strubenuff

Is there any? All I've heard of previously is the Miller experiment, which apparently isn't worth much.

theyeti

There is far more evidence than any one person can just spout off about in a couple of vB posts. It is a complicated subject with many lines of evidence.

Rather than ask such an open-ended question, you should try looking-up the basic information yourself first and then come back if you have specific questions.

I would suggest looking up the Oparin hypothesis, the "RNA world", and then the work of Cavelier-Smith for starters.

theyeti

MortalWombat

If you go to PubMed and enter "origin of life" in quotes in the search box, you get back almost 500 hits. That should keep you busy for a while. Some of the papers returned are free online (the ones with an icon next to them that looks like this: )

theyeti

I got over 2000 hits for a search on "origin of life" on PubMed. "RNA world" returned over 1300 hits.

theyeti

Coragyps

Our own Dr GH, who posts quite a bit in E/C, has a huge bibliography of references on abiogenesis/early life - he's posted parts on that forum in the past. We should all encourage him to put it all on a webpage (hint, hint.)

NonHomogenized

Also, the references at the bottom of http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html
might be helpful. I certainly found them interesting. Most are from PubMed, which someone else suggested, but it's specific abstracts.

Also, although the Miller-Urey experiment (http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary...xperiment.html) isn't a perfect experiment, it certainly shows how very feasible natural formation of many amino and hydroxy acids are in circumstances suspiciously similar to those on the early earth.

Also on the subject, an interesting press release from UCSC:
http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/pres..._scenario.html

You might also do some searching around http://www.eurekalert.org/ . I'm not positive that they will, but I wouldn't be suprised if they have interesting information on the subject.

Finally, I'll second the suggestion to search PubMed.

ohwilleke

Some evidence.

1. There is life here.
2. The neighbors for light years around do not have life.
3. We know that interstellar impacts are very traumatic events which are not known to be condusive to any form of life we know to exist at their impact points.
4. There is no evidence for God in areas other than the development of life.
5. It is possible to create organic compounds from inorganic compounds.
6. The fossil record and the molecular structure of life now tends to show a common origin virtually all, if not all, of existing life, and an origin that is somewhat younger than the age of the Earth. This evidence disproves the creation stories found in religious muths.
7. Given the time frame for abigenesis to occur (hundreds of millions of years someplace on Earth), it would not have to rely on something that was particularly likely to happen to be likely to happen sometime.
8. There are plausible theories about how it could have happened.
9. There are examples of "arrangements" such as viruses and prions, which are intermediate between DNA based life, and inorganic arrangements.

Wounded King

Just a couple of points ohwilleke.

1) How do you know there is no life for light years? There is still much speculation as to the existence of life on Europa, what do you know that the rest of the scientific community doesn't? Is all you are saying that we don't have any evidence of life?

2) Viruses are not very good examples of evidence supporting abiogenesis, micelles, proteinoids and ribozymes might be more suitable along with your prions.

MortalWombat

Not if you actually put them in quotes in the query box. Leaving the quotes off gives you results for those words anywhere in the title and abstract. For example, the query rna world without quotes gives the following: