When life evolved on Earth, was the "evolution" a singular event?

There is a difference between evolution and the start of life.

Evolution only describes what happens when a self replicating thing exists.

Abiogenesis is the start of life.

We don't know.

Everything that survived comes from one single event.

There might have been billions of these events during the last few billions of years, there might have been only one.

Should new life arise today, for example in your left shoe, then it

would be simple. It would be able to replicate itself, but not more. It would not grow fast, it would be small. It would be eaten by fungi or bacteria or your dog before it would even reach a few generations. We would never notice.

life didn't evolve at its inception, it came to be. evolution occurred afterward. The question "did life come into being multiple times, or does all life derive from a single individual" is not answerable with the available information. We do not know.

The transition of non-life to life is a process. It appears to involve many steps, with the formation of chemical complexes that are not precisely alive, and yet not precisely not alive before the formation of independently functioning and reproducing organisms. Such a process would not involve a single molecule and would not produce a single "life", if it occurred according to the general manner of chemical processes.

There must have been a set of specific conditions that would favor the development of the chemical compounds and their combination into "life". This suggests that it is very likely that the event occurred innumerable times during a short window where such conditions existed on earth. That is, it is very unlikely that a single individual organism came to be once, and only once, at one very particular location, and that all life descends from that one individual. it is far more likely that the very most primitive "life" came into existence multiple times. The very idea that more complex life requires the combination of multiple chemical constituents that would come together only when conditions were favorable indicates that the process would be common while the circumstances existed.

There is almost no event in nature resulting from a general process that has a single and unique result.

But given that we really do not know what "Life" really is, but rather only how it functions (its mechanisms), or why life is distinct from non-life in its capacity for self-awareness, there is no real way to answer the question.

You are confusing two issues.

First, to address the question asked. Evolution is not a singular event. Evolution is a process. The theory of evolution proposes that evolution is *constantly ongoing* in living species. That is: all living species are evolving *right now* - and (for the most part) living species are each evolving independently of each other. That is: human evolution (now) is separate from chimpanzee evolution, elephant evolution, oak tree evolution, etc. Those are all processes of evolution, and now they are all separate, ongoing processes of evolution..

So: evolution is *definitely not* a singular event.

Now: the theory of [species] evolution **has nothing at all to do with** the origin of life on Earth. The theory of [species] evolution proposes that **life already existed on Earth** before evolution on Earth began, and that all modern species evolved from that life. If there were multiple "emergent species" or "original species" from which Earth life evolved, that would put a (very small) wrench in the theory of [species] evolution, because one of the proposals of that theory is that all Earth species share a common ancestor. If life evolved from two or more different "original species", then that particular aspect of the theory is incorrect.

I assume your question is: "When life FIRST evolved on Earth, was this evolution a singular event?

The evolution of inorganic matter into organic living matter is highly improbable, about 1 in 10^40,000.

That's like winning the UK lottery (14 million to 1), by buying one ticket each time, 5000 times in a row, which would be twice a week for about 50 years.

Anything more than 1 in 10^100 is considered an event that will never happen.

To overcome the ridiculous odds, evolutionists have resorted to multiple universes.

Abiogenesis, the evolution of inorganic matter into life, is in breach of scientific laws and mathematical probability, so should be dismissed as "not even a singular event", more of a non-event.

We don't know. If there is only one way for life to develop and one set of biochemicals that life can use, then it could have developed more than once without us knowing. On the other hand, if there are several different kinds of life, then evolution determines which one is successful. Until/unless we find something which was obviously alive but was also using something obviously not DNA/RNA, we won't know.

The short answer is: We don't know, and may never be able to say with any certainty -- we're talking about events that happened over 3 billion years ago, with organisms that rarely if ever leave any sort of fossilized remains.

But what we DO know is: no matter how common or rare abiogenesis is, it only ever had to happen ONCE in order to eventually, inevitably result in the diversity of species we see today.

It's thought that life arose multiple times, but all life today descends from one original source. If there were other examples of life forming they did not survive, or were incorporated into our ancestor life forms.

Origins of life is utterly unrelated to evolution.

Evolution is an ongoing process that started after life began.

Don't know. What science has evidence for is one common ancestor. There's no reason why it couldn't have been multiple ancestors, and those creatures died out or got eaten by the one we're related to.

Evolution is an ongoing process. Life is always responding to environmental selective pressures.