Abiogenesis

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The thing is, although we can make the conditions right to make the building blocks of life right before our eyes, has anybody actually created a LIVING cell from the building blocks of life? Untill I hear it's possible to create artificially, I'll have to say I can't see abiogenesis occuring naturally, and I think that's fair.

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Even if life is created in the lab, it is still not PROOF (as in ultimate proof) that life arose via a precise mechanism. 3.5 billion years is a long time ago, and any models that we create are tentative and will not tell us the specifics of how life arose on Earth.On the other hand, if self replicators do form spontaneously, then the possibility of life arising naturally is possible. Current research is getting closer and closer, but questions will remain. What it comes down to for me is the God of the Gaps fallacy. Natural mechanisms have been found for almost every natural phenomena previously ascribed to dieties. Hanging your faith on a dieties presence in natural phenomena is probably not the best route to take, because that gap in knowledge may be closed and your faith with it. I don't see how abiogenesis lowers the wonderment of life on the planet, but to some it may. Oh well, at least we live in a world where we can discuss these lofty questions.

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As for when (and if) we can create life from non-life, keep in mind that using a bunch of instruments and setting everything just right to prove that abiogenesis can occur naturally, without intelligent intervention is... kind of redundant.

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If we have to intelligently measure the distance from the Earth to the Sun, does this mean that that distance was intelligently made? Nope. With respect to abiogenesis, even if the CONDITIONS were intelligently controlled, the resultant self replicators would be considered natural and not the product of intelligence. Another example, is ice intelligently created because you stick water in your freezer? Obviously not. If conditions and reactants set up by an intelligence is reasonably close to what we would expect in a natural early earth environment then the results can be considered indicative of what we would expect in nature. This type of rule is adhered to throughout science, and in the biological sciences especially.An example of possible intelligently made self replicators would be a step by step synthesis. An analogous procedure is drug manufacturing where each step in the synthesis is controlled to such a degree that the chances of this compound naturally occurring in the quantities seen in synthetic manufacturing is quite low. It is the step by step procedure that is the problem. Equating this to self replicators, it would be like creating a 3 million base genome and controlling the sequence base by base. Non-intelligently produced self replicators must have a large dose of randomness, and this must be reflected in the methodology.Argh, turned 30 last month and already I am getting long winded. I'll probably start repeating myself any minute now. And I'll probably start getting long winded too.

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It would be a curious thought indeed if we considered prions as a live and virses as dead. I do hope DNAunion is correct and we are out of Alice's rabbit hole.
  —McFall

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Without going into levels of complexity, prions and viruses do have major differences between them. A prion is just a catalytic protein, nothing more. A virus is much more complicated and actually contains a genome. Perhaps a prion is alive in the same way fire is alive. Fire does reproduce and consume resources, two of the characteristics of life.As to the origin of viruses, I think they came about after cellular life. They could have been the first gametes, but mutated in such a way that they fell under the control of evolutionary mechanisms and now live as separate entities. Perhaps they are "diploid" gametes that developed selfishness in the Dawkins sense (I use diploid loosely, meaning complete in an allele sense compared to haploid with half of the alleles). Lytic and lysogenic stages of bacterial phages could explain this, especially with the lytic stage being initiated by DNA damage. If the bacteria in the past experience damage, dispersal of DNA material in packets could have helped survival of subsequent generations by a type of sexual reproduction. Are viruses alive? No. Are they important in understanding evolutionary mechanisms? Yes. They are important for understanding life and diversity, but are themselves not alive.