- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: The Rip Saw
Posted by: Stickman Army
Even though my knowledge of chemistry is some what limited due to me being in Grade 10, and schools are directed to average, stupid people, I might be able to understand it. I'm usually good at such things. And I do know about probability.To fully comprehend how life formed, you need the chemistry. I don't have the chemistry knowledge to know the specifics of it. But to understand how life can form, all you need is to understand that time can make unlikely things happen. So here goes:
We all know about natural selection. No matter what you believe, natural selection is a real life process that is occurring right now. The weakest animals are getting eaten, the stronger animals are winning the rights to breed, the smarter animals protect their young better so they live, etc... Natural selection as pertaining to life means the best animals get to breed and thus pass on their genes. The ones who die before mating don’t. Plain and simple.
But natural selection does not only pertain to life. The smartest people go to college, the strongest athlete wins the gold, the most beautiful person gets the date. Natural selection is a process that does not require life at all to work. Natural selection is the best item winning out over others. It’s because this item has a better probability of survival than others.
How does this relate to life forming? Well, life could never form spontaneously. The odds of a single strand of DNA forming spontaneously out of the materials are so impossibly high that even time might not ever make it happen. There are too many base pairs of genetic code. Thus, DNA did not form spontaneously.
Let us suppose we have a computer program, not very complex at all, but just enough to make it have the capacity to use the computer. Now, in this program, we have entered in some random code. We run the program and discover this random code acts in a way that it destroys the program. This program has failed to “live.” Now, suppose another program has code that does nothing. This program lives, but fails to do anything for itself. Now, suppose a third program has code that copies itself. Ah, now we have a program that will replicate.
The same goes for chemicals. There are certain chemicals that cause replication of themselves. You can dissolve some crystals in water and then chill the water. Not until you place another crystal in the water will the chemical condense onto itself. This is one example. There is a certain protein that will cause itself to replicate in the brain too. These are not alive at all, but they can replicate themselves.
So what does this have to do with life? In the early stages of Earth, there were compounds known as amino acids. The Earth’s oceans were literally a soup of these acids. Now, with a big soup of chemicals, and lots of ultra-violet radiation from the sun (the sun was very young then) there were chemical reactions occurring all the time. There was plenty of energy from the sun to make chemicals form randomly. Some of these chemicals lasted longer than others, and some even formed that could cause more of that chemical to form. Eventually, one chemical formed that could easily replicate itself, ribonucleic acid.
This chemical is also known as RNA, and can be found in your body. Basically, it’s a half strand of DNA. This strand of RNA was tiny. The odds of a big strand forming would have been too much, but a tiny strand could form. This piece of RNA would float around, and if the right combination of chemicals was near it, they would connect to it. Once enough chemicals were connected, they would separate from the RNA, and there would be an identical piece of RNA floating around. (Almost identical. It would actually be opposite to the first piece. But if it happened to the second piece too, that new piece would be identical to the first. Knowledge of chemistry helps here.)
This piece of RNA makes many copies of itself randomly over time. Now, some of these copies aren’t perfect copies. They have little differences here and there. Maybe a chemical got cut out or added or changed. Some of these mutations were bad. They couldn’t replicate any longer or were easily destroyed by the sun’s violent rays. Others were better. They could replicate with relative ease and weren’t as affected by the sun. The best mutations from each generation would be the ones to live each time. They would live and replicate.’
Eventually, these pieces of RNA get so long and complex they are easily broken. They have no protection form the elements. Now, I don’t have the knowledge of chemistry to tell you this step, but somehow there were also little bubbles floating around. Maybe a piece of RNA had the coding to make the basic building blocks for these bubbles, maybe they also formed spontaneously, but there were little bubbles. These bubbles were made of materials similar to the ones that make your cells. A piece of RNA makes it’s way into a bubble, and gets the protection it needs to form more and more complex iterations of itself.
From here, it’s all natural selection. The pieces of RNA that destroy their bubbles die, and the pieces that make proteins that keep their bubbles in tact live. This first step happened over billions of years. After a few million years of refinement, the first proper cell emerged. I could explain those in between processes too, but that would require a prodigious amount of either chemistry, or similar analogies. That would also require a bit of my time, which I am running out of as I have work in less than 2 hours and have stuff I need to get done. I hope this little explanation helps you to understand how you can get something out of nothing if you have enough time.
It’s all about survival of the most probable molecule.
Thanks a lot for that explanation. I understood all of it, too. And that was my question. I can see how it would evolve from there. Man, thank you so much.