Hey everyone.
I've been holding off posting here for a while, mostly because I've been in a particularly bad place mentally since partway through the summer. The good news is that I'm on medication and seeing a psychiatrist regularly, so hopefully this school year will go better than the last one. I'm not terribly confident about my ability to keep playing my instrument at a university level, though - I'm terrified that I'll never shake the anxiety problems that are keeping me from being able to improve as a musician. For that matter, I'm worried I'll never shake the problems that keep me from socializing and enjoying myself during the school year. I really want to be a normal person who's not scared to live life, and I wish I knew how to do that.
I make a post like this a few times a year, don't I? At least this time I'm seeking professional help and taking medication that will hopefully make me feel better and let me concentrate on fixing the problems with my thought patterns.
JEREMIAH SMITH'S GUIDE TO CREATING LIFE
Step one: Take some planet, newly condensed from the swirling debris and gases of some nebulous progenitor. Allow water to condense from its atmosphere onto its rocky surface to form an ocean.
Step two: Allow asteroids to rain organic compounds formed in space into the ocean and put a hot sun in the sky and hydrothermic vents in the sea to dump tons of energy into the water. Turn the ocean into a hotbed of chemical activity. Hundreds and hundreds of various types of simple organic compounds, billions upon billions of chemical reactions in every liter of water, trillions upon trillions of reactions a day, all of them combining organic molecules into tons of varied and possibly interesting chemicals.
Step three: Wait for millions of years until natural biochemical processes bring together a certain sort of small organic molecule. It's almost certainly bound to happen eventually, with a big enough ocean and a long enough wait. This certain molecule is very much like all the others floating around in the ooze, but with one crucial difference that makes it so much more interesting. This molecule happens to catalyze a reaction with other molecules, a simple reaction with the result of a copy of the original molecule. It need not be big and complex; there are known molecules that can do this that are only a couple dozen subunits long. And the tendency of carbon to form chains makes building up long molecules easy. But the important things is that you now have a molecule that makes more of itself: the first self-replicator.
Step four: Sit back and watch. It will replicate, and soon it will be spread around by water currents. It will be taken to new places, perhaps with new chemicals, and it will continue to do its amazing little trick. As it replicates, there will undoubtedly be places where it does not replicate exactly. Perhaps, a few millennia after the inital replicator forms, one of the molecules needed to catalyze the replication reaction will be subtly different in one reaction, causing the resulting molecule to have a slightly different structure that causes it to replicate a bit more efficiently, a bit more rapidly than other self-replicators. This new molecule will spread faster, and dominate its own part of the ocean. This is the first natural selection. These are the changes that evolution needs to work with. No mitosis, no asexual cell division, no DNA, no RNA, no genes, no predators, no prey. Just a self-replicating object that does not always reproduce perfectly, whose imperfections can be passed on to the new copies, and whose imperfections may provide a slight edge or detriment to that replication. Mutation, inheritance, natural selection. Just biochemistry doing its thing.
Step five: Wait a bit longer as the initial reaction starts incorporating sequences of reactions; a primitive biochemistry of Molecule A using Molecule B to create Molecule C which uses Molecule D to create a Molecule A again. The molecules need not be localized; after they're made or used to catalyze a reaction, they can float off into the ocean, to participate in some other region's chemical dance. It's the simple beginnings of chemical reaction processes that will grow so much more complex over the next billion years. But we have time for that.
Step six: Lipids are organic molecules that naturally form membranes, like soap bubbles. You'll probably have tons of these membranes in your ocean. Sooner or later, one of the micro-biochemistries will find itself going at it inside a membrane. Some membranes, perhaps having imperfections of their own in areas, will allow molecules to pass in and out. It will probably not replicate via cell division. Perhaps every so often, some byproduct of the reaction will escape and start a new reaction that gets its own lipid membrane. Perhaps the byproduct will even inspire lipid membrane formation around itself. But however it replicates, we've reached a milestone. The first protocell is here; much tinier than modern cells, and far far less complex. But it's the most complex thing on the block, baby, and it's got lots of potential.
Step seven: Watch your protocells spread, and grow. Soon they'll evolve amazing things like photosynthesis, to get even more energy from the sun, or chemical signalling, to draw them closer together into colonies, the start of multicellularity. Some will engulf other protocells and incorporate them into their chemistry, the precursors of organelles like mitochondria. The protocell's descendants will go on and on to bigger and better things; multicellular bodies, locomotion, predation, sexual reproduction, walking on land, intelligence.
Step eight: Finally, after billions of years of evolution, after billions of years of chemicals reacting and replicating and competing, growing ever more complex in their molecular dance, we will reach the long hard result of all this: Creationists who turn around and say the whole thing never happened and oh my isn't this book of Bronze Age folklore interesting?
I make a post like this a few times a year, don't I? At least this time I'm seeking professional help and taking medication that will hopefully make me feel better and let me concentrate on fixing the problems with my thought patterns.
JEREMIAH SMITH'S GUIDE TO CREATING LIFE
Step one: Take some planet, newly condensed from the swirling debris and gases of some nebulous progenitor. Allow water to condense from its atmosphere onto its rocky surface to form an ocean.
Step two: Allow asteroids to rain organic compounds formed in space into the ocean and put a hot sun in the sky and hydrothermic vents in the sea to dump tons of energy into the water. Turn the ocean into a hotbed of chemical activity. Hundreds and hundreds of various types of simple organic compounds, billions upon billions of chemical reactions in every liter of water, trillions upon trillions of reactions a day, all of them combining organic molecules into tons of varied and possibly interesting chemicals.
Step three: Wait for millions of years until natural biochemical processes bring together a certain sort of small organic molecule. It's almost certainly bound to happen eventually, with a big enough ocean and a long enough wait. This certain molecule is very much like all the others floating around in the ooze, but with one crucial difference that makes it so much more interesting. This molecule happens to catalyze a reaction with other molecules, a simple reaction with the result of a copy of the original molecule. It need not be big and complex; there are known molecules that can do this that are only a couple dozen subunits long. And the tendency of carbon to form chains makes building up long molecules easy. But the important things is that you now have a molecule that makes more of itself: the first self-replicator.
Step four: Sit back and watch. It will replicate, and soon it will be spread around by water currents. It will be taken to new places, perhaps with new chemicals, and it will continue to do its amazing little trick. As it replicates, there will undoubtedly be places where it does not replicate exactly. Perhaps, a few millennia after the inital replicator forms, one of the molecules needed to catalyze the replication reaction will be subtly different in one reaction, causing the resulting molecule to have a slightly different structure that causes it to replicate a bit more efficiently, a bit more rapidly than other self-replicators. This new molecule will spread faster, and dominate its own part of the ocean. This is the first natural selection. These are the changes that evolution needs to work with. No mitosis, no asexual cell division, no DNA, no RNA, no genes, no predators, no prey. Just a self-replicating object that does not always reproduce perfectly, whose imperfections can be passed on to the new copies, and whose imperfections may provide a slight edge or detriment to that replication. Mutation, inheritance, natural selection. Just biochemistry doing its thing.
Step five: Wait a bit longer as the initial reaction starts incorporating sequences of reactions; a primitive biochemistry of Molecule A using Molecule B to create Molecule C which uses Molecule D to create a Molecule A again. The molecules need not be localized; after they're made or used to catalyze a reaction, they can float off into the ocean, to participate in some other region's chemical dance. It's the simple beginnings of chemical reaction processes that will grow so much more complex over the next billion years. But we have time for that.
Step six: Lipids are organic molecules that naturally form membranes, like soap bubbles. You'll probably have tons of these membranes in your ocean. Sooner or later, one of the micro-biochemistries will find itself going at it inside a membrane. Some membranes, perhaps having imperfections of their own in areas, will allow molecules to pass in and out. It will probably not replicate via cell division. Perhaps every so often, some byproduct of the reaction will escape and start a new reaction that gets its own lipid membrane. Perhaps the byproduct will even inspire lipid membrane formation around itself. But however it replicates, we've reached a milestone. The first protocell is here; much tinier than modern cells, and far far less complex. But it's the most complex thing on the block, baby, and it's got lots of potential.
Step seven: Watch your protocells spread, and grow. Soon they'll evolve amazing things like photosynthesis, to get even more energy from the sun, or chemical signalling, to draw them closer together into colonies, the start of multicellularity. Some will engulf other protocells and incorporate them into their chemistry, the precursors of organelles like mitochondria. The protocell's descendants will go on and on to bigger and better things; multicellular bodies, locomotion, predation, sexual reproduction, walking on land, intelligence.
Step eight: Finally, after billions of years of evolution, after billions of years of chemicals reacting and replicating and competing, growing ever more complex in their molecular dance, we will reach the long hard result of all this: Creationists who turn around and say the whole thing never happened and oh my isn't this book of Bronze Age folklore interesting?