Where did life come from?
Life from non-life?
Even the simplest cell needs DNA to store its instructions, proteins to read them, and an oily skin to hold it together, and each depends on the others. Evolution can't build the first cell, because it only works on things that already copy themselves. So chemistry had to do it alone. James Tour, one of the world's leading synthetic chemists, has studied the attempts:
Those who think scientists understand the issues of prebiotic chemistry are wholly misinformed. Nobody understands them. Maybe one day we will. But that day is far from today.
Here's what chemistry would have had to write. DNA is a code: four letters, A, C, G and T, read three at a time. Each three-letter word means one of the 20 building blocks of proteins, or “stop.” Below is the real start of the gene for hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in your blood. Be the ribosome, the machine that reads it: find each word in the table, fast.
- ATG
- GTG
- CAT
- CTG
- ACT
- CCT
- GAG
Of a million random codes, only about one softens typos like these better than the real one. DNA works like software: a written message, read by machines using a lookup table. When the human genome was first mapped in 2000, Francis Collins, who led the project, said we had “caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.”
In 2016, scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute cut a bacterium down to the fewest genes it could live on: 473. No self-copying cell in nature has a smaller genome, yet it's still packed with molecular machines, and the team couldn't say what 149 of those genes do.
Even then, they didn't build a cell from scratch. They made its DNA and put it into a cell that was already alive.
Hutchison et al., Science (2016)No. Nobody has made life from non-life in a lab, and the field agrees that how it began is still an open question. Eugene Koonin, an evolutionary biologist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, calls it a chicken-and-egg problem:
Origin of life is a chicken and egg problem: for biological evolution that is governed, primarily, by natural selection, to take off, efficient systems for replication and translation are required, but even barebones cores of these systems appear to be products of extensive selection.
You need the copying machinery to evolve the copying machinery. Koonin's own answer: in an infinite multiverse, even that would happen somewhere by chance.
Koonin, Biology Direct 2:15 (2007)Francis Crick shared a Nobel Prize for finding DNA's double helix, and he was a firm skeptic of religion. On how life began, he wrote:
An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.
His answer? In 1973 he and the chemist Leslie Orgel proposed that aliens had sent life here on purpose: “directed panspermia.”
Crick & Orgel, “Directed Panspermia” (1973)In the 2008 film Expelled, Ben Stein asked the world's best-known atheist how intelligent design could turn out to be true. Dawkins said an advanced civilization elsewhere might have designed life and seeded it here, and that we might find “a signature of some sort of designer” in our molecular biology.
He later said this was a possibility, not his belief, and that such aliens would themselves have had to evolve.
Expelled: No Intelligence AllowedIf astronauts found a car parked on the moon, nobody would think it had come together there on its own, given enough time. They'd know someone built it and brought it there. A cell is far more intricate than any car, and it runs on written code. The astronomer Fred Hoyle, who was no Christian, worked out the odds of a cell's proteins forming by chance and said they were like a whirlwind blowing through a junkyard and leaving behind “a fully assembled 747, ready to fly.” His answer, like Crick's, was that life came from space. Notice where the answers go: a multiverse, aliens. Each only moves the question back a step. The Bible's answer is simpler: life comes from the living God. As Job put it:
In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.