The Origin of Life :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

How life arose is a question that is fundamental to both ism 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 finger 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 prototypal question has only two responses. As Douglas Futuyuma says, Creation and evolution, between them, eat the possible explanations for the transmission line of living things (197). Either we be the product of the chemical substance 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 incur how one will establish a belief system to ready 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 natural (as o pposed to supernatural) processes. The possibility that perhaps the spring of life cannot be explained by a natural mechanism is ignored, and this is disturbing. For if we limit what explanations we are involuntary 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 great power assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein (Johnson 106). Why do respected scientists enquiry 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 wh ich contractable material such as RNA becomes entrapped in a safety-related cell membrane as a likely recipe for the arrangement 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.