I guess you could get that answer.  The answer I would give you, if you had asked how life began and were coming from the point of view of evolution would be that the science of evolution has nothing to do with the origins of life.  That study is called abiogenesis.  If you're not familiar with it, there are several hypothesis out there.  There have also been important advances recently in forming RNA from their component pieces in environments that are not disimilar to those that would have allowed RNA to form billions of years ago.

 

Well, these things have to do with evolution.  First, if you want to know where life came from you have to look further back than DNA.  Understandably you're asking the questions from a very ignorant place.  Granted, I ask questions of biology from a rather ignorant place too, but reading a book or a journal article or a study is not a bad place to start if you want information.  Second, we're not going to find 'first reproducing cells'.  Individual cells very rarely, if ever, fossilize.  And if you want first cells, you have billions of years of geologic change to go through during which time any fossilized thing may be destroyed.  We have barely found anything older than a few hundred million years old and the oldest found ever, I believe, were fossils of bacteria from 3.5 billion years ago (an incredibly rare find).

You mean that life doesn't just appear one day?  Well, no, it's an incredibly gradual process.  I highly recommend you read up on abiogenisis.

Well, I can't give you that.  That doesn't mean that you're correct to believe in creation, though.  We have inference, extrapolation; indirect evidence.  We know that evolution occurrs.  You're not talking about evolution, though.  You are talking about genisis versus abiogenesis.  The evidence we have for evolution and the inference and extrapolation based on what we can observe suggests that life started some 4 billion years ago and has evoled to the currently extant forms.

I don't think we came from a pile of goo.  To believe in the relevant truth of the hypotheses for abiogenesis, though, is far more reasonable than attributing our existence and the existence of all other life to creation by an entity which cannot even be probed by the tools we use which are efficacious in probing everything else in this universe and which have led us to amazing discoveries and technology.  I don't think you're likely to believe in faeries or unicorns because you believe in creation; you are likely to believe in something much more unlikely than either of those things -god(s).

 

What Thomathy said.  There are rules that atoms follow.  It's in their nature.  By observing how they behave in the lab we can come up with reasonable hypotheses as to how they might form in nature, such as the RNA world hypothesis.  I'm over-simplifying greatly here but even the ease with which amino acids form, without intervention, suggests that the building blocks for an RNA world weren't difficult to find.

 

So to repeat Thomathy's words; we have inference and extrapolation from indirect evidence.  Anyone claiming they had PROOF (why the capitals?) of a process that occured 3.9 billion years ago would have a tough job on their hands.  The best you can do is come up with a reasonable conclusion that best fits all the available evidence.

 

We can make reasonable conclusions about abiogenesis from what we see in the world today.  No such claim can be made about the genesis story.  And if you're going to be cocky and come in here demanding proof from billions of years ago, then you prove to me that god created the world.  In fact, screw that, I'll be nice.  Show me how you can make a reasonable inference that god created the world.

 

I won't hold my breath.

 

 

 DNA is a complex molecule, but it doesn't have anything that fossilizes.  You're never going to find "pre-DNA fossils."  In order to get a grasp on what probably happened, scientists are doing their best to literally recreate it, and they've come damn close.  Only recently, they solved a decades old problem of how to get certain chemicals to self-assemble into the literal building blocks of RNA.  The neat thing is that all they had to do was not only replicate the chemical composition of early earth, but the seasonal changes as well.  By adding water, letting it evaporate, adding water, letting it evaporate, etc, they facilitated the self-assembly of chemical molecules into those necessary for building RNA.

As Bob has already pointed out, anything except the gradual formation of life is kind of daft.  It literally goes against everything scientists know about the universe.  Let me make sure you understand that.  Absolutely every single principle scientists know about the universe demands that simplicity had to have moved to complexity.  In asking for a complex creator, you're asking for millions and millions of interconnected scientific principles to be not just wrong, but horribly, grossly, and completely wrong.  The physics that let us send spaceships the size of Volkswagons through the rings of Saturn?  Wrong.  The Chemistry and Biology that made penicilin?  Wrong.  All lucky guesses.

You pick which seems more likely.  A concept invented by non-scientific cave men is actually right, or as man got smarter, he figured out what really happened.

 

You are just making a meaningless bald claim.

Assuming creation of the universe from nothing (even quantum fluctuations are not ex-nilio since physics and a false vacuum need to exist) is less logical then assuming a preexisting non-contingent being such as God. With an intelligent non-contingent being such as God you are at least conforming to what we logically know to be true from science - simple cause and effect in the natural world. 

 

Except, of course, you exclude God from the cause and effect relationship. Or did God have a creator as well?

OK, what comes off as really obvious to me is that in your first paragraph, you assert that science is not researching the origin of life and then in your second paragraph, you ask for proof of abiogenesis. Pardon me but if it was not being researched, then how could the proof of what you are asking for exist?

Seriously, that is just poor debating. In any case, it fails because science has been actively researching the origin of life for about 60 years. The general idea is to set up the conditions that probably existed on the early earth and then let things happen for a while and see what comes of it.

As it happens, we have yet to produce something that is unarguably alive. However, we have produced all the basic molecules that are involved in life such as amino acids, sugars and all of the building blocks for DNA/RNA.

 

Go check out some science journals at your local university.  Do you understand biochemistry?  If not, there's no point in asking the question.

I said nothing of convolution.  I said there are many potential paths that life might have taken.  You've got things backwards.  Multiple paths make it much easier to establish the plausibility of abiogenesis.  If you have a die with a million sides on it, and you have to roll a 1 to win a game, you might as well say that you're probably not going to win.  But if there are fifty or a hundred thousand potential numbers that would win... well.. duh.

So carbon, then, becomes critical in understanding how this works.  Carbon forms chains -- long ones -- and it bonds in ways that make it uniquely likely to form immensely complex molecules.  As proponents of creation are fond of pointing out, replicators are immensely complex.  

Again... duh.   The answer's right in front of you.  Replicators aren't magic.  They're just really complex molecules that behave in self-perpetuating ways, and in a little under a century of research, we've facilitated the self-assembly of virtually all the building blocks for replicators.

My point earlier was that even if we facilitate the assembly of a replicator, we have no guarantees that the process we find will be the exact process that happened on earth.  For all we know, there were competing replicators before RNA, and RNA won by simple selective math.  (In fact, there are a few scientists who are quite fond of that idea.)  This doesn't hurt abiogenesis.  It makes it that much more likely.

Ok, smarty pants:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/chemical_evolution

The principles explained in this essay will give you a rough understanding of the kind of biochemical processes that were continuing through RNA.  The same chemical processes are, in one way or another, central to any pre-RNA replicator.  That is, carbon behaves like carbon, whether it's in RNA or not.  Any pre-RNA replicator would still obey the laws of organic chemistry.  Using these observable laws, we can make very reasonable predictions about what kind of chemical arrangements could conceivably self replicate.  Unfortunately, carbon is such a uniquely flexible molecule, it's probably not possible for us to ever say with certainty that this or that path was the only one that could have led to RNA.  In truth, there are probably quite a few paths that could converge on the same outcome, in much the same way that eyes have evolved separately more than a dozen times in the last three billion years.

 

 

Gee OrdinaryClay, do you really not get what we are telling you? The fact is that it is trivial to set up laboratory apparatus that simulate the conditions which we think were fairly like the early earth. Under those experiments, it has really proved to be trivial to make all of the building blocks of life. Amino Acids, Sugars, Fatty Acids and every other basic chemical. They all have been produced experimentally in sterile glass ware.

 

OK, so now you have these chemicals moving around in the sea and in the atmosphere. They are going to combine in every way possible to make slightly more complicated molecules. If you want a simple analogy, think of them as sort of like Lego bricks (except that they have many more options for possible combinations).

 

Now it happens that most of the ways that Lego bricks can combine are just not going to hold together in stable structures. They will fall apart back to the basic units. However, some will come together in more or less stable structures fully at random. You don't need a designer for this part of the process, it just happens.

 

Actually, what Hamby was telling you is relevant here. There are no small number of scientists who feel that at this point, many different structures came together that were sort of stable. If there is any reason why life on earth is mostly similar, it would be because the most stable configurations dominated the environment and tended to crowd out the less stable ones.

 

As more quantities of the more stable dimers come together, they are going to become the buliding blocks for the next level of development and so on. Given enough time, structures that have hundreds and then thousands of sub-units are going to form. At every level of this process, that which works best will dominate.

 

Eventually, these chemical processes are going to become complex enough that some of them will form basically what amounts to a bag around themselves composed of simple fats that are more permeable to the most basic building blocks and less permeable to the more complicated chemicals that they are competing with in the general environment. Then the process can shift to something rather more like primitive self assembly in a controlled environment.

 

We still are not at the point here where we can say “this is life”. Actually, I don't believe that anyone who follows this stuff seriously thinks that there is a point where one may reasonably draw that line but whatever.

 

You should learn what ad hominem is.  I haven't commited one.

You're saying that your misinformed perception that I have engaged in ad hominem is perpetuating your self delusions?  Correct.

I wish you realized that everyone speaking to you at this point has studied this subject, and it's obvious that you have not.

I already explained this to you.  Go to any university you want.  Look up any bio-chemistry or biology journal you want.  Search "abiogenesis."  You will get hundreds of citations.  Go to a university textbook store.  Buy a book.  Read it.  Any textbook will have a huge... HUGE... list of citations.

 

 

You misunderstand chemistry.

See now this is the point that someone can ask for a citation - which critics are you referring to?  I'm not meaning to be difficult, I'd like to read some of their articles.  And which particular "science" are they criticising?

As far as I knew it was the RNA world hypothesis, not theory.  Am I wrong anyone?

 

 

The earth is 4.5 billion years old.  Current estimates on the beginnings of life about 3.8 billion years ago.  So we have 700 million years for the first cells to arise.  We've been looking forensically at the primordial soup for, what, 85 years?  Imagine not being able to accurately replicate a process that happened over 3.8 billion years ago, with limited knowledge, in 10 millionths of a percent of the time required for the original process.  Scientists are dicks eh?

 

 

It's not a spontaneous process for a start, so let's hit that one right on the head. 

The environment you look at depends on the theory you're testing.  Are we going biotic shocked soup?  Hydrothermal vent?  nuclear beach?  Which environment in particular do you think we should be studying?  Even if you find the enviroment that matches your theory how do you test for contamination? 

In world teeming with life that you're still trying desperately to understand how do you spot the formation of new life?  How do you see it in the noise?  How do you see it at all?  If you do see it, how are you sure that it's not a microbe that's survived millions of years?

At what point does non-life become life?  What process would you be wathcing before you could answer this question?.

For us to see life form - using anyone of the outlined hypotheses - would require us to be able to constantly monitor a spot on earth that met the right conditions and, crucially, had never been exposed to life.  We'd also need a 24 hour watch on that sucker.  And you'd need to be monitoring everything the size of a microbe or lower.

Still want to bitch about us not seeing it happen?  Or do you want to point me in the direction of your nearest abiogenesis watch?

 

Here's the thing that bugs me about this sort of criticism.  The cry of "we've not seen it, you haven't proved it, stop talking about it" is childish in the extreme.  What do you hope to accomplish with this?  It's just another bad god-of-the-gaps argument.  Of course we haven't seen it.  It's why the RNA world hypothesis is just that.  That doesn't mean it's not a reasonable hypothesis based on our current understanding of chemistry.  That's the beauty of science. 

We have several hypotheses for the rise of life.  Men and women all over the globe are currently working on experiments to test each and every one.  We get excited about each new set of "simple results" because they open the next door of experimentation.  We now know that amino acids form easily.  We know that an RNA-like molecule can form under very simple wetting and drying - seasonal - conditions.  What does it prove?  nothing.  What does it give us?  two bits of evidence that suggest the hypothesis is still a reasonable one.  So the experiments continue.

Just because we've not seen it yet doesn't mean we throw it out completely.  We keep testing until we're sure that it's true, or there's absolutely no way it's true - and even then we admit we might be wrong.  What we don't do is create special circumstances for things that don't require explanation and assume that's that.

 

M

Oh, and please clarify this statement.