Abiogenesis takes another step forward.....

by snare&racket 48 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  cantleave

  That inorganic molecules get transformed into organic molecules outside a cell doesn't necessarily make abiogenesis a law.

  WTF??? Do you know the definition of the terms you are using?
• 

  cofty

  I lean heavily toward biogensis.

  Please explain more.
• 

  Apognophos

  What is that 'something' that..
  a) pushes the single cell to replicate,

  Well, biology is not my strong suit, but I'll give these a brief try, and you should do more research for detailed answers if you want them. I think the simple answer to what causes a cell to want to replicate is that you should think of it as a perpetual or runaway chemical reaction. Imagine that this mercury thiocyanate is a DNA coil. You might want to study the root cause of chemical reactions to understand where the chemical energy comes from. The initial energy to kickstart the reaction could have come from geothermal energy (if life began in deep-sea vents) or solar energy (if it began in shallow pools).

  b) ...cause plants to grow towards light,

  The sunlight causes an ionic reaction which makes part of the veins in the plant dilate, displacing water to another part of the stem. This makes the plant wilt in the direction of the sunlight in order to absorb more light.

  c) ...cause animals to produce their kind and care for them till they can survive on their own?

  Animals cannot produce anything different from their own kind; it would be more amazing if they could. They are limited in what they can produce by the genes they carry in themselves.

  As for caring for young, some animals do and some don't. An octopus never meets its parents; it wanders the dark oceans in total isolation until it meets one of the opposite sex. It generally dies soon after mating (in the case of the male) or reproducing (in the case of the female). So it's really just a matter of what works best for each species.

  The caring instinct is one that evolved because it was beneficial for certain animals. There's really nothing more to it than that. A benefit of caring for offspring is that it allows offspring to be born weaker and more helpless. This is useful for humans, for instance, because our infants can then prioritize brain growth quite a bit more than the rest of the body. This allows us to learn much more about our environment than most animals, which operate off of instinct, and maybe also perform some learning, but which do not receive instruction from their elders.

  We take in a tremendous amount of information in our early years, while the brain is still plastic, which allows our brains to adapt more readily to any environment than is the case with animals that must rely on evolution to hone their instincts over the course of many generations. The down side is that babies are totally helpless. So the maternal instinct is useful in keeping the baby watched over until it is self-sufficient. Animals which are less intelligent are born at a much higher degree of self-sufficience, such as horses which can stand on their own a few hours after being born.
• 

  snare&racket

  Speargrass, I stand by my answer to you, you are asking questions we have answers to. Ask yourelf why you don't know them, IF you are truly interested....
• 

  speargrass55

  Snare, I've never come across any evidence that abiogenesis conclusive. Or maybe I'm about to learn something new?
• 

  speargrass55

  @cofty what I meant was I've seen, or come across nothing which makes me believe that new life forms have been created independent of pre-existing life forms.
• 

  speargrass55

  @agnophobos, thnx. I think I learned something.
• 

  jgnat

  Speargrass, none of us were there when the first life was generated. All we are ever going to get is plausible explanations. Does that mean we shouldn't try and learn what we can?
• 

  cofty

  speargrass - We know for a certainty that there was a time on earth when there were no living things - the planet was abiotic.

  We can be certain that there were living things on earth more than 3 billion years ago.

  It's reasonable to suggest that a chemical process led to replication and metabolism. The precise details of how this came about is very much a hot topic in science. The OP is about a potentially very important step in the quest for the answer. It has been shown that a simple metabolic process can arise outside a cell. This is HUGE!

  Creationists and proponents of ID will continue to insert their fingers in their ears and repeat "god-did-it" but reality is far more interesting.