Creationism's Nightmare - Abiogenesis!

Haematite tubes

Haematite tubes from the NSB hydrothermal vent deposits that represent the oldest microfossils and evidence for life on Earth. The remains are at least 3,770 million years old.

Photo by Matthew Dodd

Evidence for early life in Earth’s oldest hydrothermal vent precipitates : Nature : Nature Research

Science is moving closer to an explanation of a process whereby the earliest proto-cells could have developed naturally on Earth. It's looking increasingly as though the best explanation of where suitable conditions could be found - in the rock precipitates around hydrothermal vents on ocean floors - is the right one.

It's also looking as though the process got going even earlier than we thought - when Earth was just few million years old, if the interpretation of the evidence presented in this paper is correct. It is strongly suggestive that the process may have got going at least 3.77 billion and maybe even 4.28 billion years ago.

The evidence was found in rocks from the Nuvvuagittuq belt in Quebec, Canada, which are believed to have been formed by precipitation around seafloor-hydrothermal vents.

Abiogenesis May Have Been Easier Than We Thought

The stromatolites in figure a are from Greenland; those in c and d are younger stromatolites from Western Australia. Figure b shows the layers created by microbes as they formed the Greenland stromatolites (blue lines). ‘Stroms’ are several overlapping stromatolites.

Source: Guardian
Photograph: Nature

Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures | Nature | Letters.

How quickly did life 'take off' on Earth?

The answer to this question is probably relevant to the likelihood that life will be found on other suitable planets too because it it happened quickly on Earth this suggests the process was not the vastly unlikely event that creationists try to present it as but a process (or processes) that can happen in just a few hundred million years if not even more quickly.

Yes, I know that a few hundred million years is not a short time but, compared to the 4.5 billion years or so that Earth has been around, it is during Earth's early childhood. It also suggests that Earth was not the hot, inhospitable, volcano-strewn and desiccated ball of rock that it was once thought to be but that it settled down quite quickly to be closer to what we have today (sans life, initially, of course). It also brings the early Mars within the timescale over which life could have arisen there at a time when Mars was thought to have been suitable, complete with liquid water, atmosphere, etc.

The discover of these stromatolites in Greenland rock pushes the earliest age at which cellular life was known to exist on Earth with a fair degree of certainty back to 3.7 billion years ago from the previous earliest known evidence dated at 3.48 billion years old found in Australian rocks.

Another Creationist Lie Refuted By Science

Early bioenergetic evolution

Here's another one of those scientific papers that creation pseudoscience frauds must dread because it deals with another of their mysterious 'beginnings', abiogenesis.

Beginnings are such things as the Big Bang, the origins of morality and abiogenesis, or, as creationists like to call it, life from no-life. These are where they can fool those ignorant of science that the beginning must have had a magic cause because there couldn't have been something before it so, to the scientifically illiterate (i.e. creationists), it looks like getting

Creating Life By Chance Alone

Darwin's "warm little pond"

Chances of first life improved by weighted dice - life - 18 September 2014 - New Scientist

"How did life first arise on Earth?" is one of those questions like "What caused the Big Bang?" that creationists and religious apologists love because science either doesn't yet have an answer, or the real answer seems counter-intuitive and thus can be dismissed in front of an audience conditioned to assume that the Universe and everything in it - apart from their assumed god - should be easy to understand and makes intuitive sense even with little or no knowledge of the subject. The answer that the BB was a quantum event and so did not necessarily