The origin of life (biogenesis)

The origin of life (biogenesis) is currently not a completely clarified event, during which inanimate matter became living matter, which began to multiply, develop, and transform its surroundings. It is a scientific-philosophical-religious question when the individual parties try to present their theories or evidence of how this event happened.

There are many different ideas about the origin of life, but the issue has not yet been clearly resolved. The fact that no fossils from the oldest periods have been preserved also hinders a reliable solution. And even the simplest organisms today are probably much more complicated than the primordial living cells.

According to current scientific knowledge, the origin of life on Earth occurred at the beginning of the Archaic, about 4100-3800 million years ago. [1] It is also assumed that life could have originated several times and subsequently been destroyed repeatedly before it was successful. In any case, according to DNA and RNA analyzes, all current organisms have one common ancestor (the so-called Last Universal Common Ancestor) (LUCA). This means that today’s organisms do not come from forms that occurred by chance in multiple places. However, the last common ancestor was already a well-developed cell, so it is not the first organism, but its most successful offspring. [2]

The oldest known traces of life on Earth were discovered in 2017 in a 3950 million-year-old graphite layer, found in the issue banded iron ore belt in Labrador, Canada, [3] [4] but also in Greenland. [5] But even the 3,700-million-year-old findings are challenged. [6] Unambiguously accepted evidence of ancient organisms is known only from about 3500 million years ago. [7] [8]