Should abiogenesis be regarded as fact when scientists have not even created life from inorganic matter?

How can abiogenesis be a fact if no one knows how it happened?

Some think that forming life's building blocks in the lab helps prove abiogenesis. This is absurd. Scientists have found the minimum complexity of life to be about 2000 genes for a self supporting microbe, and about 400 genes for the simplest parasitic microbe, not capable of surviving on its own. So it is not enough that there be life's building blocks present - they must be arranged in a precise order (and all amino acids must be left-handed) in order for life to function at all.

Creating amino acids or nucleotides in the lab and saying it proves abiogenesis is like someone saying the complete works of Shakespeare arose from naturalistic processes by pointing to a bowl of alphabet soup.

It is one thing to create life's building blocks in the lab, it is another for us to believe that those building blocks will be stable long enough for life to spontaneously arise from them. Many people know of the Miller-Urey experiment that produced amino acids from a hypthetical (now known to be wrong) early earth atmosphere. What many people don't know, however, is that those building blocks of life were unstable. Miller stopped the experient when he got the most favorable results. If the experiment continued, the building blocks of life were broken down by the same environment that produced them.

Also, from what is now known of the early earth, life had to have formed under hostile conditions. And while life, if appropriately designed, can survive under extreme physical and chemical conditions, it cannot originate under those conditions. There are extremeophiles that can live in harsh environments, but these organisms have mechanisms built in to them to survive those conditions. If the building blocks of life were present, they would have a very short half-life. Also, the early earth was very acidic. Acidic conditions frustrate key prebiotic reactions. Acidic conditions also promote the breakdown of key biomolecules like proteins and DNA.

There is not enough time for life to have arisen on its own. After the molten earth had cooled, there is evidence that there was some water on earth between 4.4 and 4.2 billion years ago. Then the Late Heavy Bombardment occurred from 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago, causing the crust to become molten again. The first evidence for life that we have is from 3.8 billion years ago. Allowing for the possibility that extremeophiles could have survived the Late Heavy Bombardment, the best case scenario for the time the origin of life had is between 400 and 600 million years. But during the majority of this time period, the earth's environment was extremely unfit for life.

And for those who say that abiogenesis has nothing to do with evolution:

Evolution and abiogenesis are both the products of the philosophy of naturalistic materialism. Although not formally part of Darwin's theory, abiogenesis forms the core of the evolutionary paradigm. Life must have its beginning in exclusively physical and chemical processes for evolutionists to legitimately explain life’s diversity throughout Earth’s history from a strictly materialistic standpoint. If abiogenesis lacks scientific credibility, the foundation of evolutionary theory crumbles. Moreover, if life can be shown to have a supernatural origin, then the door opens for viewing all phenomena in biology from an intelligent design perspective.

Some scientists are trying to create life from 'scratch' in the laboratory. (It is not really from 'scratch,' but based heavily on design concepts already found in living cells.) This is different from abiogensis and has no bearing on it because the life they are trying to create would be *designed.* Recently scientists have created an enzyme from scratch. But it took about 30 researchers working hard and the use of supercomputers to do it. This shows obvious DESIGN, not abiogenesis: which is life arising on its own from strictly naturalistic processes, and without intelligent direction.

Not quite yet. So far, they've shown that amino acids can be generated by simple chemical processes. Amino acids show up pretty much everywhere. They've been detected in space, for example. Amino acids, though, can't self-replicate. The key to abiogenesis would be to identify a process whereby amino acids combine to form some self-replicating system (either a single molecule or a collection of molecules). There's some debate over whether such a system would constitute life but it's very likely to be subject to natural selection and could therefore eventually develop into something that we would recognize as a lifeform. It's that jump from amino acids to self-replication that's eluded scientists so far. One of the problems is that these pre-life molecules would not have left any fossil evidence. Also, these sorts of molecules would almost certainly lose out in a competition for resources as more complex and robust forms developed. They wouldn't survive long. The best you can do is look at existing lifeforms and try to reverse-engineer the process that led to where we are now. One interesting recent development is that prions, which are not considered to be lifeforms, appear to be subject to natural selection. It's unlikely that anything like prions are precursors to RNA or DNA, though.

The faith based myth of the atheist. Abiogenesis is a hypothesis that is unscientific and unsupported by any evidence!! The hypothesis teaches that life arose from inorganic dead chemicals which came to life over the course of one billion years!

Atheists attempt to use in their desperation is "lab created RNA and protocells" as proof for abiogenesis.These experiments are highly orchestrated by very intelligent chemists, NOT unguided natrual chemical processes!

Well, first of all the article that is linked to about RNA has a lot of "could have"s and "if"s in it, secondly RNA is not life, third, there is no form of life which is RNA based , fourth there is no proof that RNA on it's own carry inheritable traits, or "blueprint" needed for even a one celled form of life to live and reproduce ( how exactly would meiosis work in this instance?), fifth, even if you had a whole "soup" of RNA how does any of this become a cell? Where does the membrane come from? This membrane is extremely complex, made up of protein, sugar and fat molecules. As evolutionist Leslie Orgel writes: “Modern cell membranes include channels and pumps which specifically control the influx and efflux of nutrients, waste products, metal ions and so on. These specialised channels involve highly specific proteins, molecules that could not have been present at the very beginning of the evolution of life.” New Scientist, “Darwinism at the Very Beginning of Life,” by Leslie Orgel, April 15, 1982, p. 151.

So if you suppose that somehow, despite there being no evidential support, that RNA could work without the DNA molecule then how does the chemistry of the cell work? The chance of even a simple protein molecule forming at random in an organic soup is one in 10 to the 113th power, which is a number greater than the estimated number of atoms in the universe.Some proteins serve as structural materials and others as enzymes. The latter speed up needed chemical reactions in the cell. Without such help, the cell would die. Not just a few, but 2,000 proteins serving as enzymes are needed for the cell’s activity. What are the chances of obtaining all of these at random? One chance in 10 to the 40,000th power. “An outrageously small probability,” that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated [spontaneously] on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court.” Evolution From Space, by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, 1981, p. 24

When I start quoting numbers like this I am not quoting "creationists" but this is what proponents of evolution are saying. Still they believe it had to happen simply because there is only one alternative, and so it is simply a question of prejudice and emotion on their part which motivates, because of a lack of any real proof, a desperate resort to science fiction and fantasy; sort of the same thing that they accuse others of who believe in an intelligent creator.

From at least the time of the Egyptians onward many people believed that life could begin by itself, and this was called "Spontaneous Generation". Louis Pasteur proved that the spontaneous generation of life is impossible, and his experiments were one of teh great milestones of science. Hardly more than ten years following Pasteur's experiments Thomas Huxley coined the term abiogenesis. "I shall call the . . . doctrine that living matter may be produced by not living matter, the hypothesis of abiogenesis." --Huxley, 1870.

It is so appropriate that he called it "doctrine" since it is a bunch or religious hooey couched in terms to give it an intellectual flavor. It may make some people feel good, like many a well written science fiction book, but it still belongs in the fiction section.

"Inorganic matter" is a misnomer. All matter - whether living or not - is composed of molecules and atoms. If a group of molecule reaches a complex enough form so that they can self-replicate, then it can be considered "alive".

To do this, energy has to be applied, such as the heat we receive from the sun. When energy is applied to simple atoms, they tend to group up into more complicated molecular forms.

Scientists HAVE been able to create simple forms of the building blocks of life in the lab. By simulating the primordial conditions suspected to have been, and adding simulated lightning in the form of electricity, simple molecules arranged themselves into higher order structures. These weren't "life" per se, but put us a lot closer to eventually being able to produce it.

Should it be regarded as fact? Abiogenesis is a scientific theory that seems to be supported by the current evidence and facts at hand. As such - like all scientific theories - it is our best explanation for now, and may change as new data is found.

All scientific "facts", including gravity, relativity, plate tectonics, and yes, abiogenesis are theories based on the data at hand, and are subject to change. They represent the facts as we know them today.

At its most sophisticated, the creationist argument is that the first single cell organisms popped into existence from nowhere. At its least sophisticated, a hand came down out of the sky to plant the first man and woman on earth.

Even the more "sophisticated" of those two options leaves the central question of how the first single cell organism came to be completely unanswered, and it seems completely reasonable for the physical sciences to ask what the physical processes might have been which produced those first organisms.

Maybe it would have been theoretically possible for God to arrange for single cell organisms to just pop into existence out of nowhere, but in the world we see around us he works through natural processes, not through miraculous acts, so why should the origin of life have been any different?

Having said that, it must be admitted that abiogenesis is currently a name in search of a theory.

A fundamental but elusive step in the early evolution of life on Earth has been replicated in a laboratory.

Researchers synthesized the basic ingredients of RNA, a molecule from which the simplest self-replicating structures are made. Until now, they couldn’t explain how these ingredients might have formed.

“It’s like molecular choreography, where the molecules choreograph their own behavior,” said organic chemist John Sutherland of the University of Manchester, co-author of a study in Nature Wednesday.

RNA is now found in living cells, where it carries information between genes and protein-manufacturing cellular components. Scientists think RNA existed early in Earth’s history, providing a necessary intermediate platform between pre-biotic chemicals and DNA, its double-stranded, more-stable descendant.

However, though researchers have been able to show how RNA’s component molecules, called ribonucleotides, could assemble into RNA, their many attempts to synthesize these ribonucleotides have failed. No matter how they combined the ingredients — a sugar, a phosphate, and one of four different nitrogenous molecules, or nucleobases — ribonucleotides just wouldn’t form.

Sutherland’s team took a different approach in what Harvard molecular biologist Jack Szostak called a “synthetic tour de force” in an accompanying commentary in Nature.

“By changing the way we mix the ingredients together, we managed to make ribonucleotides,” said Sutherland. “The chemistry works very effectively from simple precursors, and the conditions required are not distinct from what one might imagine took place on the early Earth.”

Like other would-be nucleotide synthesizers, Sutherland’s team included phosphate in their mix, but rather than adding it to sugars and nucleobases, they started with an array of even simpler molecules that were probably also in Earth’s primordial ooze.

They mixed the molecules in water, heated the solution, then allowed it to evaporate, leaving behind a residue of hybrid, half-sugar, half-nucleobase molecules. To this residue they again added water, heated it, allowed it evaporate, and then irradiated it.

At each stage of the cycle, the resulting molecules were more complex. At the final stage, Sutherland’s team added phosphate. “Remarkably, it transformed into the ribonucleotide!” said Sutherland.

According to Sutherland, these laboratory conditions resembled those of the life-originating “warm little pond” hypothesized by Charles Darwin if the pond “evaporated, got heated, and then it rained and the sun shone.”

Such conditions are plausible, and Szostak imagined the ongoing cycle of evaporation, heating and condensation providing “a kind of organic snow which could accumulate as a reservoir of material ready for the next step in RNA synthesis.”

Intriguingly, the precursor molecules used by Sutherland’s team have been identified in interstellar dust clouds and on meteorites.

“Ribonucleotides are simply an expression of the fundamental principles of organic chemistry,” said Sutherland. “They’re doing it unwittingly. The instructions for them to do it are inherent in the structure of the precursor materials. And if they can self-assemble so easily, perhaps they shouldn’t be viewed as complicated.”

*

Citations: Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions Matthew W. Powner, Beatrice Gerland & John D. Sutherland. Nature, Vol. 460, May 13, 2009.

“Systems chemistry on early Earth.” By Jack W. Szostak. Nature, Vol. 460, May 13, 2009.

A cartoon showed scientists approaching God to say they no longer needed him as they had created life. God says, "Show me." The scientist begins playing with dirt. "No, No.", God says. "Make your own dirt."

Before there was organic matter there had to be inorganic matter. Science even with the best labs and equipment cannot replicate on purpose what they claim happened by shear accident.

Quite a puzzle for them.

Not necessarily. Scientists are just starting to scratch the surface on this.

A. Einstein thought that energy and matter were related on a subatomic level. In 1998, Stanford U. scientists created matter (particles) from energy with their Linear Accelerator.

The next step in the process is creating atoms and molecules from the particles. I don't think they've succeeded yet, but they're still working on it.

No. Abiogenesis is an embarrassment to Darwinists who claim humans are descended from bacteria. They can't claim we are all mutant bacteria without giving some explanation of our bacterial "ancestors."

Excellent detailed explanation from Ludwig Van Bach--he has my vote for best answer. I especially enjoyed the analogy that developing alphabet soup is tantamount to writing the complete works of Shakespeare.

Cheers,

Bruce