How is it that life strated by chemical reactions of non-living organic elements and compounds…..?
February 14, 2011 by Power Maven
Filed under organic living
which later (after billions of years) finally became a living organism (micro) with LIFE!!!!
As it is how exactly did conciousness even come into being?
That is all subject to theory and speculation. There is no concrete answer for that question. Religion attempts to explain life, as does science. As of yet there is no verifiable answer.
Your information is mistaken. The period of cometary bombardment of the earth stopped about 3.8 billion years ago, and it’s believed on the basis of chemical evidence that life arose shortly later. That was only 750 million years after the earth formed. Also, your question doesn’t make sense as written. You asked how life strated (sic) and billions of years later became a living organism. The start of life was, by definition, the start of living organisms. This is a semantic question. It involves the use of words, not interpretations of science.
Your question about consciousness is, as you may know, unrelated to your main question. There is no general agreement about what consciousness is, but in my opinion it exists on a continuum, with the simplest life forms exhibiting the lowest level of consciousness and the highest organisms exhibiting the highest level. Self-awareness and a theory of mind are the highest level of consciousness, and it’s only a relatively few species that are at that high level, man being the most prominent example.
We don’t yet know exactly how this happened.
What we do know, with high certainty, is this:
1. The earth is about 4.6 billion years old.
2. The oldest signs of life are stromatolites (the remnants of single-celled life forms) about 3.6 billion years old.
3. All modern living things show signs of being genetically related to a common tree of ancestry.
4. Evolution explains the last 3.6 billion years of common ancestry … but evolution does not claim to explain what happened in the first 1 billion years.
Therefore, there is a window of about 1 billion years from the formation of the earth, to the first living organisms.
How this first life emerged from non-living organic compounds is still a question being investigated. There are many plausible hypotheses, but none has emerged as the front-runner (the way that natural selection solved the question of how evolution and the origins of modern species occurred).
As for your question about consciousness, it is not so much a difficulty with how consciousness evolved, but what consciousness *is*.
If you can explain what consciousness is, in biological terms, I can tell you how it evolved.