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Question
How do we know that life arose from nonliving material? Is there experimental data to confirm this?
No one has yet duplicated in the lab the process by which life originated. This is a very active area of research for astrobiologists, but without definitive results so far. However, what alternative is there to the origin of life from nonliving material? We know life exists (at least on Earth), and we know the universe began with non-living material (initially just the elements hydrogen, helium, and lithium). The idea of panspermia or exogenesis (that life could be exchanged between planets) was suggested more than a century ago as a way for life to have formed elsewhere and migrated to our planet, but that doesn’t solve the origin problem — it just shifts the requirement for the origin of life to some other location. Thus one must conclude that life arose from non-living matter, even if we won’t yet understand the details of this process, or how common this process may be in the universe.
David Morrison
NAI Senior Scientist
April 24, 2009
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