The Origin of Life :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

How life arose is a question that is fundamental to both school of thought and science. Responses to it enable one, in turn, to answer such questions as, Who am I?, why am I here?, and How do I make sense impression of this world? This secondary set of questions can be answered in a myriad of ways for a variety of reasons, but the answer to the startle question has only two responses. As Douglas Futuyuma says, Creation and evolution, between them, outfox the possible explanations for the assembly line of living things (197). Either we are the product of the chemical and physical laws of nature operating over time, or we have been formed, at least in part, by some supernatural Force or Deity. The acceptance of one of these options as a foundation will jell how one will establish a belief system to rig his place in the world. This is a matter of crucial importance, yet in most biology classes offered at U.C. Davis, we learn that life came from nonlife by purely natu ral (as opposed to supernatural) processes. The possibility that perhaps the bank line of life cannot be explained by a natural mechanism is ignored, and this is disturbing. For if we limit what explanations we are unstrained to accept for the origin of life, we could be closing our eyes to reality. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, has said that the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going (Horgan 27).2 Noted evolutionary astronomer Frederick Hoyle has described the chances of life having evolved from nonlife to be about as probably as the chances that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard readiness assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein (Johnson 106). Why do respected scientists precariousness what textbooks teach as fact? It would appear that these scientists know something that current theories describing the origin of life fail to explain. While current theories describe scenarios in which inheritable material such as RNA becomes entrapped in a protective cell membrane as a likely recipe for the organisation of life, they generally do not focus on the difficulties of forming and concentrating all of these components in the first place.3 To clarify, current theories suffer from what I call the cookbook mentality.