Evolutionary Hurdles

Dur­ing my time at work, my mind often wan­ders into mat­ters which are very much over my head — evo­lu­tion, for example.

How­ev­er, it has occurred to me on var­i­ous occa­sions that for life to have evolved from sim­ple sin­gle-cel­lu­lar organ­isms birthed out of a pri­mor­dial soup on an ancient Earth, there are a cou­ple hur­dles that would have to be jumped for said life to work at all:

The Repro­duc­tive Hur­dle Let’s assume that a liv­ing cell is formed by means of ran­dom inter­ac­tions of pri­mor­dial mat­ter & ener­gy. If that cell is not formed with the abil­i­ty to repro­duce itself, that par­tic­u­lar life is doomed. Cel­lu­lar divi­sion is a seem­ing­ly com­plex process, and even if a “first sin­gle-celled life form” man­aged to form many, many times, how like­ly is it that one formed with the ful­ly func­tion­ing abil­i­ty to repro­duce itself repeat­ed­ly? The copy­ing of genet­ic infor­ma­tion, the sep­a­ra­tion of cel­lu­lar mass, the clos­ing of the cell wall after divi­sion… All of it would need to be present in the first cell for it to pros­per, no? This leads me to my sec­ond thought… 

The Diges­tive Hur­dle If a cell forms with the abil­i­ty to repro­duce but not ingest, it is doomed to dupli­cate itself into noth­ing­ness. So not only must the first cell have been able to repro­duce, it must also have had a way to ingest mate­r­i­al both for mass and ener­gy. Fur­ther, it would have had to have a means to get rid of the waste prod­uct, and so some form of excre­tion sys­tem must have been present as well.

Could the first cell have pos­sessed all of those amaz­ing abil­i­ties? Pre­sum­ing evo­lu­tion to be true, it sim­ply must be con­clud­ed that it did, lest the whole the­o­ry col­lapse. How­ev­er, is it not pos­si­ble that these hur­dles under­mine evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry’s expla­na­tion for our origins?

I don’t know. Like I said, evo­lu­tion is over my head. So I share these ideas with the world, hop­ing oth­ers might enjoy or even refine them. God bless.