Yes ok, I get what DNA is, how cells work together to make us and all, but how did that actually pop up, from literally metal and rocks and dirt?? Like how does a germ fucking exist and WIGGLE and MOVE, and how did the universe “KNOW” to make it exist, as stupid as that sounds???
In: Biology
Okay! So, imagine you have a big soup made of tiny, invisible stuff like metal, rocks, and dirt, but also some other special ingredients like water and gases. A long, long time ago, the Earth was like a huge kitchen where this soup was being cooked.
Now, when you stir a soup, sometimes random things bump into each other and mix, right? Well, in this Earth soup, tiny bits of stuff started bumping into each other a *lot*—and after a really, really long time, some of these tiny bits happened to come together in a way that made them start *doing things*, like wiggling or copying themselves. That’s basically how germs, and eventually living things, started.
The universe didn’t really “know” how to make life; it was more like throwing a lot of ingredients together and just hoping something cool would happen. Over time, some of these little wiggly things, which we now call “cells,” got better at surviving and making more of themselves. That’s how life got started—just from tiny things bumping around in the big soup, finding ways to stay alive!
Ok so the bigger question is where did all of this stuff come from?
The term you want to look for is abiogenesis.
I will try to give you the Eli5 of the main theory, as far as I’m aware, of how abiogenesis happened.
First, you start with a soup of random chemicals. We’ve tested and seen that, with a reducing atmosphere and enough carbon and other elements present, things like amino acids and ribonucleic acids will just spontaneously form as a result of things like lightning strikes. At this point, they aren’t really life, just chemistry.
But, if you have a bunch of RNA nucleotides, they will tend to form chains of varying lengths. Some of those chains can act as enzymes, which basically just means they do something. Sometimes they can break other chains, sometimes they can build chains, and so on.
The other key element is, essentially, soap. Or, more accurately, lipids with a hydrophilic, or water-loving, end. They will spontaneously form bubbles. Those bubbles aren’t as good as modern phospholipids, the stuff our cell membranes are made out of, at containing what is inside them and keeping out what is outside, but that’s actually good for early life, because early life didn’t have any complicated machinery to do things like let necessary substances into and out of the cell.
So, you have these chains of RNA floating around, and you have these bubbles spontaneously forming. Sometimes, you will have a bubble spontaneously form around some RNA. Still not really a cell, at this point, but getting a little more complicated.
But, it’s close enough to being life that natural selection can start to happen. The RNA strands that are best at making copies of themselves, best at maintaining their bubbles, and so on will make more copies of themselves. And these protocell soap bubbles can, under certain conditions, divide into two without spilling their contents.
So, pretty soon, instead of just a soup of random chemicals, you have a bunch of little bubbles with RNA inside of them. And, the bubbles that are best at making copies of themselves, best at reinforcing their bubbles, best at absorbing other bubbles, best at breaking up different RNA strands so they can use the nucleotides, and so on will be the most numerous bubbles.
From there, protocells just get more and more complicated, get better and better at controlling their internal environment, and eventually are, pretty unarguably, life. Very primitive life, simpler than even the simplest modern bacterium, but capable of reliably reproducing itself, storing genetic information in DNA instead of RNA, using proteins to perform various functions, creating their own phospholipids, and so on.
But, if you break it down far enough, even a modern bacterium is just a lot of really, really complicated chemistry. Even you are basically a lot of extremely complicated chemistry. The universe doesn’t need to “know” what life is in order to make that happen.
There is no why.
Self replicating molecules got started at some point and got better at replicating through natural selection and dot dot dot here we are.
We may never know HOW precisely that happened as it’s hard to run sterile billion year expriments to try to get it to happen spontaneously again.
Maybe it’s happened spontaneously lots of times but if there is already more advanced life out there a fledgling proto life just becomes a snack for a bacteria or something.
God. He knew everything in a dream, so life kinda created itself troughout molecules and all. « You project what you think ». Anyway, he doesn’t know he knows until he trusts himself and pushes himself. Only then, he’d discover the truth about his life. 😂 Joke… 😐
This is a philosophical question when trying to understand events regarding the Big Bang. It’s THE question of all questions and we’ll likely never have a straight answer, at least not in any conceivable timeline currently.
Any confident answer that pretends like they know should be instantly disregarded. A naturalist point of view will talk about primordial soup and infinite time and infinite universes to explain this crap. People will believe anything that keeps things internally consistent. Who the fuck knows is the answer
Because of how the laws of physics are, carbon atoms love to join other atoms together in these big long complex molecules.
Some of those other atoms are reactive, and so maybe when that big carbon based molecule bumps into some other atoms or molecules they can react and “do stuff”.
You have all these random molecules being formed continuously over hundreds of millions of years. Eventually maybe one of these molecules is shaped specially enough that it can “collect” other specific atoms and then pop out a copy of itself.
As soon as this happens you have survival of the fittest – this self copying molecule will be competing for resources, and because the copying process would never be perfect new versions of it could appear that were even better at gathering resources.
Very quickly these molecules will improve through random mutations, getting better and better at gathering resources and protecting itself from being absorbed by other self replicating molecules. Aka “evolution”.
Do this for long enough and you get cells and finally complex life.
the basis for life is first having something able to replicate itself, so perhaps due to pure chance a chemical got formed, to which other molecules connected, and then broke off esentially creating more ans more.
this replication is not perfect, so when other chemicals connected they formed a structure that wasnt the same.
over an extremely extremely long time eventually some of these copies were for some reason better at replicating, essentially evolving. this way you end up with something like DNA.
the key to life is the ability to not perfectly reproduce. if something exists that can make non-perfect copies of itself just from random particles in water, inevitably some of these will randomly be better at this due to random modifications, and you can guess how it goes from there.
Even single celled organisms have multiple irreducably complex systems. The only real explanation that makes sense to me is intelligent design
Even when I was an atheist I never heard a theory that really sounded plausible, and I wanted one lol
Braced for the downvote tsunami
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