If I’m not mistaken, prokaryotes were the earliest life forms, but what factors played into effect of making them? Did a specific chemical reaction change inorganic matter to life or was it brought to Earth from extra terrestrial objects?
In: Biology
There are a lot of different theories about how life first developed. Prokaryotes, though, are latecomers, compared to the strange things that scientists have dreamt up to explain how we began billions of years ago. There’s the RNA World Hypothesis, the Clay Hypothesis, and others. What all of these theories try to explain is how the chemicals necessary for life as we know it could become sufficiently concentrated that they could do life-y things without the need for extraneous additions like proteins and cell membranes. Once life is able to get a toehold, it can start augmenting itself through the process of evolution which eventually produces the prokaryotes and their descendants.
A lot of people, me included, don’t really like the Panspermia Hypothesis, that life came from somewhere else in space, because it doesn’t really explain how it came to be. It just adds an extra unnecessary step to the sequence. We still have to figure out, in that case, how life arose in that other part of space.
Latest Answers