and does this mean we can recreate this process to manipulate life into whatever we want?
In: 186
how is this question allowed? surely it breaks Rule 2?
Random chance.
The idea is that the primordial soup that was on Earth contained a lot of amino acids (the building blocks of life) and eventually enough stuff randomly came together to form a strand of RNA that coded for a protein. It assembled the amino acids into a protein that could then construct another strand of RNA. This self replicating strand of RNA would have been the first lifeform. Eventually, it mutated enough that several strands of RNA coded for several proteins that could come together and form a cell. At some point, the RNA assembling proteins would have mutated and created DNA, which was much better at its job. Over billions and billions of generations, it would have mutated enough to look something like cells we know today. Once the primordial soup was running low on amino acids, one of these cells would have mutated the ability to get energy from light. These would be the first cyanobacteria. At one point, some form of amoeba ate another cell and stored all of its DNA inside of it, giving us the first nucleus. At another point, some form of amoeba at another cell, but instead of digesting it, the eaten cell started producing energy for the amoeba, creating the first mitochondria. Eventually, cells started to work together to make the first multicellular lifeforms, and that brings us to the Cambrian explosion. And that’s about the first 3 billion years of life on Earth summarized.
We have already created life from non-life. Craig Venter and his team first created synthetic life forms by taking the base components of DNA (adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T)) and combining them into a new synthetic genome and then injecting the genome into the husk of a cell and it started to live. Since then, many researchers have created many other new life forms (mostly bacteria) for research purposes. So it’s certainly something that can be done by humans and if given the right conditions and time nature could as well.
As for how it happened originally, we don’t know for sure, it’s impossible to know the exact conditions of the early earth. That said we can make very educated guesses.
Wait a minute. Doesn’t life creation have something to do with a guys rib, a garden, an apple and their kids making kids together, because they were the only ones around to procreate? Didn’t some popular book spew this scenario?
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An excellent question and one that I’ve wondered a lot about myself. The most interesting and well thought out explanation that I’ve heard of is called the Clay Hypothesis which was proposed by British organic chemist and molecular biologist, the late Graham Cairns-Smith.
You can read a more detailed explanation here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Cairns-Smith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Cairns-Smith), but the TLDR is that clay minerals form naturally with unique shapes which are preserved as they grow. Then, they dry out, break apart and are blown about by the wind where they settle and are able to start growing again thus forming the basis for primitive evolutionary replication (‘stickier’ crystals reproduce more successfully). Certain clay crystals are able to selectively trap other types of molecules to their surface and thus this process in the right environment could lead to the development of primitive self-replicating life.
Looking at a lot of these explanations, I think you may need to get a bit older and go do some research of your own. The key is that there has been a very, very, very, very (I could go on) long time for really rare, random stuff to happen. On our planet, approximately a billion years.
If you could figure out a definitive answer to that question, you would probably win a Nobel prize.
An enzyme one day reacted with a sugar and created a protein that released a little energy. That energy caused the enzyme to react with another sugar, setting up a self-replicating process. Natural selection did the rest between that first enzyme and you.
One theory is that life was an inevitability given a random chance of spontanious genesis and an infinite amount of time and resources. That is, eventually molecules will “whoops” fall into each other in such a way that they self replicate in ever increasingly complex ways. I’m not very convinced by this one.
[Another theory](https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/) is that life is an inevitability given that the universe wants to increase in entropy as efficiently as possible, and life by definition is an experimental process to find the most efficient way possible to spread out energy. That is, capture useful energy (like the chemical energy in sugar) and use it as efficiently as possible until it is transformed into less usable states of energy (like waste heat produced by your muscles).
Essentially, life is the universe’s experimental technique to turn a few high energy photons into many low energy photons as efficiently as possible. Jeremy England says “If you start with a random clump of atoms and shine a light at it for long enough, it should not be such a surprise to return and find a plant”. A plant is much better able to absorb energy and route it through itself than a random clump of carbon atoms. It will die and be replaced by better plants if it doesn’t.
Understanding the genesis of life is not very useful in terms of guiding life to be whatever we want. Better to take the processes that already exist and bend them to our wills than try to reinvent biology. It is much easier to make an apple pie from apples than it is to make apples from scratch.
Here’s a [Veritasium](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxL2HoqLbyA&ab_channel=Veritasium) that suggests the origin and purpose of life is entropy.
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