AA sorry was away will respond to:
What's the difference between your beliefs Qcmr and Spontaneous generation when it comes to how life evolved on earth?
I am no authority on the beginning of life studies however, we observe in nature and without intervention from any measurable supernatural medium the following: 1/ complex chemistry in the presence of energy gradients, reactive molecules and mediums such as water or ammonia 2/ in some scenarios the spontaneous chemical generation of amino acids 3/ in some scenarios the spontaneous generation of cell like membrane structures ( basically tiny bubbles separating chemicals within from chemicals without but crucially, in the presence of an energy gradient, allowing chemical reactions to occur by passing material across the membrane - for example clay bubbles in solution with salts) 4/ many natural processes follow regular replication patterns ( crystals as a quick example) Given enough time, energy and chemicals ( say in vast oceans) and the unimaginable speed and number of resulting chemical reactions that occur every second is it really a stretch to conceive of a very, very simple replicative chemical process that happens to reach a stable state. Once you have a replicating mechanism ( all chemical, no 'life' ) and enough material and energy to sustain it and you have an opportunity for RNA to emerge as long as the chemistry that is occurring is generating amino acids and the replicative process is not 100% perfect ( I.e. you must have room to change). One thing that helped me to think about it is Lego. We all know you can build amazing machines in Lego and the idea that if we shook loose Lego together long enough it would somehow fall together as a vast machine is clearly wrong. However, if we add some chemical style rules ( certain bricks will try and fit with other bricks , certain structures are able and likely to always form if we have 5 blue, 2 red and 1 yellow 4 by 2 brick close by and so forth - lets call it. 'bobbleA' structure ) and now we don't have lots of loose single bricks we have clumps of bricks that are sticking together then breaking apart ( sure you won't get a beautiful colour coded millennium falcon - that would be design!) but given enough time and enough Lego structures and enough 'reactions' you will get some behaviour and state machines forming completely by chance. They won't be pretty, they will be complex( at the atomic brick Lego level) and they won't be alive but they will do stuff ( for example one made from a clump of bobbleA's might have a hole that only fits another unattached bobbleA and quite by chance starts to act as a sorting structure and increasing the likelihood of more bobbleA sorters occurring.) The long term result would / could eventually be organised into basic machines that copy themselves - don't get me wrong highly unlikely in a tiny scenario but given oceans of Lego and billions of years not so hard to imagine since we know that organised right Lego has the ability to act as a machine. Have a look at what proteins look like..chemical Lego. http://www.123rf.com/photo_16083493_chemical-structure-of-a-nerve-growth-factor-ngf-protein-molecule-this-signaling-protein-is-important.htmlLife is , IMO, an emergent property of chemical reactions that is not guaranteed (for example replicative chemical and physical reactions such as crystal formation haven't , as far as we know, spawned crystal life forms ) but the chemical machines that occurred somewhere billions of years ago happened to be right for ongoing replication. We see the end result today as very complex machines ( animal cells) and the relatively simpler viral machines. The organisation of cells with each other is a totally different topic but not too difficult to imagine - note this IS NOT HOW IT HAPPENS - one mud membrane protects our bobbleA sorters such that it fills with them, every now and then the bubble gets too big and splits carrying a few bobbleA sorters in each division, one such bobbleA sorter bubble happens to be near another membrane that has something gathering blue, red and yellow bricks ( a tribbleB sorter) and the two, quite by chance, begin to correspond and now wherever a bobbleA sorter population occurs it does so more generally near tribbleB sorters until the majority of instances of these two sorters are next to each other and the most successful are the accidentally conjoined membranes.