Reproducing origins of life?

Question

so the urey-miller experiment proved that life, or living cells, could begin from nothing if it has the right conditions to do so. but does that mean that if somebody repeated the experiment again and left it long enough then living cells could be produced and then they could watch them grow and evolve? or is that impossible?

(sorry if the question is confusing)

Answer 1

if they did, it would take millions of years. evolution on any measurable scale takes forever

Answer 2

It would take a long time. Simple self replicating (or even the normal kind) proteins are a long way from life.

The formation of a membrane around a cell may have been pure luck, a freak accident.

And we don't know all the conditions that were around back then.

Yes, we know many, but who's to say we know them all? There may be other factors we overlook.

These proteins will not become life anytime soon.

Answer 3

Be very careful here - misunderstanding of evolution theory has allowed a lot of people to dismiss it for the wrong reasons, particularly since there are a lot of people out there propagating false information to serve personal agendas. The Miller-Urey experiment simply showed that in Earth's primitive atmosphere, it was possible, if not probable, that environmental factors caused the creation of organic compounds which were necessary for the creation of primitive single celled creatures.

Theoretically,  I guess, yes it does mean that you could set up and watch this experiment long enough for cells to grow and evolve, but it would take billions of years, just as it did on Earth, according to modern scientific theories about the origins of life.  Even if  you "tweaked" the experiment to favor the evolution of the cells, how much could you possibly shorten the experiment?  Even if you reduced the length of the experiment to one tenth of the time, it would still take hundreds of millions of years.  You can see that it wouldn't be very practical.

I think that's why some people have trouble believing the theory.  In the time frames that a human being can understand, the chances of a human being "randomly" evolving from such basic elements seems ridiculous, but if you really make an effort to understand how long 3 billion years is, and to understand natural selection, it becomes very reasonable.  It doesn't make it true - it just makes it a reasonable theory.  That is, of course, how science works.

Consider this - your chances of winning the jackpot in a lottery like Powerball are about one in 146 million.  That means that if you play every day of your life, (and I mean every day) and you live to be 100, your chances of winning are still only about one in 4000, which means that chances are you would still never win.  Now consider if you could play that lottery every day for 3 billion years.  Chances are not only that you would win it, but that you would win it 7500 times.

The chances that organic molecules will combine to form a crude cell are small, but the theories of modern biology suggest that given millions of them in the primitive ocean for billions of years, it is all but guaranteed.  The Miller Urey experiment only proved that it was possible for environmental factors to create organic molecules, but it made the current theories for the origin of the first cells much more likely to be true.

Hope that wasn't too much, and hope it helped!