Abiogenesis

Context

It is interesting to ponder on how we, as human, have arisen from non-living matter such as organic compounds. One of the reasons it is of interest is that it may teach us lessons that may apply to how intelligence arose from non-intelligent being or how something of one type can transform into something of another type.

Learned in this study

• Intelligence as a tree of life

Things to explore

Overview

Abiogenesis is based on the concept of emergence, that is, up until a certain degree of complexity, things aren't considered "biological". But once a threshold is reached, something that was once considered non-biological becomes biological. A simple example of this idea is how a bike chain is composed of multiple smaller units, and alone, they themselves are not a chain.

Biology defines "life" as having the following characteristics:

• Homeostatis
• Organization
• Metabolism
• Growth
• Adaptation
• Response to stimuli
• Reproduction

Programming of Life

Be careful, as the following quotes have been taken from videos that have been claimed to be propaganda from creationists. In this article, I take these claims as facts, but do not consider them as arguments for creationism.

What is the probability of a simple cell, evolving by undirected natural processes? $1$ in $10^{64}$¹,

The probability of life, a simple cell, evolving by undirected natural process is $1$ in $10^{340,000,000}$, which is known as operationally impossible^{1 2}.

Abiogenesis assumes that meaningful prescriptive information can be created from a purely physical mechanism, which completely violates the laws of information^{1 2}.

Biopoiesis

Bernal coined the term biopoiesis in 1949 to refer to the origin of life. In 1967, he suggested that it occurred in three "stages":³

1. the origin of biological monomers;
2. the origin of biological polymers;
3. the evolution from molecules to cells.

See also

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_development

References

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordial_soup
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment