Because we are only now discovering the mind boggling complexity inside living things, we can forgive those before us for their limited understanding and ideas about life’s beginnings. There have been many different ideas about this… 1) The Ancient Greeks believed that living things could spontaneously come into being from nonliving matter, and that the goddess Gaia could make life arise spontaneously from stones – a process known as Generatio spontanea.
2) In 1668, an Italian physician Francesco Redi proved that higher forms of life did not originate spontaneously, though advocates of abiogenesis
believed this did not necessarily apply to microbes and maintained the position that simple life could emerge spontaneously.
Attempts to disprove the spontaneous generation of life from non-life continued in the early 19th century with observations and experiments by Franz Schulze and Theodor Schwann. In 1745, John Needham added chicken broth to a flask and boiled it. He then let it cool and waited. Microbes grew, and he proposed it as an example of spontaneous generation.
3) In 1864, Louis Pasteur finally announced the results of his scientific experiments. In a series of experiments similar to those performed earlier by Needham and Spallanzani, Pasteur demonstrated that life does not arise [without pre-existing] life. Pasteur's empirical results were summarized in the phrase Omne vivum ex vivo, Latin for "all life [is] from life".
After obtaining his results, Pasteur stated: "Spontaneous generation is a dream". As far as the world of reality is concerned, this remains a scientific fact. No one has falsified this assertion. For this reason, we continue to use the term pasteurization when referring to the removal of live organic material from a product.
4) In 1924, Alexander Oparin reasoned that atmospheric oxygen prevents the synthesis of certain organic compounds that are necessary building blocks for the evolution of life.
In his The Origin of Life, Oparin proposed that the "spontaneous generation of life" did in fact occur once, but was now impossible because the conditions of early Earth had changed, and preexisting organisms would immediately consume any spontaneously generated organism.
Language Use in the Origin of Life
Let’s consider the history so far. The ancients had a belief that life arises spontaneously, and really did not possess the instruments to know otherwise. Once the scientific era began, every experiment, culminating with Louis Pasteur’s, demosntrated that life does not in fact spontaneously form. Following these scientific experiments, we enter the era of supposition. An era we are only now leaving.
Oparin’s statement is revealing. As the facts are concerned, the spontaneous chemical creation of life does not occur in nature, we cannot witness it and in the last 100 years not one person has been able to recreate it. No theory can express why we should expect it, yet, somehow we are assured “it did occur once.”
Really? Well, evidently life exists – but what is being proposed, is that chemical conditions determine this phenomenon. Further, that somehow presently (though presumably the same laws govern the universe) chemicals don’t seem to “spontaneously” create life, but at some point in the “distant past” they did.
Yes, we are promised, this ‘event’ did occur once… except we can’t actually see this process unfold today because “conditions found on early Earth have changed.” But, if this is true, why don’t we simply recreate these conditions in a lab? (As it turns out, many have tried). LIST
The Infamous Building Blocks
Also, in Oparin’s statement (above, and repeated below) and in fact throughout all literature pertaining to the origin of life we are told about these infamous ‘building blocks’.
Oparin reasoned: “that [present-day] atmospheric oxygen prevents the synthesis of certain organic compounds that are necessary building blocks for the evolution of life…” but that the same process could have occurred long ago. Building blocks is one of those red-flag phrases that signals trickery or sleight of hand. Building blocks are the materials which comprise a thing. Thus, steel is the building block of sky scrapers; wood and dry-wall are the building blocks of a house. Yet, the process that assembles the building blocks is what is actually important.
The so-called ‘building blocks’ themselves say nothing about the process required to actually build living systems; the “mysterious force” required to reverse nature’s trend of finding the most simple and stable arrangements, moving always from greater order to less in a process known as entropy. And certainly the building blocks say nothing of the origin of intelligent behavior exhibited by all living things. It remains the case in order to survive all living things must behave rationally in a chaotic environment, selecting specific materials to consume, and specific states to avoid. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
(Building Blocks: Some assembly required)
Regarding the infamous “building blocks”, the full statement (above) refers to “the building blocks necessary for the evolution of life.” Huh? To be clear, evolution as proposed pertains to living things and how their intelligent behavior (i.e. instinct to survive and reproduce) leads to change over time within a species. In a nutshell, the notion is that the more ‘fit’ survive, consequently certain traits are amplified within the community.
Building blocks, aka inert matter, do not evolve! Chemicals do not have ‘traits’ that can be ‘selected’ for – in the chemical world, advantage goes to simplicity and the most stable forms. Hydrogen is the most basic atom, and there is more of it than any other in the universe. The so-called ‘heavy elements’ become increasingly rare.
The simplest single cell is orders of magnitude away from the platform of basic simplicity, and thus does not follow logically from any process of so-called ‘chemical evolution’ – being that it resides on the opposite end of the scale.
The assertion that chemical systems ‘evolve’ into logical systems is a fiction (by definition, as it has never been witnessed and cannot be shown possible, i.e. it never happened); it is not scientific because it contradicts known laws, and has never been observed in the natural world unaided by the selective hands of researchers; it is not “likely” and not “suggested by evidence.” It is not even a hypothesis, because a hypothesis must state the rationale behind the expected outcome; the “why” something should happen. There is no LOGIC or principle motivating this line of research beyond the ideologically driven insistence that an impossible process is preferred to one deemed to be inconvenient for the status quo.
By this standard, all narratives invoking chemical processes are fictions. Or worse, because, at least fictional stories are often compatible with how the world works. The narrative of chemical evolution –the chemically driven spontaneous genesis of life -- contradicts all known facts about the world. Those advocating this account believe it should be considered SUPERIOR to alternatives invoking intelligent forces. Which is like discovering a computer chip and insisting it formed after years of erosion. To continue…
…Oparin argued that a "primeval soup" of organic molecules could be created in an oxygenless atmosphere through the action of sunlight. These would combine in evermore complex ways until they formed coacervate droplets.
First off, what is the “action of sunlight”? And how does it create organic molecules? Statements such as these expose how words can be used to express non-sense. Ideas that do not correlate to any sensical activity in the real world. He goes further…
These droplets would "grow" by fusion with other droplets, and "reproduce" through fission into daughter droplets, and so have a primitive metabolism in which those factors which promote "cell integrity" (?) survive, and those that do not become extinct.
Did you catch it? “etc. etc. etc. could have etc. etc.” This is not a scientific argument. It is pure conjecture, like saying planets could be the droppings from a large, galactic trans-dimensional dragon. Yes, it is true, planets could be made this way, but there is no evidence to support such an idea. And no one has witnessed such an organism. Oparin elaborates:
They contained no functional nucleic acids, but split asexually and formed within double membranes that had some attributes suggestive of cell membranes.
If your thought is, well yes, but this was almost 100 years ago… we can review 21st century literature and find the same supposition. “Could,” “may have” “chemicals…evolve…selection”.
Hubris
The article continues to quote Professor Colin S. Pittendrigh stated in 1967 "laboratories will be creating a living cell within ten years," His remark is characterized as deflecting “the typical contemporary levels of innocence of the complexity of cell structures.”
“Innocence” of the complexity of cell structures? I think there is a more accurate word.
To translate the above: the more we know about life and cellular processes, the less likely it is we’ll ever reproduce it, and the more impossible our quaint little narratives about ‘molecular soup’ seem to be. By this reasoning we move not closer to demonstrating the chemical origins of life, but further. And it is true for a simple reason. Our discoveries reveal more about the reality of things, and the hypothesis for strictly chemical causes for life is false.
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