Beginnings...
There is a Jewish proverb that says "All beginnings are hard," The first beginnings are perhaps harder than even the proverb makers knew.
Life's beginnings are a mystery. I taught AP Biology for a number of years. One old exam question used to fascinate me. What characteristics would the first cell have to have? My students rarely got it because it involved a type of thinking new to them.
The answer key listed these as some of the crucial traits:
small, single-celled, lipid bilayer membrane, DNA, a mechanism for making proteins, a means of taking in nutrients (diffusion, I suspect), a means of getting rid of wastes (also diffusion), ATP, and the ability to reproduce. If you've not studied biology, that may not sound like much, but if you have, the chemical impossibility of making ATP without enzymes while not being able to make enzymes without ATP makes this ludicrous. This process cannot be done in a lab without very specialized conditions which are in no way similar to early Earth conditions. Reproduction of DNA is far more complex. The DNA code had to match the code for the necessary proteins, in fact had to be used to make those proteins, another complex process.
Yet the question was asking about the FIRST cell.
How could such complexity come to be?
I have yet to see a plausible answer to this AP Biology question.
Beginnings are indeed hard.
