Do you believe in spontaneous generation?

No. Spontaneous generation is something like mosquitos forming from mud, or mice forming from cereal.
It is bollocks.

…....... can we first explain how its possible and theoretically inevitable

@ragingloli or, what was it again, flies on meat?

It’s easier to go from order to disorder but it is difficult to go from disorder to order. That’s why evolution doesn’t make sense for me. You go into disorder to order where everything (mostly) makes sense.

So no, I do not.

@troubleinharlem
please do not conflate spontaneous generation with evolution.
it is like equating magic with physics

@ragingloli : He said that it was a possible theory for the start of evolution, and so what I said had to do with the topic at hand.

@troubleinharlem
But that is where he is wrong. Spontaneous generation is not a theory, it is superstition from centuries ago.
Also, nature goes from disorder to order all the time, from the formation of stars and planets from dust clouds due to gravity, formation of salt crystals from a chaotic solution when you remove the water, to the formation of intricate and orderly snow flakes from atmospheric moisture.
It is all just physics.

I did not believe in such a concept, but then spontaneously came to see it was not only possible, but a confirmed fact. See the second box, third bullet point for further discussion.

Recent observations suggest this still goes on near the event horizons of massive black holes, and that while the mass attraction of the particle/anti-particle pairs generally causes them to merge back together and self destruct in short order, occasionally, the one moving toward the black hole gets sucked in while the one heading away from it has sufficient momentum to escape. Hey world, look at me. 13.75 billion years after the Big Bang, here I am, all brand new.

As far as I’m concerned, this could be referring to the old alchemists’ goal of turning lead into gold, which quite frankly I don’t believe possible in our world. However, in the case of a ‘wormhole’ if you will, I must agree with ETpro, a wormhole could essentially spontaneously generate, or at least appear to generate matter (I always thought wormholes transported matter..?).

No, in the sense of evolution of living beings. It doesn’t do a very good job at all at explaining evolution, as you would then have to explain how the spontaneous generation occurred!

Nope. Nopety nope nope. NO.

Now for the reasons: @zyx: no, while it is possible, for certain values of ‘possible’, it is not in any real sense ‘inevitable’. It is possible for the sake that, yes, if we go with the easiest possible scenario, that some random protein debris and nucleic acids floating in water could spontaneously form something akin to a virus (yes, i know, not technically life, go with it), the actual probabilities, even for something that tiny, are ludicrous. And that’s assuming all these things are in solution together, when most of the things necessary to have sustained life are very specific. Certain types of proteins with certain modifications on them, nucleic acids with some sort of real code. And that’s not even considering whether or not thing thing would actually be a viable life form!

And that’s just for a virus! A thing that most biologists don’t even consider a real form of life! you go as far as an amoeba or bacterium, and you’ve just increased the complexity a millionfold, literally. Maybe more.

Now, evolution is different, which is very important. Evolution never requires spontaneous generation. How exactly we went from primordial ooze to life is still unsure, to be plain, but it took place of millennia or more. Molecules ever so slowly coming together. A amino acid here, a self-propagating peptide here, a lipid here, etc etc etc. At some point, yet, we had to go from non-life to life. But it wasn’t spontaneous by any means, it took huge amounts of time.

No, I do not. Whatsoever.

@Zyx I’m curious how and why you think it’s possible and theoretically inevitable.

Spontaneous generation is completely different from abiogenesis.

Spontaneous generation is a very ancient belief that such simple living things as maggots and flies appear from garbage. People thought that if you left dirty rags around, they would sprout mice. It wasn’t too hard for scientists to figure out that this is BS (you can just put rotting meat or rags under a sealed glass and see if any flies or mice appear—they don’t.)

Abiogenesis, on the other hand, refers to hypotheses about how complex molecules used by living structures—like RNA, amino acids, and lipids—emerged from simpler chemicals on the early Earth, and eventually combined into something like a cell. It has nothing to do with spontaneous generation. It is, however, often straw-manned by dishonest creationists as being the same as spontaneous generation.

It sounds like you’re asking about abiogenesis, not spontaneous generation. The latter is the centuries-old rejected notion (once a widely held belief) that, for example, piles of garbage promptly cause maggots to spontaneously appear as if by magic. Now we understand that flies visit the garbage and lay previously unnoticed eggs from which maggots develop, and this process is preventable with fly netting. End of mystery. Ditto for mold on bread, etc.

Abiogenesis refers to how life (and especially biochemistry) arose on Earth from non-living precursors, presumably on a billion-year time scale shortly after the Earth’s crust solidified. There are tantalizingly plausible hypotheses to fill in some pieces of the puzzle, based on lab science, that amount to educated guesses but real evidence is scant. Molecules don’t leave fossils! (Abiogenesis is not to be confused with Darwinian evolution, which explains the diversity of life once the first living cells appeared.)

Given that life arose on Earth we can wonder how commonly it occurred on other worlds at other times, but nobody knows yet. Panspermia (the hypothesis that Earth was “seeded” from pre-existing extraterrestrial life) is plausible, but this only buys a few more billion years of time. Life still had to arise spontaneously somewhere, if not on Earth, because it could not have previously existed until matter, along with chemistry, formed first.

Abiogenesis remains a deep scientific mystery.

@Qingu Ah, abiogenesis, okay. I somehow did not know that term. Right on.

@gasman Aw, don’t rag on spontaneous generation too hard. It was, after all, a conclusion arrived at after observation of the apparent facts.

Just a couple of additional thoughts.

The problem with some views of abiogenesis (as discussed, not in terms of scientific publications), is that it is perceived to be basically akin to spontaneous generation, even if labelled correctly. In other words, people perceive abiogenesis to refer to something readily recognisable as a life form springing forth from “nothing”. Which is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is being suggested (yet another straw man as it were). For instance, a single modern cell is infinitely too complex to arise from such a process “spontaneously”, as is a virus, as is even a single organelle of a single cell, as is a modern cell membrane. These are the resultant products of billions of years of evolution, not starting points.

When it comes to abiogenesis, although it sounds counterintuitive, i tend not to think of it (at least for most of the process) as speculating about how “life” arose from non-life. It is more akin to the gradual development of chemicals with specific properties, as synthesized by other chemicals, and so on…with this process taking 100s of millions of years, with very gradual associated development of increasingly complex chemical structure via a proto form of natural selection. Where life begins is then a judgement, in effect, drawing a line on a path that extends for a billion years, based on some a priori designiated combination or features that is decided by us to be classified as “life”. These features generally include characteristics such as the most basic forms fo replication and/or metabolism. No movement, no complex organelles, etc..etc..etc..

So life didn’t arise from non-life, it arose from proto-life. And proto-life didn’t arise from non-life,it arose from pre-proto life. And if one can think of this as a billion year journey from chemistry to biology, I think we’re on far sounder footing, and it helps shake off the tendency to think within the mistaken terms of spontaneous generation, even if we dont label it as such.

One scenario discussed here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg

Wow, I’d like a term to distinguish between rats not needing mothers and the combination of enough energy and time to form life. Because when I said spontaneous generation I did mean to imply all large scale chemistry can (and eventually will under the right conditions) lead to life, in evolutionary order. (wat?)

I’ve always assumed (since it is the only thing we share with viruses) that DNA was the start of life. I have no clue how long a strain one would need in order to start off this process, but with a string of molecules having to float together; it just seems like a matter of time.

Besides, it seems sort of impossible to disprove anything.
It seems even more unlikely anyone might successfully disprove spontaneous generation.

Some viruses don’t have DNA, they rely solely on RNA.

DNA is highly unlikely to be involved in what could be classified as the first “life”. Much more likely to be RNA, as it can act both as an information storage device, and it can catalyse reactions.

Spontaneous generation, as per the definition, is antequated nonsense. Unlike the study of abiogenesis, for which there is an active and rapidly advancing science.

Well, if it’s really such a big deal, let me rephrase it:

How closely related do you think spontaneous generation is to abiogenesis?

@Zyx, the emerging consensus among scientists is that RNA, not DNA, was the start of life (at least, the start of lifelike things that could encode information and make copies of themselves).

DNA seems to have evolved as a specialized form of RNA.

There’s also other stuff going on, too. Lipid bilayer membranes are interesting. All cells have walls made of lipid bilayers. These lipid chemicals probably existed on their own in the early Earth. The neat thing is, if you put lipids in water, they naturally form tiny little bubbles, the same size as modern cells. These bubbles can even split apart in a way similar to cell division.

So basically, we have a pretty good idea of where cell walls come from, and we have a decent idea of how genetic material might have evolved from RNA. We know how the simpler molecules that form RNA work. There are still lots of gaps, but we have the basic idea of what probably happened.

And spontaneous generation is not at all related to abiogenesis. It’s not even like a case of astrology being related to astronomy. Spontaneous generation was an explanation of a different thing than abiogenesis (people who came up with spontaneous generation didn’t even know that cells existed, let alone molecules).

Honestly this seems to be all about semantics now so I’m out.

Learned from this though, so thanks to everyone for your well constructed arguments.

@Zyx In science, semantics can be incredibly important. It may seem annoying, but in order to get real ideas across you have to be sure the words you use are unambiguous. The problem with using ‘spontaneous generation’ is that it refers to a current life form occurring from non-life, like a bacterium or, the classic example, maggots. Ambiogenisis, as @AdamF said, is much better seen as life from proto-life from pre-proto life etc etc back a few million/billion years. And the first life forms were undoubtedly much simpler then even the current-day amoeba. It may seem like semantics, but they really are different concepts.

Secondly, yes, it’s a logical impossibility to 100% disprove something (and by corollary, to 100% prove something). Doesn’t mean we can’t try and find and understand the most plausible explanations. This is, if you think about it, the way we interact with the world on a normal basis. There’s no way to prove 100% that your refrigerator will not come to life and eat you the next time you open it. However, logic and evidence show this to not be the typical response, and so we discount it as a real possibility and take the considerably more likely scenario, that it will maintain it’s status as inanimate and a good place to store food, as the ‘real’ one.

Also, i have to agree with @nullo (oh the pain!). Much like alchemy, just because they got it wrong doesn’t mean it was ridiculous. It fit the facts at the time, and until Pasteur showed the major flaws it was hard to show why it should be wrong. And biologists working under that assumption still lead to great leaps in understanding of the field. Alchemy may have had lead to gold as it’s ideal, but until we had atomic theory there was little to say it wasn’t possible beyond negative results (which can be taken simply as ‘you’re doin it wrong’). And Alchemists like Newton and Boyle lead to huge leaps in the understanding of chemistry.

Damn, you gave me a reason to respond.

Alchemy seems more than likely at this point of our understanding of matter, we just haven’t mastered it yet. Isn’t alchemy how we create new elements in the lab?

Also: semantics are opinion and thus not relevant in science in my opinion, which doesn’t matter to science. I still don’t have to agree with any of you though. Haha, maybe that’s the only reason I don’t. Even so.

It’s not semantics. Spontaneous generation describes whole organisms appearing from nonliving objects. Abiogenesis describes the emergence of a cell’s machinery.

Also, this isn’t even like alchemy vs. chemistry. Early chemists were alchemists; the science of chemistry evolved out of the pseudoscience of alchemy. Both alchemists and chemists were concerned with studying the properties of matter. Some alchemical ideas made their way into chemistry. That is not how abiogenesis relates to spontaneous generation at all. In terms of intellectual tradition and evolution, abiogenesis is not related to spontaneous generation, and describes an entirely different level of phenomena. There are no ideas in spontaneous generation that made their way into abiogenesis.

@Qingu GA!

I am no Science major, but I know that you can’t make something out of nothing. However, you can make something out of something else. :)

@Zyx “semantics are opinion and thus not relevant in science in my opinion”

No. Language is the medium through which science communicates. Because science tries to approximate reality, it can only be impaired by sloppy language. Clarity is everything, and clarity requires that there is as little ambiguity as possible with respect to the meanings of the words chosen.

That’s not an opinion. Neither is the fact that spontaneous generation is not abiogenesis. The two words can’t be conflated.

One more thing. Alchemy is not how we create new elements in the lab.

We create new elements with nuclear reactions. It doesn’t happen “in the lab,” it happens either in nuclear reactions in nuclear weapons or power plants, or in gigantic particle accelerators.

Alchemists knew nothing about nuclear reactions, nuclear energy, or atomic nuclei, period. They believed you could transmute elements into other elements through something like magic (or a “philosopher’s stone”).

Technically, you could even argue that real transmutation isn’t even chemistry (since nuclear reactions are completely different from chemical reactions, which only concern the electrons that orbit the nucleus.)

Well, I’ll admit I was looking for the word transmutation, not alchemy.

Language is opinion, otherwise mindgames would be impossible.
Communication can never be guaranteed.

Language isn’t opinion. In order for language to function, at least two people have to share an opinion on what certain words mean. The meaning of the word “up” is not just my opinion.

Language doesn’t work, we compromise our opinions around a logical construct of reality embedded in language. Any communication requires the communication of the entire mind, because our minds are not modular. All “language” does is help groups of individuals attune their behaviour to each other. No information is passed directly from person to person. It’s avatar to avatar because our bodies can’t express our minds accurately.

Semantics!

“Language doesn’t work”....Zyx writes, while concurrently relying on the capacity of language to successfully convey the message.

See you don’t get it.

(and since this loop can go on forever I win again)

Language works. Just not very well.
There is one exception, though.
Mathematics. The Language of the Cosmos.

Math is pretty solid (not literally ofcourse)