ABIOGENESIS
Index
Life has been on our planet for eons. Forming about 4.56 billion years ago [4.56 gya] the Earth remained inhospitable to life until after about 4 gya, mainly because large asteroids were still striking the inner planets and vaporising the oceans. The earliest definite fossils are from 3.5 gya, but suggestive carbon traces exist from 3.85 gya almost on top of the end of the late asteroid bombardment phase. Life seemingly appeared within, at most 100 million years.
What sort of life are we talking about? Basically bacteria, but that term for most people implies 'germs'. Let's not malign bacteria. Firstly, much of your digestive health comes from being on good terms with benign bacteria in your gut. Also bacteria form the backbone of the Earth's ecosystems, converting and concentrating many chemicals into useful forms for other life. While bacteria are simpler in design to eukarya, like ourselves, they can exist in an incredible range of environments, from boiling water to solid ice, and on anything from indigestible plant material to basalt and water.
Also certain components of eukaryotic cells seem to be bacteria, albeit no longer independent of their 'hosts'. The energy-factories of many eukarya, the mitochondria, and the light-converters of plants, the chloroplasts, are examples of such bacterial components. In a vital sense eukarya are bacterial colonies. More speculatively, the molecular 'skeletons' of our cells and the waving tails of our sperm seem to be products of a fusion of another kind of bacteria with early eukaryotic cells.
Gram for gram there are more bacteria in and on the Earth than any other kind of life. And for the first billion years they seemingly ruled the Earth alone, forming immense colonies called Stromatolites that are found in the right conditions to this day. Also bacteria were the first life to colonise the land, their chemical activities converting the bare rock into soil over the eons. Eventually other life left the oceans, but not to find an uninhabited world.
So the first life was bacteria, and to go from bacteria to eukarya is fairly well understood. But what about the first step, from organic chemicals to bacteria? Creationists have rightly emphasised that this is a virtually impossible leap. The odds of a bacterium forming out of a vat of suitable simple atoms is a figure that is mind-numbingly small. There is a one in ten-to-10 billion [a 1 followed by 10 BILLION zeroes] chance of such a spontaneous leap. Billions of atoms make up the smallest bacterium and these have some many more ways of coming together than as a bacterium.
But the power of self-organisation is being ignored. Firstly, many of the simple molecular components that make up life would have formed on the early Earth [or Mars, or in comets, or in space, other possible sources of such], which immediately makes for better odds. And several major components of bacterial cells form spontaneously thanks to their molecular structure - a simple cell wall, for example. Also we don't know just how simple a cell can be. Given energy and time perhaps life can form in suitably chemically rich environment - no one knows, yet.
And that's the whole point - we don't know, so why should we stop looking? Creationists say 'it can't happen, so God did it' but we don't know that it can't, and by saying 'God' as THE answer produces no scientific research or endeavour. By understanding life and its origin we understand bacteria better, and we understand ourselves better, because we have to look at how Life really works and how it might work. The quest for abiogenesis creates new ideas about all living things, but saying 'God' doesn't. And since we don't know, 'God' is not an answer, but an excuse not to find out.
Let me give you an analogy to stress the importance of such research. Since the early days of civilisation, disease has been linked to the actions of the gods and demons that ran the world. What if people had stopped searching for knowledge about disease because that threatened the 'demon theory' of disease? If someone's god is threatened by an increase in knowledge then what is that god other than IGNORANCE? Christians led the search for knowledge about disease - Louis Pasteur being the most famous example. Which is Creationism? A quest for Truth, or a call to ignorance?
I believe that we will find that life's origin relies on the deepest level of Nature. Paul Davies, a famous physicist, has speculated that life has its origin in quantum effects - the physics of atoms and molecules. Biomolecules are the right size for significant quantum effects, and this may allow them to 'search' through many possibilities at once, as smaller particles do in the right conditions. This may help explain Life's rapid origin, seemingly against the odds.
But in the end the origin of life lies in the hands of God. As do all of Nature's works, including the beauty of flowers, the flight of eagles and the hunting prowess of lions - all affirmed, in the Bible, as the works of God. In Genesis we read that God commanded the soil to produce plants, and the sky and sea to produce flying and swimming things. God gives power to his creation, it seems, to make itself. And yet he knits us together in our mothers' wombs.
Here's a good link at Talk.Origins Archive...
Abiogenesis - Probability Arguments by Creationists
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