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Abiogenesis, nothing more than a chemical conclusion (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Nifegun



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Before I get into this, a good place for base knowledge about what life is would be this TED talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dySwrhMQdX4
where the guy discusses many current ideas of what differentiates life from non-life. It's funny that I had this idea as an epiphany before I even knew about "proto-cells" or had seen this video. Now onto my post.

When most people think about Abiogenesis (the origin of life, often quoted as "life from non life") most people seem to think about how likely it would be for the simplest single celled life from to be assembled and naturally Frankenstein'd to life. In fact experiments have been done where people have accomplished Frankenstein'd cells, at minimum proving that life from non-life is at least possible. However even with the ability to manufacture life, I don't accept that as a realistic possibility. The chance of a cell being formed by chance are so low that even if we assume a nearly infinite amount of planets and the billions of years that the big bang theory suggests, it wouldn't likely ever happen.

So rather than simply trying to imitate a living thing under our current understanding of life, I'd like to contemplate what life is and what the simplest version of life would be.

First let's explain what a living thing is. I'll use humans since we all know what humans are. A human is really nothing more than a container housing multiple interlocking systems in symbiotic relationships, each driven by recurring chemical reactions. What I mean by this is that we have our neurological system which, although comprised of a complex network of electric pulses, is driven by a recurring chemical reaction that produces said pulses, and even manipulates said pulses.

The easiest example that most people are familiar with though is the human digestive system. within our organs; used for digestion there are constant chemical reactions taking place that are tuned to repeat and require food to continue. If given too much or too little food, the reaction becomes less stable and your organs feel that, resulting in feelings like hunger or feeling full. This goes into more detail since the system is actually complex enough to react to individual elements within the food you eat and tell your body different things as it sends these elements to other systems within your body.

While it sounds grossly over simplified to say "a network of symbiotic recurring chemical reactions", it is an accurate description of what is taking place in the process we refer to as living. So if you were to attempt to generalize the complex concept of life to a point of elegance, and see what is the simplest form of life, a simple answer is just a single recurring chemical reaction. By that definition, fire counts as life. But why wouldn't fire count as life? Not only is it a recurring chemical reaction, meeting our simplest definition of life, but it also has movement, and even spreads as a means of finding more food. If you look into work done on "Proto-cells" or watch the video I linked earlier, you'll see that most current hypotheses use the following criteria.

1) Life needs to be in non-equilibrium.
2) Life needs to be in liquid form.
3) Life needs to be able to make and break chemical bonds.

The only thing I take issue with here is item number 2. Not just because it is the only thing that eliminates fire, but also because it seems absurd to me to assume that all life is liquid. With the other two criteria being so vague, I don't see any real reason why these would be impossible in a system of gasses or even solids. Though I'll grant that it does seem most likely to occur in liquid, and that we assume that all life on earth started in liquid.

Using the most simple criteria, that "life is a recurring chemical reaction", all we need for life to happen is a chemical reaction that lasts a reasonable period of time, thus we know it's possible. In fact it happens all the time: everything something burns, any time one substance gets absorbed into another, or any chemical reaction that isn't instant.

My hypothesis is that one recurring chemical reaction took place, but while being altered by the environment, managed to kick start other reactions in order to prolong itself. This continued until it managed to start other recurring reactions, which in turn, were also capable of starting more recurring reactions. Some of these reactions ended up in symbiotic relationships and eventually such a complex network of related reactions were taking place that we would refer to it as a living thing.

We see this in the proto-cell experiments. When food is introduced into the petri dish, the proto cells are capable of moving toward it. However that's not a recurring reaction, it is a single reaction used to move the cell, it stops when the cell gets to its destination. This one time reaction, or even just the fact that fire spreads, are examples that these recurring chemical reactions are trying to prolong themselves. So what happens when rather than simply moving, a recurring chemical reaction, due to its environment, manages to start another chemical reaction, and that reaction is also capable of repeating? There are a few cases.

When a recurring chemical reaction, like fire or a proto-cell causes a second recurring chemical reaction the following could occur.

1) They do not interact and each continue independently
2) They do interact, one suppresses or consumes the other
3) They do interact, they repel each other, then continue independently.
4) they do interact, and one or more supplies to the other.

Granted case 2 could be inside case 4 if reaction B is supplying to reaction A, but then reaction A simply depletes reaction B. But case 4 is the big one. When one recurring reaction, can start another reaction also capable of recurring, and that can supply to one another, we're already very close to the simplified definition of a human. Its true that a single cell also fits that description and is much closer to what we have, but its more fun to relate it to how I described human life for dramatic effect. The important thing to note here is that case 4 not only would be the one case to sustain the longest, but it also the most preferred for both reactions. As such, just like moving to find more food, it doesn't seem too crazy that something like a proto-cell would strive for case 4. At that point, all that is left is to arbitrarily decide at what point you stop calling it chemical reactions and start calling it life. Because realistically life is in fact a logical outcome of a recursive chemical reaction not a random coincidence.

So in conclusion, if simple recurring reactions like fire or proto-cells can search for food to sustain themselves, why couldn't they also cause other recurring chemical reactions, and sometimes yield a symbiotic relation as a result. Again jumping to complex life, we already know that symbiotic relations are found in nature, from things as specific as teamwork between different creatures, to the most general relationship of animals breathing and plants, anti-breathing. It seems far more likely that that ecosystem is the result of recurring reactions causing symbiotic reactions, rather than any of it forming randomly.

Closing thought: the only difference between a complex ecosystem with animals breathing and plants anti-breathing and a pair of recurring chemical reactions in a symbiotic relationship, is a few billion years of those reactions changing and starting new reactions as they get altered by catalysts, inhibitors, and other chemicals within the environment.
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N R Scott


In: Middlesbrough
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Whoa, two new people in one week! Party time.

Your idea that fire could be construed as a form of life is pretty cool. I like it.

If I get you right, are you saying that life didn't begin as a randomly formed 'creature' of some sort, but that it essentially swirled up into existence? I like this possibility too, it seems more reasonable than a single genesis moment.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Welcome, nife gun, despite your warlike name. I read the first half of your post with interest but gave up on length. On this forum we are addicted to short, sharp shocks.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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I suggest reading it in portions then Mick. It's an interesting paradigm.
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Mick Harper
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Very well, then you paraphrase it succinctly. I'm presently attempting a Tedtalk which can only be twenty minutes long. Being brief is painful.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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In brief: Life is a sustained chemical reaction of any kind (fire is alive). Symbiotic chemical reactions can be mutually sustaining and, in so far as they are, constitute a living system (a chemical reaction that produces fuel is part of the fire-system--especially so if the fire system somehow feeds the fuel-producing reaction).

The most primitive form of life is not some kind of proto-cell. It's a self-sustaining chemical reaction.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Holy Crap!

This idea may be powerful.

Think of SCUM. The main-star sequence. One fusion reaction creates the fuel for the next, keeping the star "alive."

And what ultimately appears on the body of a "dead" star?
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Mick Harper
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I watched the TedTalk which was interesting. Your comments led me back to Nife Gun's post. Which was also interesting but I still gave up two-thirds the way through. The argument is just too dense. I agree that SCUM plugs in very nicely.
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Nifegun



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Yeah, I wrote it all out trying to be very explanatory rather than quick. I figured the length might lose people. But those who truly aspire to be wise will take the time to read any perspective.

Regardless here's a much shorter form of my hypothesis. Classifying life as a complex organism seems illogical when you can break down that organism into a network of recurring chemical reactions all acting in a symbiotic manner. By reducing life down to nothing more than a network of recurring chemical reactions, we come to the logical conclusion that life in its simplest form is just a recurring chemical reaction.

I used the example fire, combustion is a reaction that takes place until it runs out of fuel. We also know of many other reactions that take place throughout the universe. Our oceans absorbing carbon-dioxide in "ocean acidification is a great example as it happens now and likely did for a very long time prior. Its not hard to see that in a system (earth) with many elements present and an atmosphere constantly being changed by outside sources like the sun, things will move and things will react. Some reactions take a long time and as such while things move they may cause other chemical reactions. Then on the off chance that they kick off another reaction that is beneficial to itself, it will propagate.

The point being, it's far more likely that some process like burning, that consumes fuel, burns oxygen, and produces carbon dioxide, happened to kick off a reaction that helped it attain fuel or oxygen, or both, rather than some form of cell or even proto-cell happening to assemble (just an example, first life could have been any set of reactions).

This then leaves us with a rather fun question which is. If life is nothing more than a set of chemical reactions each working to prolong each other's other run time, at what degree of complexity do you call it life? For me it's the base case. Any single chemical reaction is in fact life. Complex life is just a system that has the ability to sustain.
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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I'm willing to be proved wrong, so I'll hedge my statements.

Most forms of life (as we know it Jim) do consume energy, or burn fuels of one sort or another to liberate energy.

But don't most forms of life also accumulate energy as well, which is a crucial distinction. Does proticity happen in non-organic forms as well as life forms? Proticity is typically generated by the mitochondria of cells.

I have sometimes wondered whether the same proton (hydrogen ion) bonding could be an explanation for how water arrived on our planet. Solar-powered reduction reactions.
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Mick Harper
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But don't most forms of life also accumulate energy as well, which is a crucial distinction.

Nife Gun dealt with this rather elegantly. Forms of life do not "accumulate energy", they merely continue to exist so long as they can get access to it. Fire is exactly the same. Life might object that it has developed systems that allow it to store energy to tide itself over for a short while but no doubt fire would retort that it doesn't need to because, unlike life, it can spontaneously generate itself.

I have sometimes wondered whether the same proton (hydrogen ion) bonding could be an explanation for how water arrived on our planet. Solar-powered reduction reactions.

This is essentially the argument put forward by SCUM though I didn't have the chemistry to put it in such technical terms.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Nifegun wrote:
Complex life is just a system that has the ability to sustain.


Complex anything.... is stuff we humans struggle to understand.....normally because we cannot order or sequence it.

By breaking things down into chemical reactions you are suggesting a much more difficult disordered paradigm. You might believe that in order to understand something you need to break it down....You might also create some experiments in the lab to show something is theoretically possible..

but hey ho.....

I am made up of cells, which contain "dead" stuff creating millions of chemical reactions, this is a truly mind bogglingly complex problem, which orthodoxy can't solve and maybe never will.

However, by using a life/death distinction, (even if it's false) orthodoxy does, in fact, make things a tad easier, by concentrating on what is ordered and can reasonably be known, and I reckon this paradigm will still continue to be productive.......we humans need something to hang things on.

Good Luck Nifegun. I hope you have a quad processsor.....
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Roger Stone


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Nifegun wrote:
Complex life is just a system that has the ability to sustain.


I suspect that "life" is too simple a concept to be useful. We need a definition which includes not only the ability to replicate itself, but also to replicate with variation, thus allowing evolution to take place.

If we discover 'life' on other planets, but which only has the ability to replicate but not evolve, that would be no more significant than discovering fire on other planets. It's the modifying feedback-loop that makes life significant.
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Mick Harper
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You are conflating two things. What is life? and Why is life significant? There is no reason why life can't just be life. However (and this is latterly the theme of SCUM theory) the presumption must be that everything in the Universe evolves and that principle presumably applies to life.

Does fire evolve? If not, then it is mere process. The method by which other things evolve. Like, for instance, gravity.
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Boreades


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Mick Harper wrote:
Forms of life do not "accumulate energy", they merely continue to exist so long as they can get access to it.


Are you sure about that?

By example: when my children poke me in the stomach and start singing "Winnie The Pooh", I think they are telling me I have accumulated too much stored energy in one part of my body.

I think you can see the general case.
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