What is abiogenesis?
In: Biology
A term for how life was created out of non-living things. Our only constatation is that life on this earth is very old and that it appeared about as soon as our earth had more or less cooled down from being a living hell four billion years ago. Not surprisingly we don’t know much about this period. We have been able to create some of the chemicals that occur in cells without the help of other cells, just some extreme conditions.
For the rest it’s basically all just big and complicated questions and much loose speculation. We can more or less imagine how self-replicating RNA molecules could arise and how vesicles of fat could build up and and divide naturally to later incorporate that RNA and then somehow things like the more stable DNA and proteins coded by that got ‘invented’ and were incorporated in the ever more complicated cell, but for many steps it really seems like a wonder and requires some leap of faith how so many things could come together so nicely and how the necessary chemicals would be concentrated enough somewhere. We don’t really know. Maybe life could even have arrived from another planet but that wouldn’t solve the conundrum rather just move it to elsewhere.
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