How did it start?

I like that question. Here are some random thoughts on it:1) If it was it would be very, very hard to detect. It isn't like we have a complete list of all living things that are there so we can tell a "newbie" from the others.Heck just recently bacteriophages were discovered to be much much more prevalent than understood. It seems the outnumber all other living things by a very, very wide margin.2) The earth today is basically enormously different from what it was 4 Gyrs ago. It may be that the conditions that allow/encourage the formation of life are just too different from today.3) As a subset of 2, any new life would have to compete with life that has 3 some billion years of evolution behind it. It might have a tough time surviving in competition with that. For one thing the precursors to life might look a lot like food to todays critters.ABE
so the answer to the question is: "I doubt that abiogenesis is going on today."As cool as that would be, I would be astonished.This message has been edited by NosyNed, 12-15-2004 03:03 PM

Well, if you can't understand my argument, then maybe you can struggle with this one for a bit - if life doesn't come from non-living matter, what does it come from? Right. Nobody knows of any other things besides the living and the non-living. Before there was the living, then, it's most reasonable to conclude that there was nothing but the non-living. Ergo, what did the living have to come from? Since there was nothing else, the answer has to be "the non-living."How did this happen? I don't have a fucking clue. Presumably chemistry; maybe aliens or God.But I don't see how the proposition that "life came from the non-living" can be in any doubt, whatsoever. It's the inescapabe conclusion, at this point. No. 4 billion years of living things acting on the Planet Earth have created conditions globally inhospitible to abiogenesis.

You appear to be contradicting yourself. First you don't have a fucking clue, and then you say life had to come from non-life. How about ex nihilo? How about from "mind"? How about from some other form of biological life that is eternal?

You seem to think that there is a contradiction because you are mixing the occurance of life arising with the "how" of it.Crash says he doesn't know "how".If life arose "ex nihilo", from mind or from eternal life those mechanisms (whatever they mean, especially the first two) seem to have used non-living matter that was already around. So I don't see that you aren't being contradictory and have taken us back to the point that Crash was attempting to make awile ago.What does, btw, ex nihilo and "from mind" mean?Why would we use "eternal life" as an explanation when we have no hint that such a thing exists?

Not in the least. Where's the contradiction? I know what had to happen - life came from non-life. What I don't know is how it did happen. Did aliens turn lifelessness into life? Dunno. Did God do that? Dunno. Did it do it itself? Dunno, but the research in that direction so far has produced more results than research into God or aliens.I don't see the contradiction. "Out of nothing"? Where is nothing to be found? And if life came from nothing, then why is it made out of the same stuff that was already here? If life comes out of nothing, spontaneously, why doesn't it happen anymore? "Mind" doesn't exist, except as an idea. How could anything physical come from it? How could something in this universe be eternal? And how could something not in this universe affect something in this one?This message has been edited by crashfrog, 12-15-2004 03:29 PM

A dubious assumption. I don't know. I suppose it's possible. If we say the universe was created with Big Bang, then it would not be possible. But apparently that's debatable.This message has been edited by robinrohan, 12-15-2004 03:36 PM

Dubious? Show me a mind atom, then.

Possibly I am confusing the cause of the beginning of life with what life is made out of. If you say that life came from non-life, I was thinking this meant that the cause of life was non-life activity of some sort, which is not quite the same as the question of what living bodies are made out of. So perhaps I am discussing cause and Crashfrog is discussing material that life is made out of. I thought he meant that NON-LIFE ACTIVITY created life, whatever it might be made out of. If that's not what he meant, then no, he is not contradicting himself.There is a lack of evidence that non-life activity created life. There is the Miller experiment, which is a little evidence, but that's about it as far as I know.This message has been edited by robinrohan, 12-15-2004 04:03 PM

There's a lack of evidence for specifically what non-living activity (a better word for this would be "chemistry") gave rise to life, and without that it's impossible to say for absolutely certain that physical chemistry is the source of life, but there's plenty of evidence that life is the result of chemistry, and no evidence for any alternative, so the real picture is a lot less ambiguous than you suggest.There's very real evidence that physical chemistry is sufficient to account for the existence of life. That evidence is our vast success at creating possibly every known type of organic molecule through entirely inorganic chemistry. The question now is simply what order those molecules have to be in, and what arrangement of chemistry will sufficie to put them there.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 12-15-2004 04:08 PM

Produce the amoeba or little bush or whatever it is, or the undisturbed fossil thereof. Where is it?That would be evidence. Don't give me a little creature that was begotten in some fashion. I want the real thing.

We're talking about things that are much, much simpler and smaller than any living microorganism. What do you think the odds are that we would find fossils of it, especially since it wouldn't have any bones or hard parts? If the only thing that would convince you is that that can't possibly exist, then you're in a pretty invincible position of ignorance, wouldn't you say?

In that case, to hell with the fossil. Give me the real thing, alive and kicking.

S/he will. Within the next generation. The researcher who will give you that is alive today. It's a matter of time.This message has been edited by NosyNed, 12-15-2004 04:55 PM

Is somebody working on it?

But not begotten in some fashion, like you said before? How do you propose we do that, construct a time machine?Why don't you get right to work on that.