08/06/2021

“Origin of De Vita
Earth and Life Science

LEONARD D. GUEVARRA
SHS Teacher

2
The Origin of Life

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Learning competency
• Explain the evolving concept of life based on
emerging pieces of evidence.
Objectives
• Discuss the origin of life.
• Explain how the first cell evolved.

Geologic Evidence

M I C R O F O S S I L S
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• The earliest evidence of life on Earth comes

from fossils discovered in Western Australia
that date back to about 3.5 billion years ago.
These fossils are of structures known as
stromatolites, which are formed by the growth
of layers of single-celled microbes, such as
cyanobacteria.

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• Microfossils are fossils

that contain the
remains of tiny plants
and animals.

• Prokaryotes are
organisms that do
not have a nucleus
and are known to
be the earliest forms
of life.
• They started to
make their own food
by utilizing the
energy from the sun
and the carbon
dioxide in the
atmosphere.

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• The cyanobacteria
are the first
photosynthetic
organisms to form.
• The process of
photosynthesis
produced more
oxygens that
changed the Earth’s
early atmosphere.
• This change in the
atmosphere allowed
oxygen-breathing
organisms to exist.

• Eukaryotic
organisms that
evolved from
prokaryotes are
larger than bacteria
and have internal
membranes and
thicker wall.
• These findings
marked the
beginning of
multicellular
organisms on Earth.

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• Biogenesis is the belief that life originates

from preexisting life.

Chemical Evidence

E X P E R I M E N T
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Chemical Evidence

• In the 1920s, Russian scientist Aleksander

Oparin and English scientist J. B. S. Haldane
both separately proposed what's now called
the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis: that life on
Earth could have arisen step-by-step from
non-living matter through a process of
“gradual chemical evolution.” They
suggested that:

Chemical Evidence
• Simple inorganic molecules could have
reacted (with energy from lightning or the
sun) to form building blocks like amino acids
and nucleotides, which could have
accumulated in the oceans, making a
"primordial soup".

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Chemical Evidence
• In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey did an
experiment to test Oparin and Haldane’s
ideas.
• They found that organic molecules could be
spontaneously by building a closed system
containing a heated pool of water and a
mixture of gases that were thought to be
abundant in the atmosphere of early earth.
Miller and Urey sent sparks of electricity to
simulate the lightning that might have
provided energy for chemical reactions

Chemical Evidence

• Miller and Urey found that various types of

amino acids, sugars, lipids and other organic
molecules had formed.
• Large, complex molecules like DNA and
protein were missing, but the Miller-Urey
experiment showed that at least some of the
building blocks for these molecules could
form spontaneously from simple compounds.

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• Abiogenesis is the natural process by

which life has arisen from non-living
matter, such as simple organic
compounds.
• One criticism of Miller-Urey experiment is
that it typically doesn’t produce
nucleotides, the building blocks of RNA
and DNA.
• However, one recent study using a
different approach found that RNA
nucleotides could be formed from
inorganic components under modified
conditions thought to truly resemble those
of early Earth.

Molecular Evidence

H OMO L OG Y
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• "Last Universal Common Ancestor" may be a set of

organisms that lived at the same time and were
able to swap genes easily.
• In either case, reconstructing the early branches on
the tree of life tells us that this ancestor (or set of
ancestors) probably used DNA as its genetic
material and performed complex chemical
reactions to evolve.

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• An important line of biochemical

evidence comes in the form of surprisingly
common molecules (Homology).
• As you might expect, many of the
chemical reactions occurring in your own
cells, in the cells of a fungus, and in a
bacterial cell are quite different from one
another; however, many of them (such as
those that release energy to power
cellular work) are exactly the same and
rely on the exact same molecules.

• An experimental approach Andy Ellington,

hypothesizes that in the early RNA world,
RNA copied itself, not by matching
individual units of the molecules (as in
modern DNA), but by matching short strings
of units — it's a bit like assembling a house
from prefabricated walls instead of brick by
brick.
• He is studying this hypothesis by performing
experiments to search for molecules that
copy themselves like this and to study how
they evolve.

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• However, up until the early 1980s, biologists

were stumped by a "chicken and egg"
problem: in all modern organisms, nucleic
acids (DNA and RNA) are necessary to build
proteins, and proteins are necessary to build
nucleic acids - so which came first, the
nucleic acid or the protein?
• This problem was solved when a new
property of RNA called ribozyme was
discovered and that means that RNA can
both store genetic information and cause
the chemical reactions necessary to copy
itself.

• Homology is the similarity in characteristics

among living organisms due to shared
ancestry between a pair of structures or
genes.
• Ribozyme is a ribonucleic acid (RNA)
enzyme that catalyzes a chemical reaction
similar way to that of protein enzymes.

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Extraterrestrial Evidence

C O S M O Z O A
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• Panspermia is the theory that

microorganisms or biochemical
compounds from outer space are
responsible for originating life on Earth and
possibly in other parts of the universe
where suitable atmospheric conditions
exist.
• Essentially, it is a hypothesis which states
that life on earth came from outer space.
• The discoverer of the structure of DNA,
Francis Crick, have advocated
panspermia.

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• There are generally about 3 different

hypotheses of panspermia:
• 1. Naturalistic Panspermia where life
evolves on another planet, and naturally
gets ejected off the planet and come to
rest on earth in the form of highly resistant
spores called cosmozoa.
• 2. Directed Panspermia where intelligent
life on other planets intentionally seeded
other planets with their own form of life.
• 3. Intelligent Design Panspermia, where
intelligent beings from another planet
came to earth and designed life here.

• Various meteorites have turned out to

contain organic compounds (derived from
space, not from Earth). One meteorite,
ALH84001, came from Mars and contained
organic molecules with multiple ring
structures. Another meteorite, the Murchison
meteorite, carried nitrogenous bases (like
those found in DNA and RNA), as well as a
wide variety of amino acids.

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• It is interesting to note that these ideas that

the "universe is teeming with spores of life"
stem from the idea that life could originate
naturally in the first place.
• Though this has not been proven, scientists
typically simply assume that life arose
naturally with the following reasons.

 Life exists; therefore, it must have arisen

naturally.
 If it originated naturally, then the
chemical origin of life must have not
been highly improbable.
 If the natural chemical origin of life is
not improbable, then it must be
happening elsewhere.
 Therefore, life must exist elsewhere in
the universe and it is likely that it exists in
a lot of places.

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Theological Evidence

S C R I P T U R E
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• The oldest hypothesis that life came from

a supreme being is called the Divine
Creation Theory.
• It is believed that life forms and everything
in the universe were created through a
supernatural power rather than
naturalistic means.
• The belief among creationists is said to be
common across various cultures in the
world.

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To God be the Glory!

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