# Wikijunior:Biology/Origin of Life


## Origin of Life

!Stromatolite about 3.4 billion years
old
after the formation of the earth, there were protozoa and stromatolite.
It is not known how life evolved. There are various theories, one of
which is presented below. Living things control their internal
chemistry. A main problem in the transition from chemistry to biology is
self-regulation. A comparison with the market economy should clarify
this.

\- When the warehouses in a factory are full, production is stopped.
(End products inhibit chemical reactions.) In a market economy,
production is regulated by supply and demand. (In chemistry, starting
products and end products control the reaction.)

\- There is a problem with waste products in the industry. These must be
disposed of. This reduces the profit. Many entrepreneurs have become
rich because they came up with an idea of how to make something valuable
out of the waste products. The waste product became the raw material.
(The end product of one chemical reaction can become the starting
product of another reaction.)

**\* Step 1: Cycle** Starting products and catalysts promote chemical
reactions. After the reaction, the catalysts are released and are
available for further reactions. That\'s why it\'s called a cycle. End
products inhibit chemical reactions.

The end product of a chemical reaction becomes the starting product in
another reaction. This restarts the production of this substance.

**Both cycles control and sustain each other in a symbiosis.**

The metabolic processes of every cell are based on a large number of
hypercycles. According to the symbiosis-based definition, hypercycles
are very simple life forms based on chemistry, single-celled organisms
with their enormous number of hypercycles are a significantly higher
life form.

Living things need a boundary to hold their parts together. It is
possible that the first living beings arose in small cavities in the
rock between which chemical substances circulated. It was only much
later that individual cells left the cavities and settled elsewhere. The
first form of life was therefore not a single cell, but a habitat. The
first biological form of life was therefore the biotope.

400px \|MUexperiment

Living beings need to constantly take in food. This consists of
chemicals and provide building material and energy. In order for life to
arise, the necessary chemical substances such as sugar, fats and amino
acids had to be available. Scientists have shown that for all important
substances there are a number of ways in which they could have formed.
therefore believe that there are living beings on many planets and moons
in space.

## Speciation

All living things live in a shared **environment**. They need to use
certain things (called **resources**) from their environment, like food,
water, and a place to live. These resources are limited, so when more
than one organism tries to use the same resource, they end up in
**competition**. When two living things compete for a common resource,
one of them will eventually win and **consume** (or use) that resource.
When something about a thing\'s body makes it better at competing for
resources, we call that special feature **adaptation**. Since these
adaptations can be passed from parents onto their children, as time goes
on, these adaptations become more common within a **population**, or
group of similar living things living together. This is called **Natural
Selection**, or **Evolution**.

When a small group of living things (a small population) gets separated
from the main population that they came from (like if they move over a
mountain range or a river, or if they move to a new island so that they
can\'t easily move back) they will often find themselves in a different
environment than they were in before. This new environment has different
resources and different competitors, so the new population will need
different features or adaptations to be a strong competitor than what
they had needed before. The original population hasn\'t changed at all,
they still need the same adaptations as before. Over time, as the new
population begins to adapt to their new environment, they start to look
less and less like the other population. Eventually, after thousands or
even millions of years, the two populations will look so different that
they can\'t be called the same species. We call this process
**speciation**, which just means the formation of new species.
Speciation is an unavoidable consequence and a very important part of
evolution.

The Earth itself was born *4 and a half billion years ago*. At first, it
was just a bunch of rock and water. There were no living things. But
then, about *3.8 billion years ago*, the first life was formed in the
oceans. It was no bigger than a single cell, but that single cell was
able to copy itself and form more and more cells. Over billions of
years, as that one cell evolved, it became more and more complex.
Eventually, about *1 billion years ago*, the first living things with
more than one cell were born. Many of the kinds of things that lived
that long ago can\'t be found living in the world any more, because
newer things have been better competitors and forced the older things to
**extinction**, but we know they existed because we can find their
**fossils**, which are traces of ancient living things buried deep in
the rocks.



## Literature



[^1]:
    
[^2]: Eigen & Schuster (1977) The Hypercycle. A Principle of Natural
    Self-Organisation. Part A: Emergence of the
    Hypercycle.
    Naturwissenschaften Vol. 64, pp. 541--565.

[^3]: 

[^4]:
    