how was life created from nonliving things?

Question

and does this mean we can recreate this process to manipulate life into whatever we want?

In: 186

Answer 1

Up to a point, it’s just natural chemistry — bigger molecules forming by the combination of smaller molecules. Especially for polymers, molecules that form in chains, chunk by chunk by chunk. This is how nylon is made, nothing special there.

But the key step was how to replicate a molecule, make a copy of a molecule that’s laying around. This is doable if you have catalyst molecules also laying around to help that process.

But the bazinga moment was a molecule that was a catalyst for its own replication. This happened to be RNA, most biologists think. From then on, it’s a downhill coast.