Life comes from life

[Won2blv]

Something I'm thinking of lately as I have been embracing atheism.

From our human observations, we have only seen life come from life. This does not mean that life cannot come from life and surely scientists can make hypothesis' and experiment. But as far as we know from our current observations, is that life can only come from life. This doesn't mean we should jump to god as the answer. But until a scientist proves that life can come from non life, should we assume that life always comes from life?

I am sure there will be examples of experiments like the Stanley Miller experiment. But does the scientist using a controlled environment and intelligence seem to suggest that even that experiment used life to make life? I understand that would be a high burden of proof for proving that life could come from non life. So please let me know what your thoughts are on this topic

[Alex K]

However the mechanism in detail, it is clear that life from nonlife will not happen frequently. But remember that the MU experiment -which was designed, but designed to mimic natural processes on young planets- ran for a small fraction of a human lifespan in one small box. The visible Universe ran it for hundreds of millions of years on 10000000000000000000000 entire planets.

[The Grand Nudger]

Something I'm thinking of lately as I have been embracing atheism.

From our human observations, we have only seen life come from life. This does not mean that life cannot come from life and surely scientists can make hypothesis' and experiment. But as far as we know from our current observations, is that life can only come from life. This doesn't mean we should jump to god as the answer. But until a scientist proves that life can come from non life, should we assume that life always comes from life?

You'll be waiting forever, science isn't in the proving business.  We should be careful with our assumptions, and with the inferences associated with them.

[Aoi Magi]

Beginning of life? Heck we are not even sure how to precisely define life. Human knowledge is too little to speculate anything, however since what we do know is pretty much in direct opposition to most widely known god concepts, that gives us one less idea to speculate on at least

[I_am_not_mafia]

Define life. In particular at what point is something defined as being alive? The only characteristic common to all forms of life is a metabolism. And then you have to ask what is the minimum requirement for something to be a metabolism.

[Redbeard The Pink]

I mean...we know there was a point in time beyond which no life existed on this planet, and now it does, so it stands to reason that there was a specific point where what we know as "life" started developing from non-living things somewhere. Biochemistry builds on organic chemistry, which builds on regular chemistry; life science follows the same natural laws everything else does. It seems to be a rare phenomenon, but it's not actually that hard (at least in theory) to conceive how life could have gradually developed from non-life given enough time, materials, and a lucky spot in space.

[Minimalist]

should we assume that life always comes from life?

Does it matter?

You know once a month we get some theist showing up with some variant of the 'first-cause' argument.  "Everything has a cause," they bleat.  Except their fucking god who somehow exists above and beyond the rule they just stated.

http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topi...early.html

Although the environment at that time (including the constant bombardment by asteroids and prodigious volcanic activity) would have been highly hazardous to life, the necessary ingredients were all present in some form or another: liquid water, chemical building blocks (usually taken to be the six elements: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus) and some kind of energy source.

[robvalue]

It is my primitive understanding that life and non-life are not binary, but instead there is a kind of gradual scale from one to the other. At what point you actually call something "life" is somewhat arbitrary, although there are probably useful scientific definitions.

So I suspect abiogenesis follows a similar pattern to evolution, with vast numbers of small changes leading eventually to a noticeable change. I do not expect non-life to suddenly spring into life, any more than I'd expect a dog to give birth to a cat.

If any of my description is off base, I'll happily be corrected by our science guys

[downbeatplumb]

Something I'm thinking of lately as I have been embracing atheism.

From our human observations, we have only seen life come from life. This does not mean that life cannot come from life and surely scientists can make hypothesis' and experiment. But as far as we know from our current observations, is that life can only come from life. This doesn't mean we should jump to god as the answer. But until a scientist proves that life can come from non life, should we assume that life always comes from life?

I am sure there will be examples of experiments like the Stanley Miller experiment. But does the scientist using a controlled environment and intelligence seem to suggest that even that experiment used life to make life? I understand that would be a high burden of proof for proving that life could come from non life. So please let me know what your thoughts are on this topic

I had to take zinc supplements a while ago, I had an imbalance and that was causing skin problems, now zinc was from a living thing,  but zinc is a vital part of my system. My wife similarly needs iron tablets, this seems to imply that there is a lot of non-life needed to support us in our highly evolved state so you can imagine that first life needed only chemistry.

[Alex K]

Doesn't it go like this -

Chemicals -> simple self replicating structures -> Darwin -> complicated self-replicating structures with bells and whistles deserving the name "Life "