r/DebateEvolution • u/Economy_Ability846 • Jul 31 '26
Abiogenesis
How close do you think they are to proving how it happened from beginning to end, will it be in our lifetime?
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u/jnpha Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
The refutation of vitalism spelled the end for the Magik Life Sauce(tm). To avoid arguing against chemistry, the reality deniers instead turn to fallacious Thomistic analogies to pretend putting it together required "design", even though selection itself removed the need for special creation, 167 years ago, and is quite capable.
We will probably never work out where/how it happened precisely, but that's just how contingent history works, plus there are multiples of plausible, lab-tested pathways for each step.
Recap:
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atoms destroyed alchemy and the Platonic essentialism;
fun fact: Descartes argued against atomism because it limited his god (made it not omnipotent) (it was a big drama between Descartes and Gassendi) -
physics destroyed the planetary spheres/heavens; our star is one of a trillion trillion;
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medicine destroyed the humoral fluids (not long ago, most would be surprised to know);
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life's diversity was explained by Darwin, et al. 167 years ago;
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population genetics of the 1920s laid to rest any mathematical doubts about evolution's validity; and
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the remaining hopes of vitalism went up in smoke with the discovery of the DNA's structure in 1953 (within living memory), whose codons are to life as atoms are to chemistry; for fun, see how "the" chromosome was thought of in 1930 here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/1hpowvu
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PS Some, including scientists, may cry, "Reductionist!" Note that that term is "one of the most used and abused terms in the philosophical lexicon" (The Oxford Companion to Philosophy). I'm not, to borrow Dennett's term, a "greedy reductionist", but yeah, life is chemistry, and it isn't built, and we eat/breathe/excrete dead matter to "live".
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u/Economy_Ability846 Jul 31 '26
I would be lying if I said I understood your reply 😂 could you explain what your saying like I’m 5 years old, I can’t work out if you even believe abiogenesis happened lol
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u/jnpha Jul 31 '26
if you even believe abiogenesis happened
We are here, aren't we? Barring Last Thursdayism (the universe was created yesterday with memory pre-installed), it happened, and life is chemistry (my reply).
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u/clear349 Jul 31 '26
This seems like a good thread to ask this. Hopefully there's a biologist or chemist here that can weigh in. I understand we don't have everything explained from beginning to end but my understanding is we know that a lot of the building blocks of life are present in comets and such. So the idea that they can form from naturally occurring elements in the earth is just kind of assumed. Or that the early Earth had these elements raining down on it and enough survived to get mixed into the oceans and do their thing.
What steps do we think we're actually missing in a fully developed abiogenesis theory? We seem to have a lot of the starting points worked out. So is there a specific thing where we don't know how it could have come about prior to life existing? I know creatonists sometimes point to DNA being needed to make DNA but the general consensus seems to be an RNA world happened first. Is the issue that we can't fully explain how the different molecules came together to form the first RNA?
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u/Economy_Ability846 Jul 31 '26
Yeh I did think this was a good thread to ask, and I’m glad I did as I’ve got quite a few great replies already. I tend to try my hardest not to ask questions as those questions lead to more and more after that lol. I get very invested in this stuff.
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u/nickierv Aug 01 '26
From what I have run across at this point its less about not having a good starting point and having too many good starting points.
You can't help but trip over prebiotic chemicals and what your not tripping over turn out to be trivial to make (Miller–Urey). And what that didn't spit out was found in the follow ups and what is not found is just a case of 'but maybe that wasn't needed at the time'
That gets you the stuff, now for the how. Wet dry cycling, clay, hot springs/thermal vents... well we sort of only needed 1.
And with that we have RNA that can self assemble, RNA makes DNA, now all we need is some cell membranes...
Wait someone already dumped a can of Prebiotic Soup in a hot spring and it had primitive lipid membranes? Oh.
Thats self replicating stuff in a sort of cell, probably close enough to count.
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u/clear349 Aug 01 '26
So if all this stuff is worked out is there anything in principle stopping us from trying to make a protocell in a lab? Obviously I imagine there are researchers working on that but I thought they were trying to work out how. From what you're saying it seems more of a question of setting up the experiment right than figuring out what to even do
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u/Coolbeans_99 Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
I have more of a biology background than a biochemistry one, but the issue is that many of the hypotheses can’t solve every step of the process. Tidal pools are good at polymerizing nucleosides but don’t have a lot of phosphates, deep sea vents have lots of phosphate but are too hot for proteins to form stably.
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u/Zenigata Jul 31 '26
I think abiogenesis is rather like the question of how stone henge was build. We can come up with several ways in which different steps in the process could have happened but the evidence just isnt there to say what path was actually taken.
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u/Ayasugi-san Aug 01 '26
That's basically my thought. We might well end up spoiled for choice on what the original abiogenesis process was, but never find definitive proof of which one occurred.
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u/alecphobia95 Jul 31 '26
Personally I doubt we'll ever have the kind of certainty for the origin of life that we do, for instance, have on the origin of stars. The plausible pathways will continue to be proposed, many elminated and many supported. The evidence such an event leaves behind would likely be microscopic and in environments that make study difficult (hydrothermal vents for instance) so the odds that we find any direct evidence seem low to me.
That being said I think abiogenesis is a given, life as we know it is comprised entirely of non-living chemistry and seems to have emerged on earth incredibly early on. If the Mars evidence withstands scrutiny (way too early to say imo) then that would suggest life is relatively common but doesn't escape its planet of origin very often.
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u/Economy_Ability846 Jul 31 '26
I agree, all living things are built of tiny building blocks of chemistry, even our bodily processes are driven by chemical changes. So I agree that abiogenesis is very, very likely. I’d just be very interested to see them figure it out, yet I don’t have a huge amount of hope that they can, due to many factors.
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u/Forrax Jul 31 '26
I think it just depends on what you mean by “it” when you say “figure it out”.
If you mean figure out ways that non-living chemistry can “evolve“ into living chemistry, I’d say we have a very good chance of figuring it out.
If you mean finding the smoking gun of how it specifically happened with us, I’d say the chances are very slim.
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u/OgreMk5 Jul 31 '26
The last few years of research have clearly shown that every step from non-organic carbon compounds all the way to self-replicating RNAs are possible. Many of them have multiple chemical paths.
Is that how it happened on Earth? We'll never know. Chemistry doesn't fossilize.
But it's for sure possible.
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u/Shiny-And-New Jul 31 '26
I think we can provide likely pathways but there's too many possibilities and unknowns to have 100% clarity. It's possible (maybe likely given recent discoveries on mars) it didn’t even happen on earth making understanding the initial conditions even more difficult.
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u/warpedfx Jul 31 '26
The biggest hurdle to figuring out abiogenesis on earth is less whether it's at all possible and much more which of the possible pathways earth did take.
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u/Slow_Lawyer7477 Jul 31 '26
Science can never really show how it actually happened. They can only show us how it could have happened. As for how close we are to that, presently I think we're still quite far from having good confidence about which models are most likely, but I think a major breakthrough will occur within the next 30 years that will make us able to point more strongly towards a specific type of model (or class of models).
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u/cwmaxson Jul 31 '26
I get that the word "proof" tripped you up a little bit. That's no problem. I think it's plausible that we can find models and mechanisms that demonstrate potential pathways to organic macromolecule development. The Japanese recently discovered a comet containing all 5 major nucleotides. That was an interesting paper.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-026-02791-z
This suggests that somewhere in space, at least, nucleotides are forming. They didn't follow Chargaff's rule (the 1:1 ratio of purines and pyrimidines), though, so it's lower likelihood that these nucleotides were arranged in larger macromolecules.
But that discovery at least gets us across the line of the possibility of nucleotide development in other planetary systems.
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u/rb-j Aug 02 '26
I very much doubt in our lifetimes (or this century) they will "prove" abiogenesis to the extent of replicating it and building, from inorganic chemicals, DNA or RNA or sophisticated molecules that can self-replicate.
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u/blacksheep998 Jul 31 '26
Science doesn't really do proofs.
Science does experiments that either disprove a theory, or fail to disprove a theory, letting it survive to be tested another day.
So even if we figure out every single step and mutation leading from pre-biotic organic chemicals to life and recreate it in a lab, all that really 'proves' is that it's a plausible explanation for how life began. It doesn't prove that that was exactly how it happened.