with ours. I just learned this when reading about LUCA and Its very interesting 🤔
Abiogenesis isn't just one event that happened, though. It was a gradual process that probably took millions of years. With already existing lifeforms using up all the organic material, the process probably can't even get close to actually producing a new form of life before it's disrupted.
To give the creationist some credit here, that's actually a good question. In fact, I think creationists often ask good questions; the problem is that they aren't interested in the answer. They ask with the intention of stumping people, not to learn anything themselves.
Yes. That's the problem. They're, for whatever reason, not interested in learning just how fascinating and complex the world is. And that just strikes me as deeply sad. If you think creation is wonderful and beautiful you should want to learn more about it. I don't understand why they're so determined to want an easy explanation for how life came to be. If a deity exists why would their process be a simple one?
the exact same is true for evolutionists & atheists who ask questions about creation or anything else that pertains to the biblical worldview. they do it to stump bible believers who they already view as stupid & ignorant. they arent interested in the answer because they have preconceived biases & other presuppositions of what is true & not true. they have no desire to actually examine the evidence through logic & reason. i think a lot of atheists ask great questions but dont care to hear the answer. they are just like pontius pilate, who asks Jesus “what is truth” & then walks away before giving Him the opportunity to answer.
@@xReMi13x Some of what you're saying is fair. I think everyone who does this, though, whatever their worldview, does it not necessarily because they feel the other person is ignorant and stupid, (though most people are naturally inclined to consider people who overtly disagree with them to be somehow lacking,) but because it just somehow feels good to "slam dunk" an argument. I think this applies to all sides. Like, it provokes a sense of eustress, I guess would be the term. And it is, indeed, a sort of barnum statement to say "every side of an argument likes to stump the other." But I think what people are really trying to say here about Creationism is that this is almost *all* Creationism does. Sort of like it largely only engages with the facts of the matter when motivated by antagonism. You'll rarely see a creationist in modern times culturing anything under a petri dish. Meanwhile, most biologists are uninterested in debating creationists at all, or at least, too busy. The pursuit of evolutionary theory never began as a work antagonistic to creationism, but simply academic pursuit of understanding geology and biology. In fact, the first work of evolutionary theory arguably goes back to the golden age of Islam, and was proposed by someone living with probably little connection to or care for the Bible, which would have only been a little less distant to them than Shintoism is to you. That isn't to say they were disconnected from Creationism, but that protoformulation was not made out of antagonism for the local Islamic creationist mythology either, simply some innocent suggestion ala, "hey, some of these organisms might be related." I guess a way to put it is, Creationism never does any actual scientific work. Not in the complete sense. Creationists almost only ever review. Thats why the movement is always on its back foot, (of course, judging by the work done by those who do, yknow, work, if Creationists did more than just review, theyd be actively destroying their own position.) Actual biologists spend lots of time out in the field getting samples, scrutinizing specimens, etc., but go to a creationist org like AiG and you'll find almost none of that. Sometimes you'll find a guy waving a limestone covered hat saying its a fossil that a random spelunker found and sent to him. But no creationist will go and scrutinize, say, flavobacteria that are metabolizing nylon. Instead, theyll hear about the biologists who did that and come up with excuses and speculation of how it doesnt actually count. I think it was AiG, iirc, who claimed that the mutation that made the enzyme being on a plasmid meant there was some complicated mechanism that detected the nylon and arranged a mutation to make that nylon metabolism occur... did they make any predictions with that hypothesis? Did they test it? Nope, they were uninterested. It seems to me that for creationists, lab and field work is boring nerd shit, shit that doesn't have the excitement and emotional gratification that esoteric mystical experiences grant, and worse still, that boring nerd shit gets in the way of the thrills by poking holes in it. That's the real substance of the complaint here.
@@peppermintgal4302 the problem isnt that creation scientists do not do lab or field work. the problem is evolutionists dismiss their work because it hasnt been peered reviewed by enough peers. science in general is extremely political, with all sorts of cliques & biases that hinder many groups work, not just creation scientists. a lot of modern science is rooted in circular reason; there isnt enough work on this particular subject & the work that is there hasnt been reviewed by enough peers to be considered reliable, as a peer i wont review work i disagree with or that hasnt been reviewed by others first, therefore there isnt enough work on the subject. again this goes back to people own preconceived notions & biases. the issue is people will believe what they want to believe. the issue is never that theres not enough evidence. those that would rather live for themselves and indulge in their own passions & desires will reject anything that contradicts their own belief system, even if it is the absolute truth. anyone who hides behind the statement "there is just not enough evidence" needs to truly ask themselves "am i just hiding behind an intellectual smoke screen, or have i actually looked at & considered all the evidence for with an unbiased lens?"
“Why doesn’t it happen anymore?” It does, in labs, where they can set up the conditions and keep other things from getting in the way. It’s a relatively large field of study, if not very glamorous, specially _because_ of how impressive abiogenesis is.
You say it like they have been successful When they haven't. They say they can create the start of it but it will take 2 billion years to actually become life. Which means they literally have nothing. They might as well pick up a handful of dirt and say "in two billion years the bacteria in this dirt will evolve into a unicorn"
I’ve never heard of anyone successfully producing any organic matter more complex than some proteins in the lab. Can you point me to what you’re referring to? I’d like to read up on it.
If abiogenesis had happened in a lab (let alone multiple times, as your comment suggests), do you not think that it would be publicized literally everywhere? I think you're confusing abiogenesis with the creation of different organic molecules, which is not the same as life.
@@FishuaJo Autocatalytic RNA molecules. Not only that, those molecules evolved greater complexity, going from just one independent strand to some 7 or so interdependent strands, a tiny protoribosomal exosystem of sorts. It wasnt even realized that they were all symbiotes at first, they thought some large number of them, (I think it was 5?) were parasites. Martin Hanczyc has also made weird lipid bubble systems that perform life like activity. (Indeed, some bacteria leverage the same processes, processed emergent from basic properties of lipid bubbles.) Theyre not complex, exactly, but what kakes them interesting. besides their activity, is that they are often *macroscopic.* It made the news, but there's so many findings in various fields that do make the news that most people, myself included, are only familiar with a tiny fraction of even those findings.
@@Alfonso162008 The video didn't specify this well, that was definitely the issue. You are perfectly right here. Forrest needs to do a longer video explaining it, especially considering the amount of fake (usually) Christian apologists that cherry pick or even lie about abiogenesis, it makes it really difficult to learn in detail because there is so much misinformation surrounding it and actual information is often not presented in enormous detail on youtube, and reading scientific papers is difficult for most people. Very interesting field of biochemistry but not presented or taught well.
I came across something years ago. Apparently there's enough hydrogen in the sun that if everything was wiped out, there's time for it all to happen again. That doesn't mean that the conditions would be similarly conducive as before.
It’s possible and likely. The main reason why it’s thought that that happened is because life had several billion years to form and lots of resources and good conditions, so it’s unlikely that it didn’t.
Abiogenesis, like evolution, had selection pressures that eventually led life gradually developing from non-life via autocatylic sets/networks. It wasn't a thing that happened over night, so it would make sense there were multiple competing self replicating systems before one of them won. But we are talking in molecule level, so I doubt there would be any possible remains from that.
Very yes. Only one lineage currently survives, but considering just how quickly life got started (as soon as the heavy bombardment ended, anyway), it stands to reason that there were several early on.
As questions go, it seems fairly insightful to me. It leads to an elegant answer, after all. For contrast, how about "If humans come from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys?"
Tbf, abiogenesis is organic chemistry and organic chemistry is hard lol. The interactions of such obscure chemistry and modern life aren't really intuitive in any sense. So I'm not surprised at all that people ask this question so commonly.
@@peppermintgal4302 The part that I can forgive is not knowing how different conditions would have been. The part I can't is assuming that life could begin again and develop into something competitive with current life. Do they not still teach that every surface everywhere that isn't screaming hot or deliberately sterile is covered in bacteria and similar?
@@stevencurtis7157 Well, they do teach that, thats true, but I think most people forget it for the sake of their sanity. I've seen a lot of people underestimate how prolific bacteria are.
@@rbdb8953 yeah, you guys add an unevidenced and unnecessary being you have no good reason to believe even exists let alone a coherent explanation of where he came from, that's called special pleading and it's a fallacy, the fact you think that is somehow a better position to hold is laughably pathetic, you're just adding things you have no evidence for and condescendingly thinking you have a better position it is so silly
@@rbdb8953 Intentionality requires greater complexity. If nothing seems to you to be the likely initial state of reality because of its simplicity, then shouldnt you favor more simple starting conditions, like, say, those lacking intentionality? But whether the universe was made intentionally or not, it doesnt change the fact that all linea of evidence point to abiogenesis, and that abiogenesis and evolution have practical applications that creationism does not, some of them actually lifesaving. Also, the term you want is stochastic, not random. Stochasticity is partial randomness, or rather, something which isn't entirely predictable from your present perspective. And obviously the best theory we have will acknowledge stochasticity, because we can't model the universe in complete detail in our brains as we are a part of the universe. (To do so would require perfect self similarity, meaning we'd have to be a kind of fractal, with infinite resolution, but our neurons, being not infinitely small, put a lower boundary on how detailed our minds are. So the best theories *can't* be those that purport to predict everything, they must simply predict the most. (After thaf priority, we judge by how simple the process is to calculate. Geocentric Epicycles also predict transits of planets, for example, making a predictuve geocentric framework equivalent to heliocentrism, but are far more complex to calculate. Though I don't think anyone has added time dilation to that theory lol so astronomy still has it beat on predictive power. But you get the idea.) And I do want to emphasize --- creationism has next to no predictive power. You can hand over any prospecting company to a creationist with any budget and they will be outcompeted by any similar outfit that uses evolutionary theory, instead, because evolutionary theory's understanding of when mass extinctions occured where and what organisms lived where at what times and how far down they wouldve become buried by now judging by the rate of geological processes and tne intricacies of how they work correlates vastly better with reality. With evolutionary theory, you can take an incomplete picture of the fossil record and likewise incomplete but general geological data and predict where new fossil, and ergo oil, finds will be. You can't do this with creationism at all.
The fact that we have evidence of life going back to essentially the moment it was physically possible indicates it's really not that difficult for abiogenesis to happen, given the right conditions. It's just infinitely more likely for *existing* life to make more of itself than for new life to take root. For all we know, abiogenesis could be *almost* happening all the time, and just getting gobbled up immediately by the life that's already there, and already much better at surviving than whatever transitional life happens to pop up.
Evolution doesn't even attempt to explain the origins of life. God could have created the first life forms. He didn't, but IF that's what happened that doesn't suddenly falsify evolution.
Word, I'm an atheist but I have no issues with deism, or even theistic evolution. As long as they don't deny science, people can believe in any god they want.
I may be an atheist but I love the approach of god creating the first life which eventually evolved I do have to wonder tho, where did that god come from? I would assume another demension but then that leads more questions lol
@@bloodwyvern7876 that is always my question I have and I absolutely hate it when I get some excuse how because gods to powerful and awesome he doesn’t need a creator and you can’t ask that question. Anyone who doesn’t let you ask questions and gate keeps from scrutiny is intellectually dishonest.
Honestly, even if abiogenesis were occuring on some small part of the world or even if we time traveled to witness abiogenesis, I doubt we'd recognize it as life. Life likely didn't emerge looking like modern life. It probably started as just really cool chemistry that sustained itself and spread. That's essentially what a fire is. We don't even know if we can define viruses as being alive and they're essentially a gang of replicating molecules. What if there's other weird forms of replicating biochemistry that resembles the mechanics of life without falling under any strict definition of life?
You also have to consider that there is too much oxygen in the atmosphere currently while the atmosphere eons back was reducing in nature. Oxygen is toxic, it caused the first great extinction which wiped out like 99% of all life at that time, the only reason life survived is due to antioxidants which help mamage oxygen stress, I dont think new life that arise will be advanced enough to produce antioxidants from the get go.
We've got better, even. We've made autocatalytic RNA in the lab, and we have a basic working model of how RNA was produced and polymerized by geochemical processes.
Family Doctor here: isn't the fact that mutations are constantly occurring, within all organisms...and the remarkable fact of evolution is so apparent in every crop we plant, baby we have, puppy we breed....and who knows, there may be areas such as deep in the ocean near ventilation shafts and volcano vents where an environment similar to the "primordial sea" is allowing pockets of abiogenesis to occur....Okay, now I need to go do some reading about deep sea vents....
Also, whenever they bring up that „peanut butter jar experiment“ as an alleged gotcha against evolution (because most of the time they don‘t get that evolution and abiogenesis aren‘t the same thing), they always assume that whatever life there might have arisen in that jar should be immediately visible with the naked eye. Basically something along the lines of „abiogenesis BOOM ant!“ Which is just another one of the multiple layers in this scenario alone that shows the sheer magnitude of NOT understanding (if that’s even a thing) the very first thing about the thing they try to debunk.
A brand new living thing wouldn't have any of the refinements and defenses that comes with 3.5 billion years of evolution. It's like expecting a single newborn baby to survive and thrive in a world full of baby-eating professional MMA fighters.
Don't forget also that the first time it happened, the Earth was a very different place. There was little or no free oxygen to damage the emerging compounds for one thing. We now have organisms that live in diesel fuel, and organisms that eat plastic. Those wouldn't have existed without diesel fuel and plastic.
Any life that arises through abiogenesis would be extremely rudimentary, and thus be out-competed by modern forms which have a few hundred million years of acquired tricks up their sleeves.
Playing Devil's advocate: Why haven't we been able to create this environment in a lab and witness new life creation? Understand it's difficult, but that's never stopped us before.
We haven’t created stars or planets in labs, but that doesn’t mean they don’t form through natural processes. We have successfully reproduced several steps in the process of abiogenesis, so it’s not like the research bore no fruit
Guide to secondary abiogenesis: 1) Kill everything else 2) Make a supernutrient yet life-devoid pond 3) Collect the raw materials for life 4) ??? 5) Abiogenesis
Also want to add (because I'm a fuckin nerd) --- you'll need some specific minerals. Not uncommon forms of minerals, but still, afail, speciric. Something nucleotide polymers can bind to. Otherwise, hydrolysis vastly decreases your chances of getting a long enough polymer to form anything autocatalytic.
I would like to see an experiment with a sealed system that would have all the right materials with nothing to contaminate it. It would take possible many centuries but we could learn a lot in the process
Something like what you describe would be completely impossible to do, because of the timeframe you're proposing. What you CAN do (and has been done) is set up the proper materials and conditions, and create various organic molecules, but life itself is currently impossible to obtain in a lab.
Well... we have made autocatalytic RNA in the lab. It was guided in its production, but judging by how quickly it was made, statistically, a relevant setting could produce such RNA forms very quickly, (the larger the scale, the more quick it'd likely be.) Getting from there to a full, recognizable cellular form? Probably not quick, though the pairing of autocatalytic RNA, TNA, or PNA, (while what we made was RNA, TNA and PNA might be capable of autocatalysis?) and lipids was itself probably immediate, or very quick, so you'd have "cells" very quickly. But the development of a genome and accompanying proteome? Idk. Producing nucleotides or protonucleotides may have taken geological events that were wide apart in their timing, though.
also it could be that abiogenesis does happen and something approaching a cell forms but is immediately eaten by advanced life that's been evolving for billions of years
They do, kinda. But they're so detached from what we would consider to be life that you wouldn't even recognize it as life. It wouldn't look like bacteria, it would look like an odd collection of protein molecules in a vague resemblance of a closed area.
Here’s a thought. If yahweh realized he screwed up so badly creating humans, why did it destroy all life except what was on the Ark? Why didn’t it just eliminate all humans and start over with a new species?
Think of it as an economic question. Why are there so many houses but no one to buy? Because those that already own houses buy them up, then jack up the price to kill competition or prevent lower classes to move in Maybe got a bit too real there
there's an experiment done a while ago where the best approximation of the primordial soup was made in a sealed container and then shocked with electricity as if struck by lightning and a lot of precursor organic molecules form from that, some know it works. The big problem with seeing that happen in the wild today is because back then the Earth had very very little oxygen and most of the first living things and organic molecules would be destroyed by oxygen which reacts with everything very quickly. once life got going on the anaerobic Earth and photosynthesis start happening The planet was flooded with oxygen which killed a ton of the early life on the planet and started an ice age called the snowball Earth. basically life destroyed the conditions for the spontaneous generation of life to occur
It also could be happening. There's no real way to know though. How do you tell the difference between an organism that just started living, and one we only just discovered.
It's also because life has been adapting for millions of years so any newborn species of bacteria would be outcompeted before we could notice even if it was happening all the time.
Another thing that most creationists don't realize, it that the first life forms would have looked VERY different to the life forms today. It most likely would have just been a lipid membrane with some RNA. It took 3 billion years for organelles and DNA to evolve.
Thank you. You’re much more polite than I’d be when hearing people who can find no reason to think that the conditions inside a jar of peanut butter today might be different from the condition of the earth 3 billion years ago. I just can’t. You’re a far more patient human being than I am.
There's also the fact that the environment is different and because of human influence the environment is changing a lot. I've been living in the desert for almost two years now and something I've noticed in the fall and winter is these little tufts of grass growing up around my area. Now, i live close to a canal and there's trees and grasses all over the road right by the canal but I'm just inland enough, by like a few feet, that trees are sparse and small, grasses are virtually unseen with the exception of those tufts that show up in winter. Here's my point. Hardy life in the area already has a foothold and it is not going anywhere. New life does manage to show up and grow and make itself known just enough to be seen by me. And then the environment changes. It gets hotter, it gets dryer, the trees that already live here don't struggle but those tiny grasses aren't adapting fast enough, or growing fast enough for them to handle the changes in the environment around them compared to the life that is already established. Even if i go out and try to help that grass out to grow in the desert it just can't take it. Yeah there's competition from already established life in the area but the difference in rainfall and uv intensity and heat and dryness in winter vs spring is dramatic.
It's the plateau problem, which is very common. Once a biological niche is filled, it's filled forever. There won't be a new fish developing lungs and walking up on the beach, because that whole biome is filled with advanced predators that would prey on such a vulnerable creature. So that evolutionary step can never repeat the same way again.
To add on it could just be that conditions on earth are just so completely different than when life started and there’s something important about that to get the process started.
As well, the earth wasn't filled with oxygen back then. You can do a lot more crazy chemical reactions when you don't have to worry about things catching on fire.
Question: So, it won't happen today, very fascinating. But do scientists believe it happened in one place exactly once, or do they think i5 might have happened multiple times in multiple places near the beginning?
While we aren't entirely sure, it almost certainly happened multiple times and only one lineage survived. The more we look into it, the more mundane the conditions for life to get started seem to be. It's really when competition with other lifeforms begins that things get interesting!
Or taking the counter viewpoint. Why does god no longer perform supernatural miracles On a daily basis? We don’t we see Talking snakes, parting seas with dry ground, raising the dead, walking the dead, all you can eat picnic buffets, food falling from the sky to feed the hungry??? There’s mountains of evidence to support evolution but essentially zero evidence to support any of the thousands of religions. Yet all the religious people still demanding more evidence. 🤦
I think the other catch is, that some of the people asking about abiogenesis might be confusing it with human related parthenogenesis. There likely IS abiogenesis happening some where on this giant blue marble. But the likelihood of anyone of us finding it in that nascent stage, is astronomically small. Maybe people are expecting abiogenesis of multicellular or complex creatures, instead of single cellular organisms?
AND the process of anything but single-cell organisms to emerge takes thousands of years if not tens of thousands of years. Meaning for it to be noticeable it would take much longer than a human life.
Peanut butter has no sea floor minerals to help catalyze RNA polymerization. The water in it would be both necessary for that polymerization, yet also interfere with it remaining stable afterwards, preventing the likelihood of polymers forming of triple digit length, or even 50. (Iirc, estimates are that you probably don't have autocatalytic RNA sequences of any length under the number 50.) Oxygen from the atmosphere would also be a problem, I'd imagine.
What about viruses? They seem to come up in new forms all the time and mutate at rapid speed. But they aren't really defined as living beings. But I wonder how they relate to this subject.
As far as I know, rhinoviruses may have been produced by successive abiogenesis events. Autocatalytic RNA has shown adaptability, including the ability to evolve to incorporate other RNA molecules into its function. I'm not familiar enough with the evidence on rhinovirus evolution and history to be sure. Retriviruses are very very likely descended from bacteria, though. Oh, it does seem to be the case that the ribosome is descended from an RNA complex of two subunits. I'm not sure how closely those subunits resemble eachother... they may have both been produced separately.
Think of it like a new startup business. There are hundreds of other businesses that are competing for the same thing. A new business would either go bankrupt or merge/ be absorbed with a larger business.
The Question that is really interesting is: When do we consider molecular intertaction "Life" and when will we find out that maybe that Definition of old we went by for hundreds of years is insufficient. That to witness would be nice when beeing ageless immortal. But the bad stuff makes it hard to focus on that good stuff.
even if it existed and it wasnt immediately colonized by bacteria the life that happened on it would still be consumed by the more evolved bacteria before you got even close to detecting it
Dude, I got a good radio voice but that's thick. I hope you are working as a voice actor. I'm autistic and have an obsession with sounds. I love that voice.
Short version. There's too much competition from already alive things.
It does happen, but it doesn't make any impact on the organisms that already exists.*
Pretty much exactly what you said.
It probably happens here and there in small quantities.
The barrier to entry for new life is too high
So, entropy.
@@hattielankford4775 not really. It's just that the environment changed and now a new life would have to compete with other organisms. The original organism didn't have to compete.
Exactly, Abiogenesis is probably not going to occur once again cause there are organisms that are already there to consume any form of organic material.
than why not just artificially create this in a vacuum, in a place where no other life exists. this shit bogus
@@captainstabbin5374 they literally did that a few years back in a lab
@@potatoman1686 if they did than how is it a theory if it can hapen or not????? wack ahh
@@captainstabbin5374 Abiogenesis is not [Yet] a Theory. It's currently still only a well-founded Hypothesis, with several Competing [Scientific] Explanations concerning the EXACT Methods & Processes involved in the Start of Biological Life On Earth. We don't YET have enough information to say with 100% Confidence Exactly WHICH Methods & Processes Happened and in Exactly WHICH Order. But we are Quite Very Close, and Get Closer & Closer All the Time.
It has already been demonstrated that ALL of the Necessary Amino-Acids needed to form Both RNA and even DNA can form, & accrue, naturally into chains under the proper natural conditions. And it has already been demonstrated that PROTO-Cells, Pre-Biological "Life" composed of little else except Natural Lipids [in a Natural Vesicle] in an Aqueous Environment, could eventually accumulate RNA (including Self-Replicating Misfolded RNA) through Charge-Based Exchanging of Molecules, that then would have allowed it to "Change [imperfectly] Over Time" because once a Lipid Vesicle gets large enough it Naturally Splits into Two Smaller Lipid Vesicles.
@@captainstabbin5374because a scientific theory and a theory are 2 different things. Scientific theory means an explanation of a natural fact/phenomenon
There is also the fact that if abiogenesis does happen again, that new life is going to have to square off against the old life that is far more complex & developed than itself.
Yeah, imagine coming in this late to the game with no mitochondria, or derived cell wall.
In short, you're going to get outcompeted in almost any niche. Even viruses have hyper simple "life" forms covered. It's like being able to choose any sport at the Olympics, but you were born that morning, and you need to get a medal to keep competing.
Yeah, it would be like dropping a small band of human infants into Africa and then being surprised that they don't construct London in a week, but instead turn into hyena poo in a day.
It's like a newborn baby would try to fight an adult man
They will get eaten.
Exactly, and that matchup only ends one way
Precisely. Nature never rests. Every habitat will be colonised by organisms that already exist. Look at "weeds" for example.
I love that show!
Probably IS happening all the time but those first steps of life can't compete immediately with the life that's already here. Having a 4 billion year head start is quite an advantage.
Spawn killed 😂
Yeah this seems to me to be the more plausible answer. But it does beg the question: In laboratories with stacks of sterilized Petri dishes, does life ever spontaneously emerge? If a technician picks one up and sees microbes, my guess is they just toss it out and assume it was just contaminated. What if it was new life? Haha
@@truthsmiles
I wonder about this too, but then I remember that when life got started on Earth it was nothing like the agar that we usually expect to find in a Petri dish. It was very warm, there was an abundance of methane and almost no free oxygen.
Those conditions don't exist any more, and they may have been essential for terrestrial life to get started.
Or, maybe we have great conditions for abiogenesis (neglecting the issue of competition) but it's the kind of event that happens only once every few thousand years. Well, that's an abundant opportunity, if we're looking at half a billion years on primordial Earth, but hard to convince grad students to stay over the weekend to watch in case it happens.
Damn you beat me by 4 days lol
@@truthsmiles it doesn't actually require just like, a petri dish, it requires a bunch of energy and heat and humidity and conditions that we do not want to create in a lab
Also, new life would be microscopic, do they really think they'd see it with the naked eye??
also most likely at places humans very rarely look at, the bottom of the oceans near the deepsea geysers and stuff
We study microorganism a lot, you just have to take a sample of dirt and look at it. There also would be a very strong distiction between new life and conventional life, we would have seen it.
@@tmgn7588 even if new life form it probably would go extinct in like a very short time anyway since it is not suited for our enviro
@TMGN Only if it survived. Abiogenesis might occur a couple of times a year across the planet or something (just throwing out a nonsense number for the sake of discussion), but if there are ALREADY multicellular living organisms near those locations, then it doesn't seem likely that the new life would survive for long.
With pre-established life forms already adapted to consuming the same kinds of nutrients that the new life would need, the single-celled new life form would probably be completely incapable of surviving.
And we know that abiogenesis works. We've watched it occur in a laboratory setting. We have evidence for it. We have no evidence for the unfalsifiable, invisible sky wizard.
@@CatOnFire technically the bible is evidence lol
But a extremely untrustworthy probably fake evidence
"Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool."
Voltaire
So abiogenesis was invented by a foolish scoundrel?
But the Bible says we came from mud/dirt…
@@nj7969 dirt contains the same nutrients found in all living organisms.
@@Programm4r Incredibly fascinating isn’t it?
@@nj7969 sure does support the Bible ☺️
If you wanted to create life in a jar, you'd probably need a few things:
- Definitely a clean lab, so that there's no contamination from currently living organisms such as bacteria.
- The right chemistry.
- The right simulated environmental conditions.
- Hot nerd™️ as head of the lab.
The Hot Nerd™️ being the most essential ingredient.
@@kellydalstok8900 For sure!
You need to sterilise for prions and RNA too, not just bacteria 🦠 or the experiment wouldn't prove anything, because of souls. Because:
Testing requires imagination 🌈 too. If Einstein never made GR 👁⬛️ we couldn’t test 🧪 it with any data. Then the Newtonian 🌲🍎 gravity (some minor effects from unrelated phenomena would explain the discrepancies) would line up with the evidence 📑.
Humans 👥👥👥👥 can (but instead usually talk 🗣 about philosophy for ages) easily form a model to predict what they should expect from a soul ⦿.
1. The soul pretty much has to be the animator for life 🏩, or they wouldn’t be able to do anything and thus may as well not exist
2. If a soul ⦿ was at any location it would either fry the circuitry 📀 of the body with its power ⚡️ output or not be able to control the whole body (or brain 🧠). This is because the units 🔐 of the body, are so small.
Thus souls ⦿ must be non-local.
3. Souls ⦿ need to control their bodies somehow, so they need mini hands. These should increase in dexterity with intelligence accounting for single souls (1 soul/species) weirdness.
Luckily RNA and the proteins 🥩 that form prions do that.
4. Finally you can easily test souls ⦿ with data. Notable things to look for are:
• Beings valuing 💎🤑 the increasing animating power of a soul ⦿. Easiest proof by far as investing 💰💰👨💼 in this makes no sense otherwise.
• Information ℹ️ across the lifeform of the soul ⦿ ignoring all spatial limits of over a long enough time.
• An increased likelihood of beneficial mutations/negative mutations and retention in evolution 🏩🔂
There is proof 📑 of this (though you could suggest other explanations) in that the rate of Mosaic Down Syndrome. It is 2%, which might seem low 🐜, but it massively 🐳 above the rate of chromosomal abnormalities from mitosis, which is vanishingly rare 🔬❓.
Probably some minerals to help the RNA polymerize without hydrolysis getting in the way, too. Probably *more* water, as well, and some current to stimulate the chemistry and avoid things settling.
Well we've already got the HotNerd with Forrest right here!
Great explanation. Doesn't take too long to debunk stuff like that if you've got the info. Cool backdrop too!
So weird there are no replies in comments
I feel compelled to request that you two collab
Are you trying to debunk that Abiogenesis is never observed to occur anywhere? It seems the speaker doesn't debunk that.
@@sentientflower7891 its reasonable to assume that abiogenesis happened. because life had to start at some point. and its the best and most logical explanation we have so far. we know its possible. we know things can form on their own. plus it doesnt matter how life came from non life. any way it happened would be abiogenesis
@@theflyingdutchguy9870 nope. Your entire premise is wrong.
Even if a new thing came about. It would be like a model t Ford competing against modern vehicles. It would be out competed immediately probably being eaten al9ng the way.
Yes, this is the comparison I've often used - If cars were invented "from scratch", why aren't they invented "from scratch" today? New cars get built using the information learned by the car industry over more than a hundred years - anyone trying to build a car without that advantage of prior knowledge, would not get very far in selling that vehicle.
if we just wait a billion years by pure chance one might come out better than the original, but nobody of us will be alive to see it^^
@@Nightknight1992 I've always hated the wording of "pure chance" as it's just
So absurdly deceptive. Yes chance is a very real piece of evolution but calling it pure chance just... I could probably take hours to express my frustrations on that but that doesn't really go anywhere useful.
In poker there is luck. It's an incomplete information game, luck is a critical piece of those. Nobody who understands the game would call it pure luck. You have knowns and unknowns and you use those to inform your next move.
Natural selection is like that but in a less human way if that makes sense. We only have so many possible genetic "cards" though we don't have a deck just unlimited cards. Start ordering them and they start creating proteins. Most proteins may not do much, some are doing something you're already doing, and some will do something new for better or worse. The only deciding factor is the specific genetic sequence that coded for it.
Sorry if this feels a bit ranty. It's just difficult to organize these thoughts. Evolution is a very nuanced thing and this is absurdly difficult to describe in a way that's both comprehensible and accurate
@@expertoflizardcorrugation3967 i mean sure, you can say theres a limited amount of possibilities how nature can arrange genetic code, but were most likely not even close to seeing the end of it. were pretty certain abiogenesis was the beginning of life, but how would we know that the first one that happened is the best that was possible, or if different elements could have just created a completely different way better lifeform, but never had a shot cuz the first organisms already were faster by chance.
i think we can all agree that by all the planets we looked at so far that our perfect conditions on earth plus the very long time plus other small things like the prior mass extinction events lead to kind of lucky circumstances for us to be where we are now. pure chance in a general sense might be wrong, but when it might come to a new abiogenesis maybe becoming a dominant species in 1 million years id call it that.
@@Nightknight1992 on the bit on limited genetic variety I meant more on the way you work with binary numbers. There are literally infinite numbers, but that's only with infinite length. An 8 bit integer still only has 256 possibilities though. Were probably never going to see all genetic variation the same way we're never going to see every number.
As for whether or not life could've formed in some more optimal way. Probably. I'm no molecular biologist so I couldn't tell you the what how or why if it. But you're right. I never really saw that as luck, but there is no control on that.
For the circumstances that allowed us to be here I both agree and disagree. It's lucky for the individual creature in these scenarios, but taking a step back to look at the whole someone was going to win that game, someone was guaranteed to get lucky, well I say one but a lot of creatures benefited massively from these events. I think my best unnecessary analogy is a coin flipping tournament. You've got 50/50 odds of winning each round but even after 33 rounds somebody would have won each and every round.
For the last thing you've said I can't really make heads or tails of it. Could you explain what you meant here.
Forrest is the f'ing man. Brilliantly simple explanation.
Also, evolution and abiogenesis are different things!
Since abiogenesis has yet to be shown to have happened, evolution is a theory with no starting point.
@@pflume1 first, evolution explains how life changes, how did that life started makes no difference, be abiogenesis, a god, aliens, etc. once life started it changes as evolution explains
second, you should at least google what a theory means in science, its the highest rank something can have
third, there is a loooot of evidence for abiogenesis, we dont have all the steps proven (we do have possible paths) whats the alternative? god? there is obviously no proof for that, so the logical thing is to stick with abiogenesis which its the most proven out of all the possible explanations.
@@pflume1 but evolution doesn't need that starting point. If tomorrow we all learn that some kind of deity seeded life on planet Earth, it still wouldn't make the theory of evolution false.
@@pflume1 evolution comes with the assumption that life exists, it’s starting point is irrelevant. In the same way special relativity doesn’t care how the universe came to exist, only that it did happen at some point in the past.
@@pflume1 Epistemologically, knowledge of the past is more accessible the more recent it is. Ergo, any scientific theory worth its salt is unlikely to "have a starting point."
It doesn’t seem impossible to me that abiogenesis DID happen multiple times. That first proto cell or whatever might’ve come together multiple times in multiple ways before one finally had the tools and the time to reproduce.
Theres evidence inside us that it did happen more than once, and that at *least* two separate autocatalytic RNA molecules began working together to produce amino acids, becoming one self reptoducing complex with *some kind of* primitive accessory protein, (possibly even the first protein to embed itself in this "protoribosome.")
Thats why the two most ancient ribosomal subunits have not only the site to polymerize amino acids, but a vestigial site next to it that probably interacted with it to produce them without messenerg RNA. (And the very nature of that site *as* RNA would explain why the genome needs mRNA to get the ribosome to produce protein!)
I remember in school our teacher showed us a creationist video "debunking" abiogenisis and the way the guy debunked it was to say "that would be like opening a sealed jar of peanut butter and finding new life in it. you'd have to open billions of jars to have that happen."
and then some kid just asked, "But aren't there like hundreds of billions of planets?" and we just moved on.
I’ve definitely seen moldy peanut butter.
This is basically what my explanation for it was. It was an incredibly unlikely set of circumstances, but thankfully we have billions of planets that each had this miniscule chance of it happening. Earth was just the first one it was successful on.
@@chaosredefined3834First Successful one we are _aware_ of.
Doesn’t the Bible say we came from dirt/mud tho?…
People like this also mistakenly believe that places where life can form are highly unlikely to actually do it.
In reality, abiogenesis is a chain of chemical reactions. If the conditions are right for those reactions, and remain right, those reactions WILL happen. They won't just randomly stop. So life is not at all unlikely to evolve. But it is not known if planets with the right conditions are common. Earth, however, clearly did have the right conditions. So there's no reason why life wouldn't evolve. At that point the only concern was extinction.
Also, it may have happened many more times than once on earth. But many of those times failed. And then many others times was over taken by other life when they encountered each other.
I haven't had biology in a hot minute; aren't there some hypotheses that archaea arose separately from bacteria or something?
Thank you for the science lesson The Hot Nerd™️!
I love his Gender Neutral Presentation™️!
This isn't science, nothing is observed. He has never seen some inorganic become alive and then destroyed by current life. This is a make believe hand wave.
*The new life is forming somewhere on Earth. *
Already existing living organisms: "It's free real estate"
Honestly we should just make an exhibit somewhere so we can just let abiogenesis happen in real time, just so this question is done with instead of just answered
That would be really cool in like an art exhibit, just a projector connected to a microscope showing a growing culture of cells, and every day someone swaps it out for a new culture
But then their excuse would be: "This is just artificial not real"
Wouldn’t there always be the risk of airborne bacteria and other microorganisms? Even then it would probably take a while.
@@dibsdibs3495 Maybe, but in a closed environment it can be done. Pretty sure others have done it, we just need it to be recorded for people to see
Yeah...that's not how it works. Just having the right environment with the right materials doesn't mean it's even likely to happen in the time frame that anyone could possibly observe.
Biblical abiogenesis; Magic man blows on dirt and hey presto, you've got yourself a man.
Yep, they even cherry-pick the kind of abiogenesis they don't believe in.
you are a fool, nothing cant come from something. also, adam wast the first man in the bible, he was a side project, maybe read it
It really astounds me that the theists have slowly come around on the idea of the 'Big Bang' and tried to incorporate that into their mythology, but they can't seem to grasp the concept of abiogenesis. They're both events/processes that only need to occur once.
@Michael Turnipseed More sense than a wizard from outside the universe that we have no evidence for. We DO have evidence for abiogenesis. We've literally watched it happen in a laboratory setting. We KNOW FOR A FACT that it can occur. So, the idea that it did occur seems far more likely than the unfalsifiable, invisible wizard hypothesis.
@@michaelturnipseed2661 that is what theist believe when "god" spoke everything into existence everything out of absolutely nothing
@@michaelturnipseed2661 If you can produce a single shred of reproducible evidence then all 8 billion humans would believe in God. u
Unfortunately for some of us, a few Jewish guys essentially saying "trust me bro" in a book they wrote over 2000 years isn't good enough anymore.
Abiogenesis is all well and good, but is nobody gonna mention Forrest’s suave new morning-radio voice?
Yes!! His voice is so perfect! I rewatched it twice just to listen bruh
That's a great way of thinking about it. New life probably has formed all over the place but was just out competed by the existing life that had a head start.
Yeah same concept as when a mass extinction happens, new life forms will fill the gap, we would need to get rid of all life on earth even on a cellular level to get new life to fill the gap of current life.
Also evolution (not evelution) has nothing to do with the origins of life. That's a separate subject all together.
I think the orgin of life is connected to evolutionary processes but not to be confused with biological evolution by natural selection and genetic mutation.
Evolution within a system is just an artifact that is always present whenever you have asymmetry within the components.
@TurinTuramber But when we're talking about the process of evolution in biology we are only talking about the process in which life got to this point. Not how it began and definitely not the origin of the universe. Those are different theories.
@@atheist101 My point was evolution is always at work on everything including non life albeit with different drivers, evolution is just change within a given system.
You like many just contracted the scientific theory of biological evolution by natural selection and genetic mutation into "evolution" then made an assertion. People (not specifically you) should not picture that biological evolution is a process that came out of nowhere once life began, the same mechanisms were and are always around. Evolution (not biological) is most definitely is responsible for the origins of life and everything else.
I sound pedantic and know exactly what you meant, I just commented to draw attention to the bigger picture. Many Theists think of biological evolution as a fabricated special case of nature where they are free to refute it. If they would broadened their vision they would see evolution is absolutely everywhere outside of biology and within biology, it's utterly irrefutable as a description of change.
It did also take like, millions of years to happen; statistically we wouldn't see that happening all the time.
For smaller steps of the process tho, we've been reproducing those in lab and field experiments for decades.
Life doesn't happen in millions of years. It happens in lifetimes. Inorganic Chemistry doesn't reproduce or build on itself with some purpose.
Do you think people are gonna take the "too perfect of an environment" too literally and assume it was fine tuning?
Probably.
People already do
That was my first thought too. It's again the difference between using the loose meaning of the word or literally meaning perfection. But creationists always use this as an "ah ha!" moment
I thought that
Why do you care?
I’ve always wondered if it’s possible that abiogenesis has happened again, but it either died out quickly or just mixed and seems the same as other life forms
They actually theorise that at the time were our Last Universal common Ancestor (LUCA) the cell which all living things on earth today sprung out of. When it existed there could have been many types of "LUCASs" around, its just that our branch survived. Now this is kinda backed up with the fact that many viruses if not most do not share RNA with any other living or ceased life on earth today. So it is possible they are of a different single celled organism entirely and was and still is competing with ours. I just learned this when reading about LUCA and Its very interesting 🤔
Abiogenesis isn't just one event that happened, though. It was a gradual process that probably took millions of years. With already existing lifeforms using up all the organic material, the process probably can't even get close to actually producing a new form of life before it's disrupted.
To give the creationist some credit here, that's actually a good question. In fact, I think creationists often ask good questions; the problem is that they aren't interested in the answer. They ask with the intention of stumping people, not to learn anything themselves.
Yes. That's the problem. They're, for whatever reason, not interested in learning just how fascinating and complex the world is. And that just strikes me as deeply sad. If you think creation is wonderful and beautiful you should want to learn more about it.
I don't understand why they're so determined to want an easy explanation for how life came to be. If a deity exists why would their process be a simple one?
It's only a good question if you honestly want the truth. Honest people don't repeat questions.
the exact same is true for evolutionists & atheists who ask questions about creation or anything else that pertains to the biblical worldview. they do it to stump bible believers who they already view as stupid & ignorant. they arent interested in the answer because they have preconceived biases & other presuppositions of what is true & not true. they have no desire to actually examine the evidence through logic & reason. i think a lot of atheists ask great questions but dont care to hear the answer.
they are just like pontius pilate, who asks Jesus “what is truth” & then walks away before giving Him the opportunity to answer.
@@xReMi13x Some of what you're saying is fair. I think everyone who does this, though, whatever their worldview, does it not necessarily because they feel the other person is ignorant and stupid, (though most people are naturally inclined to consider people who overtly disagree with them to be somehow lacking,) but because it just somehow feels good to "slam dunk" an argument. I think this applies to all sides. Like, it provokes a sense of eustress, I guess would be the term.
And it is, indeed, a sort of barnum statement to say "every side of an argument likes to stump the other."
But I think what people are really trying to say here about Creationism is that this is almost *all* Creationism does. Sort of like it largely only engages with the facts of the matter when motivated by antagonism. You'll rarely see a creationist in modern times culturing anything under a petri dish. Meanwhile, most biologists are uninterested in debating creationists at all, or at least, too busy. The pursuit of evolutionary theory never began as a work antagonistic to creationism, but simply academic pursuit of understanding geology and biology. In fact, the first work of evolutionary theory arguably goes back to the golden age of Islam, and was proposed by someone living with probably little connection to or care for the Bible, which would have only been a little less distant to them than Shintoism is to you. That isn't to say they were disconnected from Creationism, but that protoformulation was not made out of antagonism for the local Islamic creationist mythology either, simply some innocent suggestion ala, "hey, some of these organisms might be related."
I guess a way to put it is, Creationism never does any actual scientific work. Not in the complete sense. Creationists almost only ever review. Thats why the movement is always on its back foot, (of course, judging by the work done by those who do, yknow, work, if Creationists did more than just review, theyd be actively destroying their own position.) Actual biologists spend lots of time out in the field getting samples, scrutinizing specimens, etc., but go to a creationist org like AiG and you'll find almost none of that. Sometimes you'll find a guy waving a limestone covered hat saying its a fossil that a random spelunker found and sent to him. But no creationist will go and scrutinize, say, flavobacteria that are metabolizing nylon. Instead, theyll hear about the biologists who did that and come up with excuses and speculation of how it doesnt actually count. I think it was AiG, iirc, who claimed that the mutation that made the enzyme being on a plasmid meant there was some complicated mechanism that detected the nylon and arranged a mutation to make that nylon metabolism occur... did they make any predictions with that hypothesis? Did they test it? Nope, they were uninterested.
It seems to me that for creationists, lab and field work is boring nerd shit, shit that doesn't have the excitement and emotional gratification that esoteric mystical experiences grant, and worse still, that boring nerd shit gets in the way of the thrills by poking holes in it. That's the real substance of the complaint here.
@@peppermintgal4302 the problem isnt that creation scientists do not do lab or field work. the problem is evolutionists dismiss their work because it hasnt been peered reviewed by enough peers. science in general is extremely political, with all sorts of cliques & biases that hinder many groups work, not just creation scientists. a lot of modern science is rooted in circular reason; there isnt enough work on this particular subject & the work that is there hasnt been reviewed by enough peers to be considered reliable, as a peer i wont review work i disagree with or that hasnt been reviewed by others first, therefore there isnt enough work on the subject.
again this goes back to people own preconceived notions & biases. the issue is people will believe what they want to believe. the issue is never that theres not enough evidence. those that would rather live for themselves and indulge in their own passions & desires will reject anything that contradicts their own belief system, even if it is the absolute truth. anyone who hides behind the statement "there is just not enough evidence" needs to truly ask themselves "am i just hiding behind an intellectual smoke screen, or have i actually looked at & considered all the evidence for with an unbiased lens?"
So the second new life emerges, it’s immediately taken out by the organisms that had a head start.
That’s pretty religious
@@Programm4r Here is some attention.
Sigh, I swear trolls just aren’t trying anymore.
@@2l84me8 science is observable, testable, repeatable, and falsifiable. Religious ideas are not.
I really like your emphasis on our planet being a wonderful place to live. It really is, isn't it? I need to appreciate that more💚
“Why doesn’t it happen anymore?”
It does, in labs, where they can set up the conditions and keep other things from getting in the way. It’s a relatively large field of study, if not very glamorous, specially _because_ of how impressive abiogenesis is.
You say it like they have been successful
When they haven't.
They say they can create the start of it but it will take 2 billion years to actually become life.
Which means they literally have nothing. They might as well pick up a handful of dirt and say "in two billion years the bacteria in this dirt will evolve into a unicorn"
I’ve never heard of anyone successfully producing any organic matter more complex than some proteins in the lab. Can you point me to what you’re referring to? I’d like to read up on it.
If abiogenesis had happened in a lab (let alone multiple times, as your comment suggests), do you not think that it would be publicized literally everywhere? I think you're confusing abiogenesis with the creation of different organic molecules, which is not the same as life.
@@FishuaJo Autocatalytic RNA molecules. Not only that, those molecules evolved greater complexity, going from just one independent strand to some 7 or so interdependent strands, a tiny protoribosomal exosystem of sorts. It wasnt even realized that they were all symbiotes at first, they thought some large number of them, (I think it was 5?) were parasites.
Martin Hanczyc has also made weird lipid bubble systems that perform life like activity. (Indeed, some bacteria leverage the same processes, processed emergent from basic properties of lipid bubbles.) Theyre not complex, exactly, but what kakes them interesting. besides their activity, is that they are often *macroscopic.*
It made the news, but there's so many findings in various fields that do make the news that most people, myself included, are only familiar with a tiny fraction of even those findings.
@@Alfonso162008 The video didn't specify this well, that was definitely the issue. You are perfectly right here. Forrest needs to do a longer video explaining it, especially considering the amount of fake (usually) Christian apologists that cherry pick or even lie about abiogenesis, it makes it really difficult to learn in detail because there is so much misinformation surrounding it and actual information is often not presented in enormous detail on youtube, and reading scientific papers is difficult for most people. Very interesting field of biochemistry but not presented or taught well.
"if evotion is real why doesn't abiogenesis happen all the time" is such a wild question
The argument from peanut butter is a creationist classic.
To put it simply, before chemicals could go through all the process of abiogenesis, something that is alive already is going to eat it.
Would you enter a Model T into a Nascar race?
I would; but only because I think it would be hilarious.
Would I expect it to win that race? Hell no.
Isn't it possible life started multiple times on earth and failed before it was able take hold? Idk how we'd ever prove something like that though.
I came across something years ago. Apparently there's enough hydrogen in the sun that if everything was wiped out, there's time for it all to happen again. That doesn't mean that the conditions would be similarly conducive as before.
It’s possible and likely. The main reason why it’s thought that that happened is because life had several billion years to form and lots of resources and good conditions, so it’s unlikely that it didn’t.
Abiogenesis, like evolution, had selection pressures that eventually led life gradually developing from non-life via autocatylic sets/networks. It wasn't a thing that happened over night, so it would make sense there were multiple competing self replicating systems before one of them won. But we are talking in molecule level, so I doubt there would be any possible remains from that.
Very yes. Only one lineage currently survives, but considering just how quickly life got started (as soon as the heavy bombardment ended, anyway), it stands to reason that there were several early on.
@@RenegadeScienceTeacher That’s the point I was trying to make but you explained it much better than I could so thank you.
The hot nerd never dissapoints
_"This is a really common question."_
This is a really depressing statement.
As questions go, it seems fairly insightful to me. It leads to an elegant answer, after all.
For contrast, how about "If humans come from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys?"
Tbf, abiogenesis is organic chemistry and organic chemistry is hard lol. The interactions of such obscure chemistry and modern life aren't really intuitive in any sense. So I'm not surprised at all that people ask this question so commonly.
@@peppermintgal4302 The part that I can forgive is not knowing how different conditions would have been. The part I can't is assuming that life could begin again and develop into something competitive with current life.
Do they not still teach that every surface everywhere that isn't screaming hot or deliberately sterile is covered in bacteria and similar?
@@stevencurtis7157 Well, they do teach that, thats true, but I think most people forget it for the sake of their sanity. I've seen a lot of people underestimate how prolific bacteria are.
@@peppermintgal4302 That's disappointing, too. People need to stop losing their minds over scale and either ask or look for context.
Forrest is really setting the standard for the men I want in my as- I mean life, want in my life.
As a straight guy, I agree.
The ironic thing is they always say how did things just come into existence, and yet they believe stuff just came into existence one day, its wild
The difference is that we think that was intentionality, whereas you're talking about many random events coincidentally happening
@@rbdb8953 yeah, you guys add an unevidenced and unnecessary being you have no good reason to believe even exists let alone a coherent explanation of where he came from, that's called special pleading and it's a fallacy, the fact you think that is somehow a better position to hold is laughably pathetic, you're just adding things you have no evidence for and condescendingly thinking you have a better position it is so silly
@@rbdb8953 also how do you know it was random?, You could have just been what had to happen and therefore couldn't be random
@@rbdb8953 Intentionality requires greater complexity. If nothing seems to you to be the likely initial state of reality because of its simplicity, then shouldnt you favor more simple starting conditions, like, say, those lacking intentionality?
But whether the universe was made intentionally or not, it doesnt change the fact that all linea of evidence point to abiogenesis, and that abiogenesis and evolution have practical applications that creationism does not, some of them actually lifesaving.
Also, the term you want is stochastic, not random. Stochasticity is partial randomness, or rather, something which isn't entirely predictable from your present perspective.
And obviously the best theory we have will acknowledge stochasticity, because we can't model the universe in complete detail in our brains as we are a part of the universe. (To do so would require perfect self similarity, meaning we'd have to be a kind of fractal, with infinite resolution, but our neurons, being not infinitely small, put a lower boundary on how detailed our minds are. So the best theories *can't* be those that purport to predict everything, they must simply predict the most. (After thaf priority, we judge by how simple the process is to calculate. Geocentric Epicycles also predict transits of planets, for example, making a predictuve geocentric framework equivalent to heliocentrism, but are far more complex to calculate. Though I don't think anyone has added time dilation to that theory lol so astronomy still has it beat on predictive power. But you get the idea.)
And I do want to emphasize --- creationism has next to no predictive power. You can hand over any prospecting company to a creationist with any budget and they will be outcompeted by any similar outfit that uses evolutionary theory, instead, because evolutionary theory's understanding of when mass extinctions occured where and what organisms lived where at what times and how far down they wouldve become buried by now judging by the rate of geological processes and tne intricacies of how they work correlates vastly better with reality. With evolutionary theory, you can take an incomplete picture of the fossil record and likewise incomplete but general geological data and predict where new fossil, and ergo oil, finds will be. You can't do this with creationism at all.
Also: Evolution has nothing to do with how life started. It just explains how so many variations of life developed.
The fact that we have evidence of life going back to essentially the moment it was physically possible indicates it's really not that difficult for abiogenesis to happen, given the right conditions. It's just infinitely more likely for *existing* life to make more of itself than for new life to take root. For all we know, abiogenesis could be *almost* happening all the time, and just getting gobbled up immediately by the life that's already there, and already much better at surviving than whatever transitional life happens to pop up.
I did not know that. You have made perfect sense.
Evolution doesn't even attempt to explain the origins of life.
God could have created the first life forms. He didn't, but IF that's what happened that doesn't suddenly falsify evolution.
Word, I'm an atheist but I have no issues with deism, or even theistic evolution. As long as they don't deny science, people can believe in any god they want.
My first question to that is what made god then?
I may be an atheist but I love the approach of god creating the first life which eventually evolved
I do have to wonder tho, where did that god come from?
I would assume another demension but then that leads more questions lol
@@bloodwyvern7876 that is always my question I have and I absolutely hate it when I get some excuse how because gods to powerful and awesome he doesn’t need a creator and you can’t ask that question. Anyone who doesn’t let you ask questions and gate keeps from scrutiny is intellectually dishonest.
Christoid
I couldn't hear a thing you said past that killer voice and gorgeous face
Honestly, even if abiogenesis were occuring on some small part of the world or even if we time traveled to witness abiogenesis, I doubt we'd recognize it as life.
Life likely didn't emerge looking like modern life. It probably started as just really cool chemistry that sustained itself and spread. That's essentially what a fire is.
We don't even know if we can define viruses as being alive and they're essentially a gang of replicating molecules.
What if there's other weird forms of replicating biochemistry that resembles the mechanics of life without falling under any strict definition of life?
You also have to consider that there is too much oxygen in the atmosphere currently while the atmosphere eons back was reducing in nature. Oxygen is toxic, it caused the first great extinction which wiped out like 99% of all life at that time, the only reason life survived is due to antioxidants which help mamage oxygen stress, I dont think new life that arise will be advanced enough to produce antioxidants from the get go.
Could’ve swore we currently have a jar of the basic life ingredients stuff that was made in like the 80s and science is doing stuff with it…
We've got better, even. We've made autocatalytic RNA in the lab, and we have a basic working model of how RNA was produced and polymerized by geochemical processes.
Ppl dont realize how lucky we are to be here. Very small difference between living and never lived
Family Doctor here: isn't the fact that mutations are constantly occurring, within all organisms...and the remarkable fact of evolution is so apparent in every crop we plant, baby we have, puppy we breed....and who knows, there may be areas such as deep in the ocean near ventilation shafts and volcano vents where an environment similar to the "primordial sea" is allowing pockets of abiogenesis to occur....Okay, now I need to go do some reading about deep sea vents....
Also, chances are if it happens again something nearby is just going to eat it instantly
Also, whenever they bring up that „peanut butter jar experiment“ as an alleged gotcha against evolution (because most of the time they don‘t get that evolution and abiogenesis aren‘t the same thing), they always assume that whatever life there might have arisen in that jar should be immediately visible with the naked eye. Basically something along the lines of „abiogenesis BOOM ant!“
Which is just another one of the multiple layers in this scenario alone that shows the sheer magnitude of NOT understanding (if that’s even a thing) the very first thing about the thing they try to debunk.
A brand new living thing wouldn't have any of the refinements and defenses that comes with 3.5 billion years of evolution. It's like expecting a single newborn baby to survive and thrive in a world full of baby-eating professional MMA fighters.
Abiogenesis never happened, no not once.
Also, though, are you really saying we’d notice a single proto-cell and be able to distinguish it from a virus or something?
Over a decade ago when I was still a young earth creationist, I used to think that question was evidence against evolution. Poor teenage me.
Don't forget also that the first time it happened, the Earth was a very different place. There was little or no free oxygen to damage the emerging compounds for one thing. We now have organisms that live in diesel fuel, and organisms that eat plastic. Those wouldn't have existed without diesel fuel and plastic.
Any life that arises through abiogenesis would be extremely rudimentary, and thus be out-competed by modern forms which have a few hundred million years of acquired tricks up their sleeves.
theres also a good chance it does occur again all the time, but already existing life just eats it immediately and it dies.
Playing Devil's advocate: Why haven't we been able to create this environment in a lab and witness new life creation? Understand it's difficult, but that's never stopped us before.
If you ask that question then Forrest will get mad
We have. We saw amino acids, the building blocks of life self arrange and self replicate.
@@Zoma526 they are building blocks of life. That shows the building blocks can self assemble and replicate.
@@zombine555 amino acids aren’t anywhere close to life. Not even 1 percent of 1 percent.
We haven’t created stars or planets in labs, but that doesn’t mean they don’t form through natural processes.
We have successfully reproduced several steps in the process of abiogenesis, so it’s not like the research bore no fruit
Guide to secondary abiogenesis:
1) Kill everything else
2) Make a supernutrient yet life-devoid pond
3) Collect the raw materials for life
4) ???
5) Abiogenesis
Also want to add (because I'm a fuckin nerd) --- you'll need some specific minerals. Not uncommon forms of minerals, but still, afail, speciric. Something nucleotide polymers can bind to. Otherwise, hydrolysis vastly decreases your chances of getting a long enough polymer to form anything autocatalytic.
Everytime i open a jar of peanut butter there's new life. But that usually means i gotta go to the grocery store.
I would like to see an experiment with a sealed system that would have all the right materials with nothing to contaminate it. It would take possible many centuries but we could learn a lot in the process
Something like what you describe would be completely impossible to do, because of the timeframe you're proposing. What you CAN do (and has been done) is set up the proper materials and conditions, and create various organic molecules, but life itself is currently impossible to obtain in a lab.
Well... we have made autocatalytic RNA in the lab. It was guided in its production, but judging by how quickly it was made, statistically, a relevant setting could produce such RNA forms very quickly, (the larger the scale, the more quick it'd likely be.)
Getting from there to a full, recognizable cellular form? Probably not quick, though the pairing of autocatalytic RNA, TNA, or PNA, (while what we made was RNA, TNA and PNA might be capable of autocatalysis?) and lipids was itself probably immediate, or very quick, so you'd have "cells" very quickly. But the development of a genome and accompanying proteome? Idk.
Producing nucleotides or protonucleotides may have taken geological events that were wide apart in their timing, though.
also it could be that abiogenesis does happen and something approaching a cell forms but is immediately eaten by advanced life that's been evolving for billions of years
They do, kinda. But they're so detached from what we would consider to be life that you wouldn't even recognize it as life. It wouldn't look like bacteria, it would look like an odd collection of protein molecules in a vague resemblance of a closed area.
Oxygen is incredibly corrosive. We are used to it, but new life is just going to turn to smoke. The oxygen in our atmo comes from life.
For sure but of course remember there exists anaerobic organisms and environments so oxygen isn't a total deal breaker.
Here’s a thought. If yahweh realized he screwed up so badly creating humans, why did it destroy all life except what was on the Ark? Why didn’t it just eliminate all humans and start over with a new species?
Ding ding ding, yes we have a winner life requires resources. Great video sweetie and love your work.❤
Think of it as an economic question.
Why are there so many houses but no one to buy?
Because those that already own houses buy them up, then jack up the price to kill competition or prevent lower classes to move in
Maybe got a bit too real there
there's an experiment done a while ago where the best approximation of the primordial soup was made in a sealed container and then shocked with electricity as if struck by lightning and a lot of precursor organic molecules form from that, some know it works.
The big problem with seeing that happen in the wild today is because back then the Earth had very very little oxygen and most of the first living things and organic molecules would be destroyed by oxygen which reacts with everything very quickly.
once life got going on the anaerobic Earth and photosynthesis start happening The planet was flooded with oxygen which killed a ton of the early life on the planet and started an ice age called the snowball Earth.
basically life destroyed the conditions for the spontaneous generation of life to occur
I love his explanations of life. Thank you, Forrest.
It also could be happening. There's no real way to know though. How do you tell the difference between an organism that just started living, and one we only just discovered.
“If the hyper specific scenario happened once, why won’t it happen again with new variables that contradict the specific scenario?”
Can't happen again
It's also because life has been adapting for millions of years so any newborn species of bacteria would be outcompeted before we could notice even if it was happening all the time.
Well, because:
"just" = "after a few billion years" and
"out of nowhere" = "under rather specific conditions",
that's how come!
Even if a cell did form it would get immediately eaten by more complex life.
Another thing that most creationists don't realize, it that the first life forms would have looked VERY different to the life forms today. It most likely would have just been a lipid membrane with some RNA. It took 3 billion years for organelles and DNA to evolve.
i wonder if the person was actually asking something even more dumb, like "why don't we see new weird and crazy animal types and species all the time"
I'd take the question more seriously if evolution was spelled correctly.
Thank you. You’re much more polite than I’d be when hearing people who can find no reason to think that the conditions inside a jar of peanut butter today might be different from the condition of the earth 3 billion years ago. I just can’t.
You’re a far more patient human being than I am.
There's also the fact that the environment is different and because of human influence the environment is changing a lot.
I've been living in the desert for almost two years now and something I've noticed in the fall and winter is these little tufts of grass growing up around my area.
Now, i live close to a canal and there's trees and grasses all over the road right by the canal but I'm just inland enough, by like a few feet, that trees are sparse and small, grasses are virtually unseen with the exception of those tufts that show up in winter.
Here's my point. Hardy life in the area already has a foothold and it is not going anywhere. New life does manage to show up and grow and make itself known just enough to be seen by me.
And then the environment changes. It gets hotter, it gets dryer, the trees that already live here don't struggle but those tiny grasses aren't adapting fast enough, or growing fast enough for them to handle the changes in the environment around them compared to the life that is already established.
Even if i go out and try to help that grass out to grow in the desert it just can't take it.
Yeah there's competition from already established life in the area but the difference in rainfall and uv intensity and heat and dryness in winter vs spring is dramatic.
It's the plateau problem, which is very common. Once a biological niche is filled, it's filled forever. There won't be a new fish developing lungs and walking up on the beach, because that whole biome is filled with advanced predators that would prey on such a vulnerable creature. So that evolutionary step can never repeat the same way again.
To add on
it could just be that conditions on earth are just so completely different than when life started and there’s something important about that to get the process started.
As well, the earth wasn't filled with oxygen back then. You can do a lot more crazy chemical reactions when you don't have to worry about things catching on fire.
Question: So, it won't happen today, very fascinating. But do scientists believe it happened in one place exactly once, or do they think i5 might have happened multiple times in multiple places near the beginning?
While we aren't entirely sure, it almost certainly happened multiple times and only one lineage survived. The more we look into it, the more mundane the conditions for life to get started seem to be. It's really when competition with other lifeforms begins that things get interesting!
abiogenesis is like capitalism, its great for those that are there already and can take advantage while there isn't any existing competition
Or taking the counter viewpoint. Why does god no longer perform supernatural miracles On a daily basis? We don’t we see Talking snakes, parting seas with dry ground, raising the dead, walking the dead, all you can eat picnic buffets, food falling from the sky to feed the hungry???
There’s mountains of evidence to support evolution but essentially zero evidence to support any of the thousands of religions. Yet all the religious people still demanding more evidence. 🤦
IDK man, if someone invented the lightbulb, I don't think someone could invent the lightbulb again.
I think the other catch is, that some of the people asking about abiogenesis might be confusing it with human related parthenogenesis.
There likely IS abiogenesis happening some where on this giant blue marble. But the likelihood of anyone of us finding it in that nascent stage, is astronomically small. Maybe people are expecting abiogenesis of multicellular or complex creatures, instead of single cellular organisms?
It would get eaten long before it reached a cell stage.
AND the process of anything but single-cell organisms to emerge takes thousands of years if not tens of thousands of years. Meaning for it to be noticeable it would take much longer than a human life.
Nutrient rich?
Perfect?
You said not in a jar of peanutbutter!
Peanut butter has no sea floor minerals to help catalyze RNA polymerization. The water in it would be both necessary for that polymerization, yet also interfere with it remaining stable afterwards, preventing the likelihood of polymers forming of triple digit length, or even 50. (Iirc, estimates are that you probably don't have autocatalytic RNA sequences of any length under the number 50.) Oxygen from the atmosphere would also be a problem, I'd imagine.
Thank you Renegade Science Teacher. Your hard work helps us all to the unreasonable.
What about viruses? They seem to come up in new forms all the time and mutate at rapid speed. But they aren't really defined as living beings. But I wonder how they relate to this subject.
As far as I know, rhinoviruses may have been produced by successive abiogenesis events. Autocatalytic RNA has shown adaptability, including the ability to evolve to incorporate other RNA molecules into its function. I'm not familiar enough with the evidence on rhinovirus evolution and history to be sure.
Retriviruses are very very likely descended from bacteria, though.
Oh, it does seem to be the case that the ribosome is descended from an RNA complex of two subunits. I'm not sure how closely those subunits resemble eachother... they may have both been produced separately.
Think of it like a new startup business. There are hundreds of other businesses that are competing for the same thing. A new business would either go bankrupt or merge/ be absorbed with a larger business.
thank you for making interesting posts about actual science, because the inverse that claims to be about science is incredibly annoying.
New life could be spontaneously popping up on every where, but the existing life would gobble it up faster than we could recognize it.
The chemical soup being served hot and fresh was perfect back then, wish we could go back
The Question that is really interesting is: When do we consider molecular intertaction "Life" and when will we find out that maybe that Definition of old we went by for hundreds of years is insufficient.
That to witness would be nice when beeing ageless immortal.
But the bad stuff makes it hard to focus on that good stuff.
even if it existed
and it wasnt immediately colonized by bacteria
the life that happened on it would still be consumed by the more evolved bacteria before you got even close to detecting it
Any new life seriously be eaten by things with the advantages of billions of years of evolution.
You were very generous when rephrasing that question into something more reasonable, rather than the bullshit question that commenter actually asked.
Dude, I got a good radio voice but that's thick. I hope you are working as a voice actor.
I'm autistic and have an obsession with sounds. I love that voice.