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There's quite a number of different theories for how life could've emerged on Earth. Currently most popular, as I understand it, is the hydrothermal vent hypot
by roughly 2y ago
There's quite a number of different theories for how life could've emerged on Earth.
Currently most popular, as I understand it, is the hydrothermal vent hypothesis, which uses the energy gradient provided by the heat from underwater hydrothermal vents as the motive power for the kind of self-assembly required and uses things like RNA, which still today creates its own transcriptive mechanism as well as several other utility enzymes, but the basic requirement is an energy gradient - beyond that, an awful lot of the chemical precursors to life seem to be self-assembling in the right conditions.
Now, if you want to argue about where exactly that transitions from self-propagating chemistry to actual Life occurs, that's a question for the philosophers - things get a bit muddy at that scale, but mechanistically, I'm not aware of a "missing link" in the early story of life.
- jononomo 2y agoI'm sure that if we put the word out we could get another two dozen theories. But "science" needs to mean more than "speculative theories that adhere to my philosophical presuppositions".
- roughly 2y agoRight, usually it's "speculative theories that we can assemble evidence for by building upon prior work and known facts about the world", which the hydrothermal vent theory is. "Science" when talking about "how did life form" will always be "speculative theories" until we crack the time-travel nut.
- jononomo 2y agoScience also requires a plausible mechanism and an understanding of statistics. "It must have randomly happened even though the chance was less than 1 in ten to the five hundred and twelfth" is about as far as these speculative theories have gotten so far.