Eli5: (This prob sounds stupid) How did life forms come to be on earth? Like, how did something become ‘living’?
In: Biology
We don’t know for sure but the current theory is that random chemical processes created a self-replicating molecule and that was enough to start evolution.
You really only need one, because in an environment without any other life it can replicate without any competition. The replication process would be far from perfect in such a primitive “life” so the rate of random changes (mutations) would be very, very high.
Imagine you have 2 unknown molecules A and B that attract each other. On their own they are very simple and can be created by random chemical processes. But once they connect together you have AB. Then maybe ABBABBAAABBABB or whatever. Now, the same molecules can maybe randomly attach to the sides of the chain and then get torn off later, and voila, you have a self-replicating system. Some of the sequences are more likely to undergo the replication, so they dominate and the evolution begins.
We can’t research it because we don’t have the millions of years it took to get from something unbelievably simple to anything that we’d call life today.
Creationists these days argue that the chance of creating a protein randomly is so vanishingly small that it would not happen even in billions of years. They may even be right. But proteins are already complicated effects of evolution, whatever came first had to be much simpler than that.
Imagine this thought experiment: you throw 1000 6-side dice and expect to have a result of exactly 1-6-1-6-1-6-1-6 and so on for the whole 1000 dice.
The chance of it happening randomly is 6^1000 which is truly impossible within the time available in the Universe. But, what if dice have magnets inside so that if 1 and 6 land next to each other they get permanently attached? Well, now all you have to do is keep shaking the dice and eventually all of them will align, pair after pair.
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