At some point a slightly different molecule appears which is better at converting the molecules, or perhaps they can convert other types of molecules for replication: the first evolutionary step. Perhaps some other mutation allows molecules to "harvest" the other molecules to replicate themselves: the first predators.
Over time this becomes more complex; from singular molecules and proteins to lots of molecules and proteins.
I don't know what Von Neumann "showed us", but IMHO it's not hard to imagine life starting from very simple and humble origins given the enormous timeframes involved (IMO the biggest challenge in understanding these sort of things is understanding just how long a million or 10 million years is, insofar we're even able to do that in the first place).
I feel this is a bad example to use because prions only do so due to the existence of plenty of things as complex as prions. We would need an example that creates more complex structures out of simpler building blocks, not equally complex building blocks.
I would say solid state is more complex than fluid.
Advanced material science is making use of those crystals to make semi-conductors and stuffs because they can just absorb sunlight and then react with other substances.
So you're telling me that compounds floating around self-assemble into a factory and the information necessary for the factory, including error correcting code, in a short amount of time, randomly?
I don't think you've thought this through.
Cell wall is a really amazing thing.
I'm not sure if I would count days (or possibly weeks) as quick.
It’s not hard to imagine a fire-breathing red dragon or a unicorn either.
What is hard is coming up with an even remotely testable hypothesis for how non-living molecules became alive.
This caveat does not seems to make sense to me, the advantage of time is that you run the experiment over and over, if one particular run of the experiment fails and then the organic chemicals involved decay, that doesn’t mean time isn’t still on your side.
Also keep in mind that the experiment is run on an absurd number of planets and of we can only be around to ask the question on the planet where it worked out.
There's real interesting questions to ask here, you're right. They're not getting asked in this thread, though.
What's I see here is people defending conventional OoL as a kind of quasi-religion, with dogma that does not need to be experimentally demonstrated and must not be questioned. I treat all religions with disdain, including yours.
If you ask a question about science to a random person on the Internet they're entirely within their right to say "I don't think you actually want to learn something you don't know, I think you're asking your question to put forward an argument that I've seen many people before you put forward and that I'm tired of hearing, and therefore I'm not going to humor you by answering your question", until you convince them that talking to you isn't a complete waste of time.
Second, anyone can ask any questions they like and anyone can answer or not any questions they like. No one is obligated to engage with you just because you asked a question. Actually, if someone tells you that they think you're asking your question in bad faith that's a courtesy they're having towards you, because they're giving you the chance to convince them that you're actually being sincere. They could have simply ignored you and gone on with their day.
https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/
Sorry to be short, but you're doing a very aggressive enlightened centrist bit. Chill out for a bit, and read through the above when you've got some time.
Also, the question was answered in this thread. If you weren't trying to do so much name calling, you'd probably have read the answer and been informed.
On that note, I'm curious about quasi crystals or crystals prone to substitutions in the lattice. I envision a crystallization process that occurs right on the edge between crystallizing/dissolving. Then any small unit block with some particular contaminant that is slightly more stable becomes favored by evolutionary processes and entropic ones.
If such a thing is possible, and has a sufficiently high upperbound on possible variations, I think you can get a lot of interesting behavior. Over a long period of time, perhaps a crystal unit block could develop that encourages more of its own creation.
It's a fine line though, because usually crystallization doesn't have sufficient complexity to keep evolving, and it's usually driven more by external conditions than by local conditions in the lattice, but nevertheless, it's the most plausible bridge to life I've ever come up with.
Generally cell wall first hypothesis over RNA/peptides first.
Through such a biofilm micelle only certain chemicals can get in or out. This favors particular molecules "crystallizing" (or rather polymerizing) inside such micelles.
I've always felt that RNA was probably a very late addition to the game of life.
But self-replication has to be very good to be useful. If it makes a mistake 10% of the time, the longest piece of information that be retained is about 10 bits.
It seems like your perspective is more information theoretic, and does not include selection.
I don’t see any reason to limit things to the observable universe. What prevents life from emerging outside of our light cone?
As for complexity barrier: consider the number of possible stable configurations with N atoms. It grows exponentially in N. You need to argue either that the chance of a random molecule being alive is high enough (which doesn't seem consistent with the structure we see in life) or that the sampling of these molecular configurations is extremely biased toward some that can start evolution (which is just begging the question.)
It is a mathematical argument, and not a complicated one, so I’m confused as to how we could be talking past one another here. If we model the chance that abiogenesis occurs on a planet as a random event for that planet, then the probability that it doesn’t occur on any planets is
1 - product(from i=1 to n_planets, 1-P_i), where P_i is the probability that it occurred on the i’th planet. (Sorry for the ugly notation, it is a limitation of basic text, hopefully it makes sense).
These are independent random events, there’s no need to have them linked causally.
> As for complexity barrier: consider the number of possible stable configurations with N atoms. It grows exponentially in N. You need to argue either that the chance of a random molecule being alive is high enough (which doesn't seem consistent with the structure we see in life) or that the sampling of these molecular configurations is extremely biased toward some that can start evolution (which is just begging the question.)
So this seems like an argument from first-principles in chemistry, I don’t know enough about chemistry to say much about it, but I don’t think enumerating every possible configuration of atoms is how they typically do it. I could be wrong though, it is outside my wheelhouse. I would be more comfortable with this argument if it was some well-sourced/well-known thing.
Anyway, this sort of argument seems like it will just shift the individual P_i’s in the equation up or down. We don’t really know enough about abiogenesis to make good estimates there anyway as far as I know, so I don’t see any reason to write off this explanation as a cop-out.
There could be unlimited volumes of spacetime beyond this horizon. Whether life originates there or not we can never know. There is a finite amount of matter within this horizon, and finitely many chances for life to originate. If OoL is sufficiently unlikely it is unlikely to have happened twice in the volume we can reach.
"The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities on Earth was not a single event, but a process of increasing complexity involving the formation of a habitable planet, the prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Many proposals have been made for different stages of the process."
You can always start your search on matters like this on Wikipedia.
There's no evidence for the above: chemical processes decay, time works against the chemistry.
The Sun (and sometimes the earth itself) provides energy to the system, and we're talking about a billion years to go from "churning precursors in a hot soup" to "replicating molecular machines".
I mean, what's your alternative theory? The Abrahamic God?
It is fascinating how early "goop to replicators" happened in our history. It really highlights how common life must be where there's water.
You're begging the question here. How do you know it was random and not inevitable?
What would it mean for a chemical process to be "inevitable"? Merely that it has a very high probability of happening?
When we look at the evidence, it seems like life began pretty much as soon as it could have as the earth cooled. It could be that life starting on planets like ours basically just happens as a byproduct of the planet building.
Adding a god to the discussion doesn't really advance anything at all, honestly. It just explains the mystery with a bigger mystery, so it doesn't explain anything.
That is, life exists at the barrier between active and cool energy states. Sun to atmosphere/surface, hot planet core to surface/ocean. It's a (extremely complicated) product of these transitions.
Biochemist Nick Lane writes quite a bit about the alkaline hydrothermal vent theory and it is very compelling. I don't know (bio)chemistry well enough to fully understand it but it's something like (please people who understand this better correct me...)
a) Very early earth had the 'lucky' combination of active hot core and cool (but not frozen) water covered surface.
b) In addition to 'hot smokers', 'warm' (e.g. closer to cell / body temperature) vents exist and existed on the ocean floor.
c) The ocean water was relatively acidic compared to now. But the warm vents had alkaline chemistry.
d) The specific chemical reactions involved (hand waving here) as the warm vents mixed with the ocean created complex molecules, some organic. And some of the products produced were capsules/bubbles with 'walls' similar in structure cells.
e) There's (more hand waving) reactions that can happen across the walls and molecules produced inside the 'cell-like' things.
f) At some point they 'escape' the vent and its energy source. And in escaping 99.999% of them 'die', but eventually one that escapes does so in a way that it can self-sustain from other energy sources.
g) At the same time at some point those proto-cells develop RNA or RNA-like processes internally such that they can reproduce
It's f->g that I guess is the confusing part for me.
But work is being done in the lab to try reproduce this whole process.
In any case eventually the sun and earth will die, all cell machinery will stop, and entropy will have finally had its way with us. It's not a self-sustaining automaton. It requires an externally driven energy transition.
When did asking "how do we know" become forbidden in science? Convention OoL is looking entirely too dogmatic and religious for my taste.
People are calling out Ezion for dogwhistling because of his writing style. Comments written in a glib manner, with superficial counterarguments presented as gotchas, that is suggestive of dogwhistling.
> When did asking "how do we know" become forbidden in science?
What has been forbidden exactly and are you sure we are "in science" here?
> You are exhibiting a deplorable behavior here, equating questioning of a scientific hypothesis with creationism dogwhistling.
Let me sum this up. Asking "how do we know?" with a hidden agenda is OK, but asking "what do you have in mind exactly?" is "deplorable behavior" and should be... "forbidden"?
OK, troll, bye bye.
While the original factory is not self-replicating, if you reached a fix point you would get a self-replicating factory
It was a simple "hello world", and then with only the characters needed for the program. I didn't see it spit out any usable code when I played with it.
But even if it had, it still wasn't able to run without my code existing already... (and the environment I coded it in)
I think you could actually get pretty far at understanding erosion if you had a pretty detailed snapshot of interesting river basins, some landmarks (this rock was over there, etc) and a general understanding of physics.
That's what needs to be done to achieve what was achieved.
https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/
There's a section specifically on abiogenesis: https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html#CB0
To answer your initial question, it's really difficult to mentally grasp the scales involved with this. Billions of years, quadrillions of watts of power from the sun, some astronomically large number of chemical interactions happening simultaneously all over the early Earth. These numbers throw off one's naive sense of scale. The basic recipe of "hydrogen + time" will produce some very interesting results, however. Eventually we'll reach the heat death of the universe, or some other sort of end[1], but until then all the matter and energy bouncing around will get up to some cool stuff.
[1]: Good reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
It's great to question any existing consensus. But do so with the intent of learning, not trying to sneak in a religious worldview. If you're going to push a religious agenda, be courteous and at least be up front about it.
[1] On-going series of lectures, "Physics as Information Processing" - Chris Fields
Lecture 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpOrRw4EhTo
Lecture 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkWIqpxWRM4
Lecture 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOZp_XNYijQ
[2] "How does chemistry come alive?" - Nick Lane, Alkaline hydrothermal vents at 18:44, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmvS7tgvy6U TL;DW at 52:00 "How does chemistry come alive? It happens when a focused, sustained environmental disequilibrium of H2, CO2, and pH across a porous structure that lowers kinetic barriers to reaction continuously forms organics that bind and self-organize into protocells with protometabolism generating catalytic nucleotides which promote protocell growth through positive feedbacks, favouring physical interactions with amino acids, a nascent genetic code where RNA sequences are selected if they promote protocell growth so genetic information has meaning from the beginning"
[3] "Origins of the RNA-Protein World – Lost in Translation?" - John Sutherland, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSjIDStlZg8
And yet, I think it’s a serious comment, not a troll, because this is the right epistemic stance. We don’t know how life emerged yet and this is rightly uncomfortable.
As for the object-level topic: I’d direct my attention to any research that investigates the relationship between the cell wall and the inner organelles. I suspect that the viability of the cell factories was dependent on its co-evolution with the cell wall, which, by creating a semi-closed (permeable) system, would change the entropic conditions inside the cell.
A cell dies when it's damaged mechanically or chemically, or when it's unable to sustain its metabolism thus causing chemical damage, or when its programming instructs it to destroy itself for whatever reason.
And re: the epistemological questions, etc: I think there's a temptation for people to look for a transcendent, teleological prescription for the 'why' of life; which can range from either 'God' to some abstract 'progress' concept where nature proceeds to 'higher stages' etc (panspermia, gaia, whatever). It's deeply part of at least western culture since at least Aristotle and Plato to use these kinds of tools.
But I believe the 'answer' here is just a big messy 'immanent' one rather than any transcendent order. Life happened as it happened because it happened... and it will unhappen someday, too.
And of course we would not be here to ask questions about it if it hadn't, so is it really a puzzle that needs a formula to answer it?
Humans look for "reasons" for things because that's a useful conceptual tool for understanding why other people in our kin groups do things, or why a herd of gazelle we're hunting is in a particular place, or why a plant we harvest from didn't grow well this year.
But there's no reason to assume that this conceptual tool makes any sense for understanding "life" or "existence." It's a crude instrument. At that level, there is no "why", there is only "is".
(And I'd posit further we should not make assumptions like "oh it happened here [us] so it must have happened elsewhere because <xxxx principle / transcendent order / natural progression> ... so ... Star Trek!"; the universe is massive, yes, but that doesn't mean the precise events duplicate multiple times and it does seem like complex multicellular life was a kind of ... fluke ...)
The question is how quickly do they decay in a sterile environment. A virus which has no active mechanism for preventing decay can last for days. RNA can have half lives measured in days. That's a lot of time and I'm sure there's more stable variants but in modern times stability is not a prime concern for organic molecules.
Nobel laureate Jack Szostak from University of Chicago delivered the Eyring General Lecture on March 17, 2023 at Arizona State University.
"The Origin of Life: Not as Hard as it Looks?"
We already know that an energy input, such as solar energy, to a large collection of simple molecules like methane and ammonia can produce the building blocks of life: amino acids and nucleotides. Once a short chain of nucleotides is formed, it will (slowly) replicate itself by attracting other nucleotides in the environment. That's all the original "life" on Earth consisted of. The simple chains of nucleotides were both "factory" and "information".
We don't know all the specific steps that life took between those first simple replicators and cells. We may never know for sure because data left over from that time is so sparse. But that's not the same as not having a viable theory. We have that.
We know simple building blocks can be created, in low concentrations, with large amounts of other components that don't end up in life. The concentration of any given chemical in this mix is exponentially dependent on its complexity. The "once a short chain is formed, it will (slowly) replicate" is entirely unsupported by experiment. Indeed, it's difficult to see how it could work, when it's replicating in a soup loaded with junk monomers.
Current studies are about finding the most likely pathway, rather than knowing whether of not it is possible. We know it is possible because we are here.
As for the technical details, look up "abiogenesis" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis )
"Garner" is perfect here, thank you.
> But how do random chemical processes [make the leap from molecules to cells]?
Ya, that's a kicker.
Another mind bender for me is the concept of "self". When some collection starts to prefer their own company over others. That boundary (or barrier or affinity or homophily or whatever) between "me" and "not me".
>We know that's what a cell is. But how do random chemical processes get there?
Work backwards. Think of the simplest cell you can. Now remove the membrane and the little molecular machines are free to wander in the medium arbitrarily far away from each other. The chemical processes are still happening, but they just take a long time to finish. All you need is for the abiotic medium to contain at least one of every of those molecules to have a sort of diffuse protolife.
That is, Von Neumann showed us that to have a self-replicating automaton we need both the factory and the information for the factory (saved within it). We know that's what a cell is. But how do random chemical processes get there?
Note: time works against chemical processes since the organic chemical compounds decay, keep that in mind when creating a hypothesis.
Note 2: remember that in this case, both the factory & the information gets randomly mutated until you have a factory and information that's complex enough to error correct.