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The Origin of Life
by Jennifer Umbehant

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THE COMMENT

"I have spent a fair amount of time studying Richard Dawkins, i.e. his book "The Blind Watchmaker." While I respect Dawkins' credentials as a microbiologist, he is not a philosopher. A lot of his work is pure philosophy disguised under scientific-sounding words. But even within his field, Dawkins has no explanation for how life actually arose on Earth. Buried deep in his seminal book, we find his meek admission that "We still don't know exactly how natural selection began on Earth." (The Blind Watchmaker, 165) He goes on to quietly recognize the absence of "The present lack of an accepted account of the origin of life" before quickly moving on. Even Dawkins realizes that while evolution can explain how simple organisms become complex organisms, evolution does not (and cannot) explain how dead objects became living creatures in the first place. Or, as one philosopher put it, "How do you get a dog from a rock?"

THE RESPONSE

I do agree that Richard waxes philosophical at times, but we all do. Although he is not anywhere near as bad as the late Carl Sagan. I miss that man.

You bring up a good point. Readers can visit wikipedia for a brief summary of the situation.

Dawkins wrote that twenty years ago and not much progress has been made. It's extremely difficult trying to figure out what happened 4.5 billion years ago. The origins of life are certainly a mystery. It has been theorized that

"Water, carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrogen cyanide formed key molecules such as sugars, amino acids, and nucleotides. Such molecules are the building blocks of proteins and nucleic acids, compounds ubiquitous to all living organisms. A critical early triumph was the development of RNA and DNA molecules, which directed biological processes and preserved life's "operation instructions" for future generations." More here

Most people know that in 1953, Stanley Miller simulated what was thought to be the conditions of primordial earth and exposed ammonia and methane to simulated lightning and produced organic compounds.

The fact of the matter is that there IS indeed life. Well, as far as we can determine using our senses and based on what we consider reality. So life exists and there is evidence for evolution. I am more inclined to believe that life formed than was created. You have to start with something - whether it be god or not. The problem with believing in a god is that you have to assume that something complex has always existed. You don't see complex items just popping into existence anywhere in the natural world. The pattern you see is simple things evolving into complex things.

The idea that something changes from a very simple thing to a very complex thing is not hard to grasp. Look at agriculture .. we started out as gatherers, and now we have innumerable fields of genetically engineered crops. Look at weapons .. we started out killing each other with clubs and now have weapons of mass destruction that can be controlled with only the push of a button. On a lighter note, consider the video game system. Children of today's video game market would laugh at the original Atari. Look at the books that have been written over the centuries. The Bible was written almost 2000 years ago and does not contain any current scientific facts, if any at all. If a book containing all the scientific knowledge we had today had been written 2000 years ago, we would be amazed. But such a book does not exist because we follow a natural path from simple to complex. We start as an egg and sperm coming together in the womb and after nine months we are born a human child .. simple to complex. The pattern is everywhere you look. "If incontrovertible evidence of intelligent design were ever discovered..this could only be evidence of a designer that was itself the product of natural selection or of some other as yet unknown escalatory process"(Richard Dawkins, Intelligent Aliens)

"Scientific evidence is accumulating that chemical and physical processes on early Earth, aided by the emerging force of selection, produced very simple cells through a sequence of four main stages: (1) the abiotic (nonliving) synthesis of small organic molecules, such as amino acids and nucleotides; (2) the joining of these small molecules (monomers) into polymers, including proteins and necleic acids; (3) the packaging of these molecules into 'protobionts,' droplets with membranes that maintained an internal chemistry different from that of their surroundings; and (4) the origin of self-replicating molecules that eventually made inheritance possible." (Biology, Seventh Edition, Campbell/Reece, Pearson, 2005)

It is not about changing a ROCK into life, it's about elements in a primordial soup forming the building blocks of life and through a series of changes becoming more and more complex.


further links on the origin and evolution of life

There is a "beginner" link here
Ask an astrobiologist