Abiogenesis Biogenesis, etcetera Turtles Commentary

Stanley Miller, Harold Urey evolution

Abiogenesis

• A “warm little pond,
• with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts,
• lights, heat, electricity, etc. present,
• so that a protein compound was chemically formed
• ready to undergo still more complex changes”
• —Charles Darwin, on conditions for the origin of life
• Some people thought it was impossible;
• other people thought it might have happened.
• Miller and Urey actually did the experiment
• to test the “primordial soup” theory
• of Alexander Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane.
• Miller and Urey cycled a mixture of gases
• through an apparatus that delivered electrical sparks.
• This produced a variety of amino acids,
• building blocks of proteins. Living organisms
• might have evolved from such molecules.

Biogenesis, etcetera

• biogenesis
• abiogenesis
• archebiosis
• *
• Henry Charlton Bastian believed he witnessed
• spontaneous generation of living organisms under his microscope
• and proposed the term biogenesis
• for the generation of living organisms from unliving matter.
• Thomas Henry Huxley, independently
• used biogenesis for generation from living things
• and abiogenesis for generation from unliving matter.
• Subsequently, Bastian renounced the term biogenesis
• and found that he could not accept the term abiogenesis
• so introduced the term archebiosis
• for the generation of living organisms from unliving matter.

Turtles

• If everything living came from other living things
• what did the first living thing come from?
• What do we mean by “life,”
• and what do we mean by “first”?
• If the universe and all space
• were originally compressed into a single point,
• then where did that point come from,
• and what kind of thing surrounded it?
• Asked, if the world were on the back of a giant turtle,
• what the giant turtle was standing on,
• the foolish might have argued “It’s no use;
• there are turtles all the way down.”