How did life form from non-living matter (abiogenesis)?
In: Biology
We don’t know. It’s one of the great open questions in science right now.
We have some hypotheses about how it started, but right now they’re all on the level of, “Well, this *could* have happened…” Basically, we’ve managed to produce many of the precursors to life (lipids, amino acids, RNA, proto-proteins) in laboratory conditions that we *think* mimic the environment of early Earth.
But even if we do manage to completely mimic that, and even if we manage to induce the creation of all of life’s building blocks, and even if we then manage to coax those building blocks to become a self-replicating entity that can produce descendants… it doesn’t mean that we’ve proven how life *actually* got started on Earth.
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