My beliefs – The creation of life.

Posted on by Opher

My beliefs – The creation of life.

Posted on December 10, 2015 by

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The creation of life

Isn’t that amazing?

We seem to be on a planet with a vast array of other living animals and plants. Of course – I could be dreaming it!

Over billions of years organic molecules accumulated in the seas and joined together. The building blocks of protein, ribonucleic acid, carbohydrates and lipids bonded together and the first organism came into being.

From that first simple organism, through a series of evolutionary steps, all life evolved.

As a biologist I can appreciate the chemistry involved and the way these steps might have occurred. I can see why people find it incredible to understand. It is remarkable, stupendous and amazingly unlikely.

Yet it happened. Somehow it happened.

Given billions of years and the infinity of space I believe anything that is possible to happen will happen.

Yet the creation of life is stupendous.

Given more stars and planets than we can conceive it seems likely that it will have happened elsewhere too. If there are enough monkeys with enough keyboards sooner or later they will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But that does not make it any the less wonderful.

The cop out is once again to put in a deity and put the mystery one step removed. Presumably the deity is alive? So life started somewhere before?

Life is awesome. It’s complexity is majestic.

I do believe that it happened spontaneously through natural laws. The human body is too badly thought through to have been designed (unless we have a deity who is inept or has a warped sense of humour). Why have one opening to the lungs? A neck that breaks? A excretory system and egestory system that opens into the genitals?

No – I believe animals, with all their design faults, are the functional result of evolution and not some cosmic designer.

But that doesn’t stop me from shaking my head at the wonder of it, the sheer improbability and the stupendous results of all this teeming life.

I believe we, as conscious, sentient and supposedly intelligent, animals, have a duty to nurture it.

My beliefs – The creation of life.

Posted on by Opher

IMG_5856

The creation of life

Isn’t that amazing?

We seem to be on a planet with a vast array of other living animals and plants. Of course – I could be dreaming it!

Over billions of years organic molecules accumulated in the seas and joined together. The building blocks of protein, ribonucleic acid, carbohydrates and lipids bonded together and the first organism came into being.

From that first simple organism, through a series of evolutionary steps, all life evolved.

As a biologist I can appreciate the chemistry involved and the way these steps might have occurred. I can see why people find it incredible to understand. It is remarkable, stupendous and amazingly unlikely.

Yet it happened. Somehow it happened.

Given billions of years and the infinity of space I believe anything that is possible to happen will happen.

Yet the creation of life is stupendous.

Given more stars and planets than we can conceive it seems likely that it will have happened elsewhere too. If there are enough monkeys with enough keyboards sooner or later they will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But that does not make it any the less wonderful.

The cop out is once again to put in a deity and put the mystery one step removed. Presumably the deity is alive? So life started somewhere before?

Life is awesome. It’s complexity is majestic.

I do believe that it happened spontaneously through natural laws. The human body is too badly thought through to have been designed (unless we have a deity who is inept or has a warped sense of humour). Why have one opening to the lungs? A neck that breaks? A excretory system and egestory system that opens into the genitals?

No – I believe animals, with all their design faults, are the functional result of evolution and not some cosmic designer.

But that doesn’t stop me from shaking my head at the wonder of it, the sheer improbability and the stupendous results of all this teeming life.

I believe we, as conscious, sentient and supposedly intelligent, animals, have a duty to nurture it.

Poetry – The First Waves – A poem about the creation of life.

Posted on by Opher

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The first waves

This is another poem about the creation of the first organism; the progenitor from which all life on this planet evolved.

That molecular voyage was a miracle of stupendous complexity -0 the origination of life. Because of its wondrous unlikely inception we have layered it with mysticism and religion. I see it with awe and wonder as miraculous science – another incredible product of this incredible universe.

We should pay homage to the brilliance of such a manifestation.

Life is probably the greatest glory of the amazing universe we live in.

Life is so complex and unlikely event that it is almost beyond belief.

But in an infinite universe, which is so vast and has existed so long, even the most unlikely event is bound to happen.

It happened here and we may be unique. Not only that but we have the senses and intelligence to experience it.

This is a homage to that first simple coming together of organic molecules that was the first step towards the stupendous range of life we see around us.

 

The First waves

As the first waves broke

On the lonely shore

The prime molecules cloyed

To create

In total blindness

On the first day

A new

Origination.

 

New merging,

New combination,

Forever changing,

Rearranging,

Endlessly,

With no destination,

Just because

They could.

 

Opher 30.10.2015

The Creation of Life

Posted on by Opher

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The Creation of Life

After all the gases and dust created by the Big Bang had swirled its way into galaxies and coalesced into stars the remaining debris orbiting those suns was attracted together through its own gravitational pull to form the planets and moons.

The Big Bang occurred 13.8 billions years ago – a length of time too long for human minds to grasp.

Our planet formed 5.2 Billion years ago.

For 1.7 billion years it raged, boiled and shook as a ball of molten rock with an iron core.

Finally it developed a crust and became cool enough for the creation of life.

Through the searing heat, UV Light, hard radiation, electric storms that bombarded the poisonous atmosphere of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, nitrogen, and water vapour, along with the catalysts of silica and metals, the simple chemicals fused into the building blocks of life – the protein chains and RNA bases.

It took a billion years or so.

The complex organic chemicals built up into a soupy broth in those primordial seas.

All that is possible will happen given enough time. And time there was.

Simple organisms of protein were formed. Then RNA was incorporated to provide greater organisation. One can only wonder at the extraordinary role of chance and unlikeliness of circumstance that conspired through those billion years.

What we know is that 3.5 billion years ago, when conditions had calmed, the first simple, one-celled organisms based on protein and RNA were created. The DNA came later.

Life was a single cell. It prospered and multiplied and evolved for nearly 3 billion years until the planet was a mass of microscopic bacteria-like organisms flourishing on the soup and each other before developing the means of harnessing their own energy through chemosynthesis.

Then the ability to photosynthesise mutated and the atmosphere changed, the oxygen providing greater possibility.

The creation of life was a wondrous thing. One wonders how many other times anything as astounding has happened in this universe. But then time is immense and chance plays its part. In a universe of this immensity we are almost certainly not alone.

Creation might even be easier than we think and a fairly common occurrence. Time will tell.