jer133 said: How did life begin? There was some dirt, water and hydrogen and for no reason it turned into single celled creatures. Why did that happen? The dirt felt like it. |
It seems know nothing about biology.
First of all, there were all the elements on the periodic table (exept those we made later) on the earth, and the way they react with one another is well know. With a little energy (heat, which there was a TON of in earth's early forms,) reactions will occure and form molecules. Some of these molecules are 'organic,' and contain carbon, which all life is based off of. One of these said molecules is a lipid.
A lipid has one end which is attracted to water (hydophilic), and another end that is repelled by water(hydrophobic).
What happens is if you place lipids in water, they tend to form a sack. The hydrophobic ends group together while the hydrophilic ends stay toward the water, this forms the "Bi-lipid layer" or the "lipid bi-layer":
Water
OOOOOO - Hydrophilic
|||||||||||| - Hydrophobic
|||||||||||| - hydrophobic
OOOOOO - Hydrophilic
Water
Since the "sides" of the hydrophobic ends are still repelled by the water, they will move until they are in a position where they no longer are touching water, hence a sack is formed.
Not too complcated I think. Now, you get one sack withing another sack and you have the basic cell and nucleus with a cytoplasm. You get some very basic compounds trapped in the nucleus' sack, and some other basic compounds and maybe a few other sacks with some other basic compounds trapped within and you have a cell.
Now not all of these sacks will function as a cell, but all you need is one to start life.
What are the chances of this happening? you may ask. The odds are astronomical! you will say.
But with 4 BILLION years and millions if not billions of these sacks forming each day, it was bound to happen. Even if 1 million of these lipid sacks were formed each day, and the odds were 1/10000000000000 (one in 10 quadrillion) that a cell would form, it would take only 27.4 million years before the law of averages would dictate a high probability of at least ONE being a cell.
Thats how life started. Its not complicated.
EDIT: well the lipid layer picture gets screwy when I post, but paste it in notepad if you want to see.
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