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How were the basic structures of life produced?


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Evolution of life is a wonderful thing that fascinated me recently, and I've seen several documentaries and articles about it. I'm glad to have a better understanding of how it all works... how mutations in the DNA of a bacteria lead to larger and more complex life forms over millenia, while natural selection only allows the best designs to keep going. It all makes sense and seems to explain everything, yet there's one problem: No matter where this was discussed and no matter where I looked, I've never seen anyone trying to touch the basic pieces of the puzzle: What happened before that?

 

How did the first bacteria, of the most simple structure and composition, came to be? We know it was all chemestry and physics, as well as random chance and the right thing happening at the right moment. Still, how can various chemical reactions lead to an entity which has a heart pumping a fluid through it, a brain which stores and decodes information, a DNA which tells that body how to use proteins, even a system which lets it reproduce a biological pattern stored in DNA?

 

Sadly, the best I've seen on this matter was someone pointing at a pool of bubbling mud and saying "life started somewhere in here". Don't get me wrong... I know this is one of the hardest things for science to debunk, and I'm not blaming anyone for not having an answer. But at the same time, I feel there should be more we can say on the matter, and there should at least be multiple hypothesis as to what the exact process is. Scientists can already do fantastic experiments with particles, produce smart materials, go in space... yet no one can imagine the actual process which creates the basics of life?

 

Here's my fuzzy and simplistic version of things, which I believe could be a starting point of sorts: In the beginning, Earth was a very violent place... bombarded by meteors, vulcanic reactions taking place everywhere, clouds of water and maybe other chemicals causing thunderstorms, etc. Somewhere in all this chaos, a set of substances got poured over one another and mixed, creating a material or properly shaped object that could convert a nearby resource into another. For example, a soft object soaked in acid could dissolve some minerals that touched and penetrated its surface, and release either a gas liquid or solid through an orifice (resulting from the accumulation of converted material trying to pop out of the object, similar to a vulcanic eruption). One point of interest: Converting a material implies using and / or producing energy... meaning that some such objects would require energy from the sun for the reaction to take place, while others would instead produce minuscule electric charges. Anyway, over the course of millions of years, nature and weather brought and occasionally encased various such structures together. Some kept functioning and producing their waste product, which others would then absorb and transform... creating a relationship between different types of converter molecules. Somewhere between these lines, in an enormous sea of probabilities, a complex system developed and persisted. It's possible that one such structure started producing DNA like molecules as a waste product, while chromosomes absorbed them and released a waste product of their own based on the shape of each molecule.

 

How they all got aligned in such a precise order and reached such complex functionality is impossibe for me to try imagining now. But I'm hoping someone else might be able to elaborate on the possibilities... which is actually the question of this thread. Obviously, the truth is likely very far from my version of things, and this was just to point out some basic possibilities. Is there anything more than that known however?

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Yes, Abiogenesis is the term for it, forgot to include that. I'll read that more in depth a bit later, thanks.

 

And yeah, it makes sense for something even more simple than bacteria to have first existed... as bacteria is already complex compared to the first biological systems that must have probably first existed.

 

I'm mostly curious as to what the natural phenomenons which lead to the DNA molecule and it being used to (re)produce such complex biological designs were. How could weather, vulcanism, etc. mix matter in such a way that it slowly got to living beings of this complexity? What could have been the precise steps, and each needed chemical reaction? Surely no one will know the exact procedure which took place here on Earth, but maybe complete and fully possible scenarios on how a planet can create life from nothing but random physics exist.

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There was a Danish biochemist who was doing a TED talk..I forget his name, but he was discussing the identity of the earliest "living" life form. In summary of what he said, the first organized, living (relatively simple) organism would have been something that can be synthesized in a lab. Basically; place hydrophobic solution (such as oil) into water. This forms a hydrophobic barrier in which water cannot penetrate. Add to the oil barrier hydrophilic chemicals, or what ever, and you essentially have the earliest structure of a cell. Now just give the molecules in the oil protected barrier a few million years to make some amino acids and you have proteins, the end.

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