Charles Darwin’s hunch about early life was probably right

TL;DR champion. Thanks.

Thats also interesting

> “But it’s something that could be trying to happen even now.”

Could be happening on earth still or other planets he meant?

That omits what I consider to be a key part of the insight: that the conditions might no longer be able to give rise to new life because today existing organisms would exploit the rich molecules before they had an opportunity to produce proto-living things.

The main reason it's probably right:

>In 2019, researchers in Germany made all four [RNA bases] at once. They placed simple carbon-based chemicals in hot water on a mineral surface and subjected them to repeated wet-dry cycles.

And no one else has been able to do that under other conditions such as undersea vents.

(I guess that would then kick off RNA world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world)

The article directly addresses that idea, and suggests it is not a likely answer:

> ...according to a review published in May 2020, “the direct synthesis of amino acids or nucleobases” – both of which are crucial to life as we know it – has “not yet been demonstrated” under alkaline vent conditions.

It is not just standing on shoulders of giants. It is also that we only hear about the success stories and hardly ever of the long road that lead to the insights and theories. We do this in our era as well which makes it easy to someone as brilliant and think of yourself as not brilliant because you experience your own failures and struggles but only see the successes of others.

> Even though I had heard Newton's quote about standing on shoulder of giants I was never able to understand it fully till much later.

There's an article about this [1] that I enjoyed reading a few years back, titled Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Story Behind Newton’s Famous Metaphor for How Knowledge Progresses

[1] https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/16/newton-standing-on-...

Darwin's generation was around the last who could have a full understanding of all branches of science. Biologists, Physicists, Geologists, Chemists would communicate frequenty through letters and meetings Having that cross-discipline expertise at a high level must have been amazing.

150 years ago, 90% of the planet were aboriginals or peasants, 9.9% were workers of some kind, 0.1% were rulers/nobility who were the class that needed to support these ideas, and there were just extremely few people dedicated to knowledge and science.

Rich dudes, their patrons, sitting around pondering the meaning of life.

There was a lot to be discovered and so few people trying to figure it out.

Now we have millions of PhD's studying every little nook and cranny, the vast majority of research ever published will be read by only a small number of people and then forgotten, maybe forever.

The marginal returns to effort now are extremely small.

Not to detract on your conclusion (I do think like is hard due to some estimates on chemical combinations), but there are way more planets than experiments on Earth about abiogenesis.

Indeed. One thing labs lack that the early earth had in the plenty is space (for multiple "experiments") and time.

Take the volume of all the lab experiments ever done, multiplied by the length of time those experiments were run for.

Next take the entire volume of Earth's primordial oceans and multiply by a few hundred million years, roughly the period during which life arose on Earth.

What's the ratio between those two results? The fact that something arose once in the latter tells you very little about what's happening in the former.

But over a billion years or so, vastly more conditions occur on a single planet than we could ever hope to replicate in a lab, and even with the right conditions it might just be unlikely and take a very long time. So I’m still optimistic despite this argument.

Can we make an earthquake in a lab?

Imagine that in each pond several different combinations are being tried in parallel, kind of like in a quantum computer. Of course, the universe is a giant quantum computer. This leads to the idea that even if life is very unlikely, it can still develop since there are so many "attempts". It also means that life can develop many times, but in different attempts. By this I mean different parallel attempts, such that whatever happens in one of these attempts is not accessible to what happens in another attempt.

I also think life is very rare, and I am in fact of the opinion we won't find any other instance of it.

I don’t dispute the possibility, but it does beg the question of why that’s more likely than life developing on Earth?

The RNA had still to originally come from somewhere.

Big bang produced hydrogen and helium. Primordial stars converted those to heavier elements - carbon, nitrogen... and at some point in time between the first stars exploding and spreading the heavier elements into the universe, and now, the first RNA molecules were formed. What was the chemical process that produced them is the specific question here. Not where in universe this happened. Although that question is exciting as well.

Nothing stops from using Darwin's idea here as well - there was a puddle on a planet, somehwere else, long ago and far away...

Panspermia makes the argument actually more complex, not simpler. But it's not unlikely - space is apparently full of rocks from far away places.

Gravity is also a theory.

> The meaning of the term scientific theory (often contracted to theory for brevity) as used in the disciplines of science is significantly different from the common vernacular usage of theory.[4][note 1] In everyday speech, theory can imply an explanation that represents an unsubstantiated and speculative guess,[4] whereas in science it describes an explanation that has been tested and widely accepted as valid. These different usages are comparable to the opposing usages of prediction in science versus common speech, where it denotes a mere hope.

Please take a minute to consider this and realize that you should never repeat what you just said.

A theory is the pinnacle of scientific achievement - a complete series of observations, equations, processes etc. that come together to describe a phenomenon.

There is nothing that we know with a higher degree of certainty then a scientific theory, such as the theory of evolution, the theory of general relativity, the theory of quantum mechanics, the theory of newtonian mechanics etc.

"There is a notable difference between the opinion of scientists and that of the general public in the United States. A 2009 poll by Pew Research Center found that "Nearly all scientists (97%) say humans and other living things have evolved over time – 87% say evolution is due to natural processes, such as natural selection. The dominant position among scientists – that living things have evolved due to natural processes – is shared by only about a third (32%) of the public."

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution

Of course he considered it a theory.[1] It was a new idea. He had a pile of evidence for it (yes, empirical evidence) but it still needed to be looked at by other scientists and the evidence assessed.

I don't know what you mean by "not empirical", but if you mean that Darwin just wrote "hey, here's a cool idea" and didn't have empirical evidence for it then you're just flatly wrong. If you mean that now we don't have empirical evidence for it then either you've been terribly deceived by others or you're lying. (Probably the former. My condolences.)

Something can be a theory and also factual. And there can be a theory of something that is a fact. If you think "X is a theory!" is some sort of refutation of people who regard X as true, then you are 100% wrong about that.

The usual progression goes like this. Someone comes up with a theory (in the vernacular sense). Say, Darwin's theory of how living things got to be the way they are. Some theories are more or less correct from the outset. Some are just plain wrong. Most are somewhere in between. If the theory seems worth taking seriously, other people try to work out its consequences in more detail, and go looking for evidence for or against it, and refine the details. When the theory is all wrong, it will hopefully get knocked down as this happens. (Examples: "cold fusion", Lamarckian "inheritence of acquired characteristics".) When the theory is basically right, the wrong bits will get corrected (e.g., Darwin expected inheritance to be a sort of "mixing" process, which isn't really right and produces some wrong intuitions) and new ideas will be brought in (e.g., Darwin didn't know about genes), and as repeated investigation doesn't refute the underlying ideas it becomes increasingly implausible to reject them.

Today's understanding of evolution isn't identical to Darwin's. He made some mistakes and some wrong guesses and there was a lot he didn't know. But we have a lot more evidence than Darwin did that populations of living things evolve over time, that a major cause of the change they undergo is natural selection, that even very different-looking living things have common ancestors, etc.

Darwin had a "theory" in the vernacular sense: an idea that seemed to explain a lot of things and might or might not turn out to be right. It was a good enough idea that scientists after Darwin put a lot of effort into investigating and refining it. We now have a "theory" in the "grand scientific edifice" sense, and while details will continue -- ahahaha -- evolving, there's little scope for reasonable people aware of the evidence to doubt that its central ideas are facts.

[1] Even in the "vernacular" sense. It's true that sometimes "theory" means "grand scientific edifice, well evidenced and elaborated with mathematical sophistication", but it doesn't always, and when Darwin called evolution by natural selection a "theory" he didn't mean that.

There's been a lot of evidence accumulated for it since Darwin's time.

Um, that's how science works. It's an effort to explain the world. Everything is a theory, nothing is final. Some theories (evolution, gravity) are more credible/developed than others.