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re: #106 Steak
Most (not all) Darwinists claim alien life forms seeded the planet. The ones who don’t believe that, believe we came from mud. Just as absurd. So, where did life come from?
I’m absurd? You’re absurd! Gee, you are so insightful, Steak.
Let’s start with panspermia.
It was recently proven that at least one multicelled animal - not just a bacterial spore or something - is capable of surviving in the vacuum of space for 12 days:
Sorry if I just blew your mind. Sometimes reality is absurd, no? In any case, you can’t categorically dismiss the possibility that a microbe survived a long deep space journey and landed here.
As to the possibility of life developing on earth, well, the whole “man came from mud” is a pretty embarassing strawman. We know that minerals, such as calcium carbonate, can catalyze (in conjunction with heat and UV radiation, e.g. sunlight) the formation of all the nucleic acids from simple organic compounds such as formamide - which forms abiotically and would have undoubtedly been present in the primordial soup. It’s quite simple to envision an ocean awash with free nucleic acids.
Next up, a different reaction. Ribose can be synthesized abiotically by reacting formaldehyde with calcium hydroxide - again, these are not rare compounds:
So now we’ve got sugar and nucleic acids floating around. If you know anything at all about biology, and I hope you do if you’re going to comment on this, you should know that these are the two key components of RNA and DNA. They will combine spontaneously, albeit infrequently, but the key part - the one that creationists are sadly unable to wrap their head around - is that this chemistry experiment took place across the entire planet for half a billion years. Eventually, I propose, a ribozyme (an strand of RNA that can catalyze reactions) formed that was capable of copying itself. This is an exceedingly unlikely event, but again, when you have a whole planet and half a billion years, you are certain to see some unlikely things. And really, it only had to happen once, at which point the molecule would spread like wildfire. And then one of its copies would be slightly different, slightly faster, and it would be even better at spamming itself, unwittingly crowding out its “parent”. This is not to say that we have a living organism yet; it’s more like a very primitive virus. An organism must be able to maintain an internal environment if it is to accomplish anything meaningful on its own.
Thus, the cell, the fundamental unit of life. For a ludicrously simple organism, the cell really just needs to be a membrane, to stop nucleic acids and such from floating away. In an aquatic environment, hydrocarbons (oils) will spontaneously form tiny micelles, aka bubbles, and you guessed it - the self-replicating ribozyme that was swallowed up by an oily membrane would suddenly have its own environment to reproduce in. From there, its “offspring” might even begin constructing membranes of their own… again, if you think this sounds improbable, I agree, but so was the Immaculate Reception. I’m talking about scales of time and space that no human fully comprehends.
Anyway, I hope that clears things up?
