Originally posted by Badabing
I'm posing questions for science and religion. People seem to take certain points and run with them while ignoring other points. No where does evolution explain how life started, it explains changes in current living organisms.
Yes it does. I'll try to summarize it, but finding out more about evolutionary natural selection is the best way to learn.
Molecules and base materials coexisted in the cliche 'primordial soup' in which "life" began. Through random interaction over thousands of years, they would attach to one another to form simple entities. Eventually, some of these entities had the properties that they could attch or attract the same substances to them. This would, in effect, make copies of the original entity. These were the original replicators, archaic predecessors of DNA. Other strands formed unqiue replicators.
Through mutation (imperfect copying of these replicators, which happens through natural error) the replicators gradually changed. And in replicators where the changes were of a certain type, they tended to exist longer. For example, a replicator that mutated accidentally into something that could break down other replicators by forming stronger bonds with the materials than the original replicator, that entity would tend to do very well because it could then use the materials from other replicators to make more copies of itself. Here we see the first steps of complexification in a completely natural process. I hesitate to call it "life" at this stage, since there is no conscious awareness yet, but it is the origins of what we consider modern life. The replicators aren't aware of anything, but they seem to 'compete' for survival due to the nature of their construction.
And if the mutation wasn't helpful like that one, the replicator tended to die...natural selection. In this way, the "good" replicators tended to survive, which finds its modern correlation in particular DNA surviving. If a DNA strand induced cancer at age 3, the person will generally die...that gene won't last long in the gene pool because the child won't reproduce to pass along the gene, and the gene will die off, while more productive genes will continue to survive. This is the base for "survival of the fittest" which has very little to do with martial warfare like we often apply it to. To the contrary, warlike tendencies caused by genes may be on their way out, albeit over a span of thousands of years.
Again, over millions of years, this complexification in replicators increased. At some point, via steady random mutation, replicators became able to bond with proteins, making a protein wall around themselves for protection. Thus the first "bodies", and something akin to single-celled organisms.
Extrapolate this process over millions of years (billions?) and we have a continuous complexification caused by the traits of our genes that create us (their "survival machines"😉 to ensure their genetic survival, though the genes themselves aren't conscious of this of course...they merely are constructed in such a way that they seem to act on behalf of their survival. We aren't conscious of this either, but are intelligent by-products of the "arms race" that has been held by genetic material for thousands upon thousands of years.
I of course skipped some steps in the middle there, but that is for brevity's sake. My point, hopefully, is clear. I don't see how that fails to describe "life from non-life", though the distinction between the two is generally less clear in my mind that in most, since we aren't fundamentally different from, say, a virus or amoeba....just exponentially more complex.
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If I left anything out, anyone can feel free to clarify or add to my words, or ask me questions if they disagree with something or don't understand aspects of it.