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Life's HistoryPhylogeny Paper
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Science is a very touchy subject when it comes to the origin of life. This is, because people think it contradicts religion. Science says that life was created from a single cell, changing to some kind of multicellular form. If this is true, then people think God did not create life. This is very hard for me to handle, as it is for most people. Religion provides a kind of reason for life. When I came to college, I did not believe in the scientific reasons for why we are here. I believed that God created us. Now, I am a sophomore in college, and I know more about science, and its hypothesis on how life arose on this planet. I do not believe one over the other. I think that both concepts have great proof. I also think that both concepts have their faults. For this reason, I believe in a little of both. The purpose of my paper is not to try and prove that science is right. It is to try and give you enough information so you can make your own decision, and realize that it does make sense. You will learn the main concepts on how life arose from sciences point of view. You will also learn how scientists try to prove this through many different methods. In order to understand how life was started on this earth you must first understand Darwin’s origin of species. Darwin published his hypothesis in 1859. Darwin’s hypothesis was that species change over time, because only the strong survive. This means that if an organism has a better genetic composition it will have a better chance of living. When the organism reproduces, it will pass on those genes. Over time, this will create many different branches of organisms that arose from one. This is because species evolve and phyla do not. Around 4.6 billion years ago a mixture of gas and rock came together, and created earth. To do this, the mixture was heated and eventually cooled to form its present day earth. The oldest fossils that contain any sort of life are about 3.5 billion years old. These rocks contain fossils of cyanobacteria. This means that it took about a billion years for any type of noticeable life to appear on earth. There are many theories on what the earth’s early atmosphere was like. The oldest theory is that the atmosphere was made up of primarily hydrogen, water, ammonia, and methane. With a source of energy, (the sun) the molecules in this atmosphere could have produced the first organic molecules. There are studies that prove this theory. Stanley Miller, and Harold Urey did one of these studies. They duplicated the earth’s early atmosphere, and added a spark of energy to it. The spark represented the sun. After a week they removed samples, and found some common amino acids and other organic acids (Origin of Life On Earth- handout). The first organic compounds that were formed did not need oxygen; therefore they could live in the harsh environment where no oxygen existed. Life as we know it, could not have survived in this environment.
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