What are the Odds of life coming into existence by chance alone?

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by Alan McDougall, Jul 26, 2012.

  1. Grumpy Curmudgeon of Lucidity Valued Senior Member

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    We didn't. Our broadcasts are represented by the little blue dot in the middle of that square.

    Grumpy
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Based upon the evidence, the answer is obviously: 100%. Next question?
    That sentence is self-contradictory. I'll start by giving the idiot who wrote it a break and assume it was a typo, that he meant to say, "the odds against life evolving by chance..." Nonetheless, he needs to make up his mind. Are the odds against life evolving by chance merely "so high," which means that the odds of life evolving by chance are very low, but not zero? Or is the probability of life actually zero, which means that the odds against it are not merely "very high," but 100%? Whoever wrote this doesn't understand probability, and also isn't very fluent in English.

    And he also doesn't understand the theory of evolution. It says absolutely nothing about the origin of the first living thing. It is all about the change from one species into another and is silent about how the first one came into existence.
    You seem to not grasp the concept that complex bodily systems and structures evolve from simpler bodily systems and structures. We've had billions of years to evolve and lots of perfectly fine systems and structures were lost along the way because they were not followed by a fortuitous mutation. But every now and then one is, and eventually you have animals and plants and fungi and algae and bacteria and archaea. People who can't grasp this are innumerate: they don't understand the possibilities that unfold in an extremely large time continuum. Similar phenomena occur over and over, until finally one is followed by another phenomenon that makes the whole system more stable. Then that one dies off and another pairing occurs. A million years later you finally get seven of them in a row and you've got an eye or a heart or a digestive tract.
    "Generally" is the vocabulary of the innumerate. For every "generally" there exists an uncountable number of exceptions. It's the exceptions that got us here.

    Besides, what creationist tract did you read that in anyway? How do you know that most mutations are detrimental? Isn't it just as likely that most of them have a neutral effect?
    You have no idea what you're talking about and you're embarrassing yourself. Your grasp of probability theory, statistics, and the mathematics of extremely large numbers is, to put it politely, a little shaky.
     
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  5. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Oh, wow, I thought it was pretty large too.
     
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  7. wlminex Banned Banned

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    My take? . . . . . IMPO, organic constituents (e.g., C, H, K, Na, P, N, etc.) dissolved in aqueous media occupying interstitial spaces between clay platlets were influenced by quantum energetic patterns (similar to Casimir Effect) that produced life-forming replicative molecular processes (e.g., DNA, RNA, ala Miller experiment?). (I KNOW, AlexG . . . this infers a 'directed' influence!) The rest (from beginnng till now) is via evolution of these processes over a few billion years.
     
  8. wlminex Banned Banned

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  9. Hercules Rockefeller Beatings will continue until morale improves. Moderator

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    No, it doesn’t fail to do that at all. Familiarize yourself with the field of developmental biology and you will quickly start to appreciate how genetic mechanisms can be sequestered and altered to produce new body plans and structures.

    You’re right about that one. The ToE addresses the how life adapts to environmental selective pressures, not how it arose in the first place.

    No! This is an extremely common misconception on the interwebs. It is routinely erroneously trotted out as an argument against evolution. The majority of mutations are neutral.

    Quite clearly to you, maybe. But not to scientists who understand that the scientific evidence unequivocally indicates the validity of the “Modern Synthesis”.
     
  10. Grumpy Curmudgeon of Lucidity Valued Senior Member

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    Alan McDougal

    First, there is no such thing as "positive evolution", there is just evolution. Second, while random mutations add chaos, Natural Selection produces order, out of those chaotic mutations NS selects those best fit for the current environment. Third, most mutations have little or no effect on an organism(you will have several thousand in your lifetime, only some will produce detrimental effects like cancer), some are fatal, but some give reproductive advantage and NS selects these(simply through reproductive success)for incorporation in the genome. Evolution is not random, but it's only criteria is survival to reproduce.

    Random mutations subjected to Natural Selection quite clearly did.

    Grumpy

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  11. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    Biological organizations of matter might be considered inevitable if all combinations of matter were not only exhausted in a sufficiently sized universe, but especially if the latter was so large that it even yielded copies of the aforementioned. While I believe that an "infinite amount" as a fixed quantity or completed condition would be an error of classification, one could suppose that the universe is currently at least vast enough for patterns of elemental components to have repeated once, as some physicists claim more extravagantly as a possibility below, within the context of their infinite cosmos.

    Max Tegmark - "The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 10^28 meters from here. This distance is so large that it is beyond astronomical, but that does not make your doppelganger any less real. The estimate is derived from elementary probability and does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite (or at least sufficiently large) in size and almost uniformly filled with matter, as observations indicate. In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere. There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices." (Parallel Universes; Scientific American, 2003)

    Brian Greene - "To see how, take this deck of cards. It's made up of 52 different cards. And, if I deal them, everyone will get a different hand. But, over the course of many, many rounds, eventually some of the combinations will start to repeat. That's because, with 52 cards, there's a limited number of different hands you can deal. So, if you deal the cards an infinite number of times, then repeating hands are inevitable. [...] According to the laws of nature, the fundamental ingredients of matter, or particles, are kind of like a deck of cards: in any region of space, they can only be arranged in a finite number of different ways. So if space is infinite [...] then those arrangements are bound to repeat. And since each one of us is just a particular arrangement of particles ... somewhere there's a duplicate of you and me ... and everyone else." (The Fabric of the Cosmos: Universe or Multiverse?, PBS)
     
  12. forthelongesttime Registered Member

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    Life will find away to live. Its all over this universe we have ben able to detect organic dust moving around in space. Life formed with the help of organic material finding its way to earth and by some big storms happening naturally on earth. Could life on earth be from space dust and the other way life started here?
     
  13. FTLinmedium Registered Senior Member

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    About the same as the odds of mixing a cup of vinegar and a spoon of baking soda resulting in it fizzing.

    Sure, there's a "chance" that it won't happen- that all of the brownian motion will dance just so for billions of years and prevent the acetic acid and bicarbonate from ever coming in contact.

    Organic molecules are abundant in the universe. Water is abundant. Carbon is abundant. Nitrogen is even pretty abundant.

    Life is inevitable, given enough time. And time is something the Earth has had quite a bit of.

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  14. scheherazade Northern Horse Whisperer Valued Senior Member

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    Based on the evidence, I'd say the odds were good and the goods are odd.

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  15. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    There's one thing I wonder though, why is there only life from one source? Or has it happened several times?

    I know that the odds are slim that it would happen even once, but yet the time-frame it took in order to happen once have come and gone many times, yet there is still only one kind of life. Could it be that the earth had to have very sensitive conditions for the first stages of life to appear? Or could it be that the building blocks for life has to be in a certain way so that even if it did happen more than once, we wouldn't recognise it, since they would have to be constructed the same anyway?

    Do we find the first stages of life (or pre-life) in the oceans today? Shouldn't they be abundant, or have the conditions changed so that they aren't allowed anymore? (self-replicating peptides, etc.)
     
  16. FTLinmedium Registered Senior Member

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    It has probably happened many billions of times- the problem is that any new life would naturally be out-competed by the more established life that has had more time to adapt to the environment.

    Imagine coming into existence as this nude self replicating molecule with no defenses, no motility, and surrounded by hungry microorganisms that have motility, defenses, and a substantial arsenal of organelles evolved to eat things like you.

    In the very early stages, life probably originated at multiple points on Earth, and a number of times. It competed until one, or a few, gene pools won out. Very primitive life also tends to share DNA, so... it would really blur the line as to which was the first, and where each came from. Evolution from there also adds too much white noise to make sense of the very beginnings (wherein the DNA simply wasn't complex enough to be unique).


    What makes you feel that you know this? Why do you think the odds are slim?
     
  17. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    Yet we still have single-cell organisms, so it doesn't prove anything at all. I don't see how it couldn't have evolved in some niche that it could survive in, if it indeed did exist, it isn't too much different than different species of the same life after all.


    As I said before, all life works that way, yet we still have single-cell organisms. As you say the line blurs as different origins could have been setup much the same way, which might lead us to the idea that there is a preferred way of life configuration.




    Sorry, let me rephrase that to say that they are slim in our perspective (taking a lot of time), of course the earth is very old and has enough time even though odds are low in our perspective.
     
  18. chinglu Valued Senior Member

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    May I see a proof of this please from mainstream articles and an explanation as to why TOE does not address how life began?

    Thanks
     
  19. chinglu Valued Senior Member

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    Let us read this.

    The Harvard University Origins of Life Initiative is an interdisciplinary center unlike any other in the world. It studies everything from planet formation and detection to the origin and early evolution of life.

    http://origins.harvard.edu/
     
  20. FTLinmedium Registered Senior Member

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    What?

    Other life could originate in areas that are isolated from existing life, yes. There may be pockets of subterranean life, for example, with different and more recent origins which have been isolated from interference (if, indeed, life can develop in such conditions). This would be very, very difficult to detect, however.

    Anywhere on the surface of the Earth, the environment is too contaminated with existing life for new forms to thrive (and today, the conditions may no longer be right for it due to the changes brought about by the existence of life- particularly, too much oxygen). If there is a niche anywhere accessible, it is probably already filled.

    If we had better funding, I think we would have already seen the emergence of new life in the lab. The problem is that such experiments are expensive- partly because it's difficult to eliminate contaminants, and partly because it's inherently difficult to properly simulate an extreme environment.


    Of course, form follows from function. I don't know what you mean by preferred, though.



    Compared to things that are actually improbable on astronomical time-scales, I see life as so overwhelmingly probable that I would be less surprised if gravity suddenly changed its mind about the whole 'things falling towards the ground' concept than if life didn't develop promptly (my personal expectation would be a matter of decades) wherever it could.

    That's me, though- whether we consider something probable or not tends to have a certain degree of subjective interpretation of what constitutes acceptable probability.
     
  21. Grumpy Curmudgeon of Lucidity Valued Senior Member

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    chinglu

    You have received many such explanations of why evolution does not deal with how life started here. Over and over and over again. As to "mainstream articles" they are often as clueless as you are.

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    "One of the problems that Christian fundamentalists (specifically Biblical literalists) have in dealing with biologists who say "Evolutionary biology and abiogenesis are two different topics" is that they have no answer. If they accept that definition, then they lose one of their prime arguments: that "evolution" can't account for the origin of life from non-living matter. If they lose that connection, they have a much harder time denying evolution, since the evidence for it is overwhelming, and most creationists have been forced, by the pure weight of the evidence, to accept that evolution occurs - on a "micro" level, another distinction creationists make so that they can continue to deny at least a part of evolutionary theory.

    So when a creationist says: "What's more, if we are to remain exclusively within the natural (material) realm then the term 'evolution' must somehow be further extended to include life from non-life, i.e., the emergence of life itself must also be accounted for by the ever-stretching definition of evolution." ( http://www.trueorigin.org/to_deception.asp)

    This is such abysmal logic it is hard to even reply in any manner of seriousness. The actual statement Fernandez is making is: "If we creationists have any chance at fighting evolutionary theory, we must include the origin of life in it, so that we can point to at least something and claim that evolution can't explain it".

    The definition of evolution is being stretched to include the origin of life only by the creationists. Change in gene frequency through time is the genetic basis for any definition. However, as apologists such as Fernandez are well aware, genetics makes its outward expression as the phenotype - the physical entity that embodies those genes. Natural selection acts upon the phenotype, not upon the genotype, and changes in gene frequency are manifest, and measurable, as changes in morphology. Genetic changes in living creatures can also be measured directly by specifying the genotype, but for fossils, morphology is what we have, and it is more than adequate. So the definition hasn't been stretched, at least not by biologists."

    http://darwiniana.org/abiogenesis.htm

    Abiogenesis is not able to study the morphology of changes in lifeforms because there were no lifeforms until abiogenesis had occurred. Evolution is the study of changes in morphology in living lifeforms, it says nothing about where or how those lifeforms first appeared. They are two different things like building and driving a car are two different things.

    Grumpy

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  22. Grumpy Curmudgeon of Lucidity Valued Senior Member

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    chinglu

    As the title plainly points out, the initiative is dealing with abiogenesis and early life's evolution(more chemical evolution than biological evolution), not evolution of life in general.

    Grumpy

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  23. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Maybe read a book or something?
     

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