is life about the survival of the fittest chemistry?

Polymers is what it is all about. You have to begin with bio-chemical polymers.
That's where your bio-chemical authorship comes from.

Do watch the Robert Hazen presentation, he describes the process and rather than running down a rabbit hole he takes us into interstellar clouds where the process already begins. We can simulate it. Life is a chemical reaction. No elan vital or some obscure designer.
Keep it simple. It's JUST chemistry, and it's beautiful.
You just saw a chemical polymer used in living chemical systems in post #256 , RNA!

It's a matter of lexical statistics. Two trillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion chemical reactions in the lifetime of earth alone.
Humans had nothing to do with those experiments, earth did it all by itself....

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Actively combating entropy by feeding is an indicator of proto-life. Kinda where the virus lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus
If viruses are not themselves alive, they certainly are a persistent and abundant proto-life, which is the step below defined life. Evolution at its finest.

 

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And the sky is blue!! I don't think anyone here disagrees that life is about chemical reactions. Even creationists think that. Nothing new here.
Our discussion is about how we end from primordial relatively simple chemistry to the chemistry that is life.

Yes, Oparin et al showed that long organic molecules like amino-acids form from simplier, planets form from dust, water gets collected into rivers etc. The creation of longer and bigger structures happens all the time. So what?
There is no law of nature that says that any ordered system with constantly evolve or be naturally selected into a more ordered one, perpetually.

why don't the crystals in Titan or other planets do that? They had plenty of time, and they are more abundant than chemistry was on earth

 

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It's simple.
Evolution, natural selection and "two trillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion" chemical reactions.

 

All i say is that life may not be overall as ordered or self-organizing as we think.
Defining life can be tricky! Its like trying to see your eyes with your own eyes.
All chemical reactions of life are connected to each other. We just cherry pick what looks like us by dividing into organisms, and other biological units. Photosynthetic bacteria perform anabolic reactions, but only because there is a complex template that pre-exists, and only because they leave behind an even bigger disorder (waste, gasses, etc). But in real life, these waste are the other organisms food in a constant recycle of nutrients. We just cherry pick what we think its important.

 

that is one example and its debatable.

sketchy is the logic that equates crystallization and polymerization with life.

humans have matter, balloon have matter, so humans are balloons.

 

i dont necessarily disagree with that. I only disagree with the narrative that the reactions were a form of experiments of nature and that the really vast number of reactions is an indicator that improbable successful events will become probable and all the others are just noice that don't matter.
Or that the first ordered chemical system can spontaneously start collecting more and more order out of a chaotic environment that surrounds it, even after billions of years.

 

Let's start together then and take it from there.

That's how it works, that's what!!!

Yes it does. That is the definition of evolution and devolution.

What a strange question. How do you know that crystals do not grow on Titan?
Are crystals bio-chemical?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal#Occurrence_in_nature

What is noteworthy, crystals grow, everywhere, including Titan. If not, no crystals!!

 

Chemical evolution does that also.
Fantastic universal atomic and molecular interactions. Life has many forms of expression.
Therein lies the key, evolution it is not a rigid function, it is a probabilistic function, with many pathways leading to complexity.

 

my room is a total mess, a total disorder!! you mean that if i don't clean it it will spontaneously evolve into more order? oh wait!! maybe it needs external energy. I will put 3-4 kids and let them play in there. Maybe that will clean it up!! Lol!
I am kidding, but you got my point!!

 

C'mon, that's not even wrong.
All living systems have RNA, therefore where RNA is found (proto) life exist.

 

What do we do differently in a laboratory that nature cannot do all by itself?
If you had just watched the Robert Hazen lecture at Carnegie Institute for Science, you would KNOW the answer and have no need to pose this question.

Start watching at 25:10

 

ok i exaggerated a little bit just to underscore that RNA or other long macromolecules are not synonymous with life. I think we agree in that.
one can find deoxyribonucleic acids in comets for example, and no other signs of life. Would that count as discovery of life?
One would also found comets with proteins only.
If an RNA comet is found first, i can already see the scientists taking this as a proof of the RNA-first hypothesis. Lol!
Its how we only see the facts we want to see and totally ignore our bias

 

No, I don't. I would suggest to leave that room alone for a few hundred years and it will clean (not order) itself with the help of a few microbes. Order is not a necessity in your room.

 

It would certainly count as evidence that RNA (common to all known life) assembles in outer space as well as on earth.
It would strongly point in the direction of life in space and maybe even panspermia.

You keep questioning the evidence. Why?

 

There was no "first ordered chemical system".
The growth of ordered systems from surrounding disorder is something one can observe in every garden, or on one's windowpane in cold weather. There are pictures, above.
The observed emergence of well-ordered systems from apparently less ordered surroundings, without "seeds" or the like, was for a long time more difficult to explain, but we now have Darwinian and other evolutionary theories - quite adequate to the task.

 

because its healthy to question the evidence. You think that some deoxyribonucleic acids in some comets should convince me about RNA first or panspermia?

 

Ask yourself, does it argue against RNA first or panspermia? If not, then the weight of the evidence must go in the direction of the argument, no?

Your perspective is that Life is incredibly rare. It isn't!

It is a probability, and in view of the combinatory richness of resources on enormous spatial and temporal scales, the universe could well produce that which we could never duplicate in a laboratory.

Do you believe that if humans cannot do something in a laboratory, the universe also cannot do it?

Look only at the variety of living organisms that have existed and are currently inhabiting this planet. Life is ABUNDANT on earth in an inconceivable number of variations, and there is no fatal flaw in the assumption that life could be abundant on other planets with similar bio-chemistry as earth.

And this could be a wide range of possible planets. Apparently biospheres within the range of all the environmental periods ("ages") which the earth experienced can still support life.
It did on earth. It does not need to be a finely tuned environment, but rather an evolved fine tuning of its inhabitants.

Look at earth as an enormous chemical laboratory, as are all other planets in the universe, one way or another. Humans and their puny little laboratories came much later as a result of all these earthly chemical experimentations.

This universal electro-chemical experimentation thing has been going on for some 13 billion years, all the way down to Planck scale............

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Mathematics control the whole thing...

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Darwinian evolution mostly explains life after it emerged.
We all agree that ordered systems can emerge in nature. We are not disputing that. Our disagreement is if systems with constantly increasing order can spontaneously emerge. As per the statistics perspective, the more ordered is a system, the more difficult it is to increase even more its order. Natural selection is just a process that says that everything that can survive, you just see it and its gonna be there in the longer term. I don't see how natural selection favors the constant perpetual increasing of order....

of course if you have no idea about how biology works and you are just a mathematician or a computer scientist, you can magically create some complex computer patterns and claim that it is possible to create more order and that this what happens in reality, as if biology is some kind of algebra.
In fact, its closer to geometry

 

I don't think life is rare. At least not in the way we understand it. If life was going to be discovered elsewhere, i am sure we would be mind blown on the ways it would be different from us.

i agree!! see?we dont disagree that much.