Abiogenesis: What Is the Probability Life Arose from Inorganic Chemicals?

We explain the leading scientific hypotheses for how the first life emerged through natural processes on Earth billions of years ago. This covers proposed pathways like the clay hypothesis, radioactive beach hypothesis, deep sea vent hypothesis, and more. Contrary to popular belief, the spontaneous generation of self-replicating chemical patterns that later evolved into complex organisms seems far more likely than previously assumed. We also discuss possible great filters that may explain the Fermi Paradox.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] What you have communicated to me is that there have been.

Far more viable pathways to life springing out of no life than was previously something I thought was a thing, you know, I thought, Oh, something, something, lightning, something, something, hot air events, something, something, whatever chemical processes, but the, you're indicating that there are a lot of different ways and that.

That life coming to exist is not that surprising, at least in our environment in the, in the earth

Malcolm Collins: In fact, I think the most compelling hypothesis for ambiogenesis is the clay hypothesis, which we'll get to. So it literally means the thing that later became life was originally clay. That's so biblical.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. Oh shi What are you doing?

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: I remember listening to. A podcast or something with Andrew Tate, where he was talking about him getting blood work done to prove that he wasn't doping [00:01:00] and he couldn't remember really anything about his actual blood work results.

And he kept saying Hodger globin. Which is not a part of, it's not a thing. Hydroglobin is not a thing. Hydroglobin.

Malcolm Collins: Do you think he

Simone Collins: made hemoglobin? He, yeah, I, yeah. I mean, at first he knew, I think at first he got it wrong by mistake. And then probably saw how everyone was looking at him and then just kind of leaned into it.

Cause he's like, no, I'm. Not one of you tends to actually know.

Malcolm Collins: I said it's Hadroglobin. It's now Hadroglobin. The thing is, you know, the reason why I'm wearing a vest right now and the reason why people don't know this, you don't bottom the bottom button on a vest is because the king I want to say, I forget which king it might have been King Henry VIII because he got so fat at one point he couldn't button the

Simone Collins: bottom button.

the regent. Didn't you say it was the regent? The prince regent during the regency era? Oh, it might have been. It's more when vests were a thing.

Malcolm Collins: So he couldn't wear the bottom button and then that just became the style. You don't wear the bottom button. So Andrew Tate makes a mistake and how he [00:02:00] says hemoglobin and now that's the new style.

Simone Collins: It's Hadroglobin, guys. Yeah, it's at

Malcolm Collins: least if you're a baller. It's one I have sort of been putting off for a while because it requires a lot of technicalities to talk about, but it's an, to me, an incredibly important topic because I see it talked about in online spaces. We've entered a world in which education has gotten really, really bad.

especially along things that they could have like challenge woke stuff, but also stuff that can be overly challenging sometimes to religious stuff. Yeah. So I'll ask you in school, did you ever study ambiogenesis? Did you ever study how the first life evolved on the planet?

Simone Collins: Never. Definitely. Certainly.

Absolutely not in high school. And then in college in historical geology class, we did discuss like, here are, Then we glazed over it like it could have been chemical. It could have been whatever and like here is but we didn't go in I never heard that

Malcolm Collins: word. Yeah, well, and it's it's worse than that. What really got me [00:03:00] is actually talking to Robin Hanson And he said that he thought talking about great filtration events, right?

He's talking about great filters So if you're talking about the Fermi paradox, this actually becomes a very important thing to have information on and know about, because you need to judge in your calculations of like, why haven't we seen other aliens yet? Is it unlikely? That life evolves on a planet with the preconditions for life, right?

And he said it was very unlikely, like that was one of the biggest filters. Was it the first life came on our planet? And I think if it's a topic that you're particularly educated on and he said when he said it, he's like, and weirdly, a lot of people who are studying this area don't think it's that big a filter.

And he's like, and I don't understand why. Like, And this, to me, just had me realize it must just be that he's never dug that deep into it as a concept, because it is actually not a big filter. Life appearing on this planet, and this is another problem with a lot of attacks that religious people will [00:04:00] use against atheism, that just don't land very hard, because they haven't studied these subjects in a lot of detail, or they just haven't put a lot of thought into these subjects.

Life, evolving on a planet like Earth, was incredibly likely, almost guaranteed from what we understand right now. Bold claim. So first you need to understand why it's almost guaranteed because you need to understand what you need as a prerequisite for life and all its complexity that we know it as having now to first come about.

What you need is any type of It does not need to be RNA. It doesn't need to look like life today. In fact, I think the most compelling hypothesis for ambiogenesis is the clay hypothesis, which we'll get to. So it literally means the thing that later became life was originally clay. That's so biblical.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. Oh shi What are you doing?

Malcolm Collins: We just went over the Adam and Eve story and we didn't [00:05:00] talk about Clay. Did

Simone Collins: you just talk about Clay? Well, I told you

Malcolm Collins: that story has all sorts of truths in it. It did a very good job of capturing the truth of reality in a very big way. And that's why I think that it had some sort of, of, of actual spiritualist or, not spiritualist, but like some sort of supernatural inspiration to it.

But let's go back to this and stop talking about the religious stuff, okay? Clay, I think is the most likely answer, and maybe the Bible is pointing to us that that actually is how life started. But, but this is something that people really get wrong. They think that the early life needs to kinda look like life today, and it really doesn't.

All you need is a self replicating pattern. Okay. That has some degree of variability in its replication. That is it. You need nothing else. Any simple self replicating pattern will eventually, given enough time, become something similar to life as we understand it, [00:06:00] so long as it has minor variabilities in that self replication.

Hmm. Because the

Simone Collins: minor variabilities allow for evolution.

Malcolm Collins: So if you have something really, really, really, so this is in comes to something that a lot of people like don't get right. Like, so they talk about Spiegelman's monster. So I should talk about Spiegelman's monster really quickly. And they think that it makes it look unlikely that ambiogenesis happened when it's just a misunderstanding of ambiogenesis.

So

Simone Collins: what is Spiegelman's monster?

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