Why are we still not able to reproduce the suggested abiogenesis that took place 4 bn years ago on our earth? Most say it happened at hydrothermal vents.
Why can't we just take salt water, heat it a little, add some other molecules that must have been around there?
We find really nice alloys through mostly try and error about once a year, the Pharma industry finds many drugs each year, also to a big extent through try and error. If we can do these things regularly, why can't we generate even just the simplest thing that would be labeled life? After millennials of searching for it?
You should try it user. Then post results on here.
Hudson Wood
>Why can't we replicate something that happened only once in billions of years
Gee user, you tell me. And while we're at it, why haven't we created any new universes yet? It already happened in nature after all.
Juan Myers
Because the probability of the right molecules hooking up in the right way is very low. You need a lot of time (way longer than any grad student can afford to devote to his thesis) and a lot of raw material.
The amino acids which are the precursors of life-as-we-know it are quite easy to make by the process you envision. windows2universe.org/earth/Life/miller_urey.html Variations on that experiment have even produced assemblages which wrap themselves up in a "bubble" of lipids. You might call them protocells.
Life runs faster now because its developed enzymes (specialized catalysts) which promote desired reactions.
Life can't get started again here on Earth without human intervention because the organic molecules would immediately be eaten by bacteria.
Nicholas Adams
He started with a virus, so it has nothing to do with abiogenesis
Blake James
I'm obviously a chemistry brainlet. But why can't we optimize the conditions so the probabilities get larger and we don't have to wait billions of years?
And I don't get this "very low probabilities" part in the first place. If I bring carbon and oxide together and heat it a little, it's deterministic that I will get CO2. Same for H and O2, etc.
Carson Clark
Why not? The enzyme was simply making it go faster. You don't know with certainty what the conditions were and how long it might have taken for replication to take place originally.
Dominic Morris
Most likely there's something missing that we don't know about or can't know about. Like some form of molecule that forms under extremely precise circumstances that later can't be made at all since the environment has changed enough to halt that process. It could be something as simple as left over short term radioactive decay. Not saying that is it, but I hope that gives you an example to think about.
Jayden Brooks
It takes many millions of years. That's why. Q.E.D.
Jace Bell
But why does it take millions of years? Why would it have to take millions of years under lab conditions?
If I want CO2, I just bring coal and air together, heat it, and have it immediately. Don't need to wait millions of years to geht the molecules I want if I know what I'm doing.
Caleb Reed
Abiogenesis isnt a process that just happened at some point. It took millions of years of molecules of increasing complexity to start forming structures, then at some point thos inorganic structures gained the ability to copy themselves through use of another inorganic structure. Then continued increasing complexity until eventually life happens. DNA isn’t technically alive you know.
Jacob Richardson
Well, for one thing, heat tears apart organic molecules as fast as they're formed. Another way to think about it is to imagine you want to form, say, polyethylene. It's nothing but hydrogen and carbon. You put those gases in a flask, heat them, shake them, whatever. Will you get polyethylene? No. Some other, much more likely, hydrocarbon (or some mixture thereof) will form and use up all the reactants. To get a particular compound, you need specific concentrations, maybe a sequence of conditions or a catalyst, so that atoms tack on to the forming molecule in all the right places.
And the number of possible organic compounds is so inconceivable (it's those 4 carbon bonds) that hitting it right purely by randomly banging atoms together is a very, very long shot.
asked why it can't be done faster "if I know what I'm doing" No reason. It CAN be done faster and HAS been done faster in a lab. But you have to know what you're doing.
The secret of life is that ONE molecule happened to form which was auto-catalytic; i.e. it could make copies of itself. Some of those copies were imperfect -- by which I mean "different". Some of those different molecules worked better than the original did. This is Evolution and, given time, it produced all the variation and complexity we see today. Try reading "The Ancestor's Tale" by Dawkins.
Adam Sullivan
Does anyone have an idea of the chances of abiogenesis producing sustainable life vs. a single lifeform that dies almost immediately? I know nothing about this topic, just curious.
Leo Wood
"Sustainable" is probably quite unlikely. There are so many not-quite-right ways of making a molecule and few right ways. But you may be asking the wrong question. Doesn't matter if the "life" dies in five minutes if it reproduces (makes one or more copies) before then. And if it didn't reproduce, then it wasn't "life".
Chase Long
Well in that case, to be more specific, I was including reproduction that for whatever reason doesn't continue past a few generations. Does that make sense? As I said, I know nothing about this, so I don't know if some kind of degenerative reproduction can even exist. I do know that different species can produce infertile offspring, but I dunno if that has any analogue on the level we're talking about.
Adrian Clark
That's a more sensible question. Species die out all the time; changed environment or superior competitors. I suppose though that you could irradiate a small population of fruit flies, not enough so that they'd become entirely infertile, but enough that there'd be detrimental mutations. The line might continue onwards several generations before enough recessives combined to put an end to it.
Even without deliberate mutation, a very small, in-bred population may die out. Consider European royalty. ONE developed hemophilia and the gene was passed on. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haemophilia_in_European_royalty
Samuel Perry
Thanks for your elaborate reply, really helped me to think more about it. Just one question though
>HAS been done
Is there a reproducable or at least peer reviewed experiment out there where life was created when starting from absolute scratch (without a single ingredient that was taken from existing life)?
Adrian Allen
There was no first lifeform, just as there is no first member of a species. The transition from inanimate chemical to life was probably very gradual and since life has no rigorous definition, there is no way to find the tradition point. Also, thirties such as lipid world and RNA world start with countless protolife complexes reacting with each other, so there is no reason to assume a lifeform started alone and died off.
To answer OP's question, it's hard for us to create in a lab, blind, over a few years what took billions of years of perhaps countless molecules reacting with each other.
Aiden Scott
I'm not sure. Bacteria have been created but they started with some organic chemicals extracted from living cells. Those organics COULD (and have been) made scratch, but those were separate experiments. It was easier and cheaper to just take them off the shelf. I don't know if anyone has gone through the process, start to finish, beginning with pure elements.
I'm certain it could be done if anyone wanted to spend the time and money. Same way I don't worry if the vitamin C I take came from a test tube or was extracted from rose hips. Molecules are molecules regardless of source.
As someone who contracts out high throughput screening work in Biopharma, I can forsee running into a lot of scale artefacts that would make it a virtually impossible exercise.
Adam Williams
Doing true Abiogenesis, which literally means "creation from non-life", would be a big headline and provide a lot of scientific insight. I bet there have always been people trying to do that and that there are still well funded institutes who are working on it right now.
This is what wikipedia says when typing in "JCVI-syn3.0" >Mycoplasma laboratorium is a designed, partially synthetic species of bacterium derived from the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium. This effort in synthetic biology is being undertaken at the J. Craig Venter Institute by a team of approximately 20 scientists headed by Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, and including DNA researcher Craig Venter and microbiologist Clyde A. Hutchison III. Mycoplasma genitalium was chosen as it was the species with the smallest number of genes known at that time...
Looks like the base is Mycoplasma genitalium here, so nope, no true Abiogenesis.
