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Comment by Valmar | Hacker News Reader

For all of these lab soups, it means basically nothing.

None of this has advanced any understanding of the Neo-Darwinian origin of life model.

There's still no working theory of how one gets from basic building blocks to a fully-functioning working cell, nevermind the rest.

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To get from the basic building blocks to a fully functioning working cell, you need steps A, B, C, D, ...

This article shows that C could have spontaneously happened. It's not at all meaningless. Is it the whole story? Of course not. But it's an interesting part of the chain. Science is slow. Don't throw out the transistor because it's not an iphone.

The Neo-Darwinians don't have an origin of life model. Neo-Darwinism was a synthesis of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection with genetics. It was about fleshing out an actual mechanism behind heritability and variation (two of the three necessary ingredients for evolution by natural selection; the other being selection). It was not about explaining how life started.

The origin of life is very much a speculative area of science. I thought Nick Lane's The Vital Question was an interesting take on how life could have gotten started. I'm not qualified to comment on the validity of the chemistry behind it, though.

Aren't alkaline hydrothermal vents[0] a pretty good candidate for that? AFAIK they provide almost everything necessary for the creation of cellular life. Once you have cells and RNA everything else is just time + evolution.

[0] https://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2014/03/from-geolo...

To those downvoting this comment, can you please clarify why you're downvoting?

This is also how I see it, and I'd like to know the counter-argument.

Dragging "Darwinism", which is a theory of evolution, into an argument about abiogenesis, which is life coming from non-living stuff, is a hallmark of Creationism. Creationist are known to argue in bad faith. Best just to rid the space of Creationist arguments. Like Mark Twain once wrote, if you wrestle with pigs, you'll get very dirty, and the pigs just might enjoy it.

See my response above. Neo-Darwinianism has nothing to do with explaining the origin of life. It was strictly concerned with explaining the mechanism (genetics) underpinning Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. And the fact that the OP has engaged in name calling that isn't even correct kind of implies that their objection is ideological rather than merely logical.

Because the first two sentences in the GP comment are false and the third is a non-sequitur.

You should read "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane. He puts forward a theory for what the first life might look like, based on the shared common genes between bacteria and archea.

I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you're genuinely curious.

So? Don't you think it’s important to understand even this first basic step?

Sure, I guess.

But we've been down this road of chemical soups before ~ and gotten nothing out of it.

I'm just frustrated that they seem to keep chasing the same failed ideas.

It's time to look for other explanations... not a religious one, at that.

Some biologists look towards a meteoric explanation of life, but punting it off-planet isn't an explanation, either...

the same failed ideas

Saying that the idea of "a primordial soup produced the building blocks that eventually led to all life on earth" has failed because some extraordinarily limited experiments (spatially, chemically, temporally, and complexity limited) haven't produced cellular life is about like saying that the "fusion of hydrogen produces the heat of stars" theory has failed because we haven't been able to produce stable fusion here on earth. The scope of the effect that was likely produced in the primordial environment over billions of years is beyond basic human comprehension.

I don't think the idea is failed. Yes, attempts to replicate it in laboratory-scale tanks haven't succeeded yet. But that isn't evidence against the theory that it occurred sometime over millions of years in billions of cubic kilometers of water. It happens at some statistical rate, and lab experiments so far have put an upper bound on the rate.

This is interesting. If we can put an upper bound on the rate (what is it?) we could rule out abiogenesis if we could lower that upper bound sufficiently.

Most here seem to reason the other way around - it must have happened, so we'll just keep looking until we figure out how. I'd like to think that we could reach a point at which we could confidently say "this universe doesn't have the probabilistic resources to make it happen" instead of kicking the can down the road indefinitely.

Scientists will chase chemical soups as long as it is the most probable theory, it is that simple. The thing with chemical soups is that some of them form very complex structures, so it is pretty easy to imagine that the right kinds of soups was the origin of life. Everything else people have suggested are either much less probable (not sure how it could happen without chemical soup) or they are nonsense (intelligent design, ie "life was created by life that was already there, just don't ask me how that other life appeared").

I don't see how one could rule it out, since we don't know the number of planets on which the conditions required for abiogenesis could have occurred. It's not limited to the # of planets in the volume of the universe observable from Earth.

Right, given the Anthropic principle the probability has to be nontrivial when multiplied by all the oceans and the lifetime of the planet, but also by billions of planets and billions of galaxies. So there may be no way of ruling it out by any experiment.

All you can do is build bigger vats, just like physicists build bigger supercolliders, hoping for a result.

Here's a working theory. Warning: turn down the volume. https://youtu.be/U6QYDdgP9eg?t=227

How?: Time

Time cannot logically explain it.

Given such complex lifeforms, even a billion years wouldn't suffice to explain going from a RNA bases to a modern day human.

And no, I don't buy the Christian fairytale, either.

It's fine for me to accept that we humans have no answer as to life's origins.

Just because you can't explain it doesn't mean it cannot be explained. It could just be a reflection of you.

Be patient, this step is part of the process of discovering the part that you are focused on.

Fwiw I think the transition from single cellular life, or even non-callulqr life like viruses, is fairly easy to imagine.

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