Before anyone comes for me, I grew up southern baptist – went to a private christian school & was homeschooled for a few years. The extent of my “science” education when it came to evolution & the origin of the universe was “if we came from monkeys why do monkeys still exist?” and “look at this galaxy that’s shaped like a cross, isn’t god amazing!!” I’m an atheist now and would like to have some sort of understanding of how our world came to be, but trying to figure it out as an adult with no real foundation has been incredibly difficult, and none of it’s making sense. I also know I’m asking a lot as all 3 of those subjects are pretty extensive, so if you know any good videos or books I’d love some recommendations!
In: Biology
Evolution is more or less a fancy way of saying that our method of reproducing is not perfect. Our DNA is a complicated and surprisingly fragile thing. Over time with life, random errors/damage happen, known as mutations. When we reproduce, some of those mutations may be passed along at random, which may result in the offspring having some differences. Over many generations this can result in some lineages changing their appearance or other traits, while others may not change that much. Further driving evolution is a process known as natural selection. Basically, with natural selection, organisms that have developed traits that help them in their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce, passing on these traits, while changes that are a hindrance are more likely to get the organism killed before it can reproduce.
The Big Bang is unfortunately still one of science’s greatest mysteries. Part of the issue is the Big Bang is thought to be the source of all the known matter in the universe, so we effectively have no way to really find out what was going on before. The closest we can get is the instant after the big bang when all the matter in the universe was suddenly rapidly expanding outwards. As pressure was released due to the expansion, matter started to take the form of protons, neutrons, and electrons, forming the first atoms. The universe to this day is still expanding even though locally matter has coalesced into asteroids, planets, stars, galaxies, nebula, black holes, etc
The origin of life is another tough one, because we have no real way to truly know or replicate the conditions. Wherever the first primitive origins of life formed on earth have long been destroyed due to the ocean crust subducting back into the mantle and our planet having vastly more oxygen in the air and water than it did when life first formed, as oxygen is toxic and destructive to cells that have not evolved defenses against the element’s reactivity, though its theorized hydrothermal vents may have been the key, the high heat and nutrient and mineral rich water providing the soup of materials needed for a self-replicating molecule to first form. But even then its very hard to try and study how this process might have turned into the first primitive cells, as the cells we all known have had 3 billion years of evolution behind them, and there’s no way to create a truly sterile environment anymore, microbes are everywhere now and would be happy to consume bits of organic matter or new primitive cells before we could even get a chance to known they exist.
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