#Evolution #BigBang #Abiogenesis #ScienceEducation
Hey everyone! 😊 I wanted to dive into some pretty big topics—evolution, the Big Bang, and abiogenesis. So, let’s break it down a bit. I grew up in a Southern Baptist environment where my education was pretty focused on faith rather than science. The kinds of questions I heard were things like:
- “If we came from monkeys, why do monkeys still exist?” 🤔
- “Look at this galaxy shaped like a cross, isn’t God amazing?!” 🌌
Now that I’m an atheist, I’m eager to grasp how our universe works and how life began. Honestly, it’s been tricky without a solid foundation. Here’s what I’m struggling to understand:
- Evolution: How does the process of natural selection actually lead to the diversity of life we see? 🐒➡️👤
- The Big Bang: What exactly was this explosion that started everything we know? And how did the universe expand from that? 💥🌌
- Abiogenesis: How did life form from non-living matter? Did it just happen randomly? 🧪✨
I know asking for a simple answer to all this is a lot, considering how vast these subjects are! If anyone has good books, videos, or resources to help me get a clearer picture, that would be super helpful! 📚🎥🙌
What do you think about these topics? Have you had a similar journey in understanding them? Any tips or experiences to share? Let’s chat! 🗨️
I’m sure you’ll get a better answer but since it’s ELI5, I think it’s important to take a second and really accept the knowledge that we humans don’t know everything. In the education you got in childhood God had all the answers and everything was made by a creator with and for a purpose. Really though there are things we might never know with as much certainty as the education you were raised with. That can be a really tough concept after leaving religion- that the world isn’t just black and white and there might not be a Right Answer to every question.
Evolution is simply things changing over time, that’s all. Some animal is randomly born with a slightly longer neck -> it gets to eat a few more leaves than others around it -> it’s slightly more likely to survive long enough to breed -> fast forward a million years and we have giraffes.
No one knows how the big bang happened; we just have a pretty good idea that it *did* happen. The “why” will result in someone winning a Nobel Prize someday.
Kinda the same with abiogenesis; we mostly have a good idea that it *did* happen but the specific “how” is still being figured out.
How abiogenesis happened is something we don’t know for certain. There are various hypotheses about it but nothing proven as far as im aware.
And for evolution the simplest way to look at it is that random changes in genes can happen, some beneficial some not. Creatures with changes that help them survive and reproduce in their environment obviously reproduce more often than those with negative changes.
And so over time as nature itself selects those that are best adapted to their surroundings. Species change over time in a sort of arms race against other species or creatures and against nature itself.
As for more material. There are entire college courses on these subjects available for free on youtube.
Richard Dawkins wrote a book for people in exactly this situation. It’s called “The Blind Watchmaker.” It doesn’t cover cosmology, but it will cleanly address your first and third questions. It pays special attention to dispelling the myths that are sometimes confusing to people with a religious background.
He is on a short list of the most impactful biologists in the second half of the 20th century, so you’re really in good hands learning from him.
I’m trying to be really clear about what we actually *know*, and what we’re just assuming that means. A good scientist will never tell you this is definitely how it all happened. They’ll simply say this is the best idea we have right now, and if they see something that contradicts this idea and can’t be explained, they will change their mind and think of a better idea. That’s science: think of an idea, come up with a test that would tell you if the idea is right or not, and see if it’s right. If the idea passes the test, test it another way. If the idea is wrong, come up with a new idea that does explain all the tests.
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Evolution: creatures have genes that determine what they are. They get most of them from their parents, but sometimes various factors make something change.
If you’ve got 10 animals of some kind, and one of them happens to grow up with a mutation that helps it find food more easily, it will have more kids than the other animals. Maybe next generation she’ll have 3 kids that live when her fellow animals have 1 or sometimes zero kids. Now 30% of them are hers and have that adaptation. Next generation they all do well, too, and so on. Eventually all the animals like that have this adaptation. All the others eventually had no kids one generation and they’re all gone now. This concept is “natural selection”, that the animals that do better, *do better*. There’s really nothing more to it than that.
Evolution (its full name is “evolution by natural selection”) is just the idea that this is how **all** the life ended up how it is, which seems to check out as far as we can tell. Everything has this genetic code and it makes sense that the ones that survive better do so.
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Big Bang: we don’t know how it happened. What we truly know is that everywhere we look with telescopes, far-away stuff is getting further away. The light from it is getting stretched, and it stretches more the further away it is. It’s moving away from us, everywhere. That means in a year it will be further away… so a year ago it was closer, right? Carry that to its naive conclusion, and at one point, everything was really close. This discovery (cosmic expansion or Hubble expansion, they call it) is what led us to think: maybe this whole universe started with a big… bang of everything blasting out into a universe. It was a fun idea.
What led us to **really** think we were on to something with this big bang idea is the discovery that no matter where you aim a radio telescope into the sky, a good telescope picks up this background noise in the microwave range. It’s almost the same everywhere, any “blank spot” in the sky has this noise. What’s more, if we calculate the amount of light stretching because of expansion that would lead to that microwave noise, it matches our other estimates for how old the universe is.
What we think happened was: when the universe was first banging (heh…), all the matter was so crowded up and soupy that light couldn’t just fly around like light does now. At one magic point, stuff spread out enough that electromagnetism could draw elections into orbit around protons (and make hydrogen!), and there was *empty space* for the first time. Right then all the light of the universe that was caught up in the soup was able to blast out for the first time, everywhere in every direction. And stretched out over billions of years, *that is the noise that we pick up everywhere*. It’s still here: it’s already everywhere so there’s nowhere else for it to go. We call that the CMB, the Cosmic Microwave Background. When we discovered that, this bang bang idea really caught on as the most reasonable explanation we have for this.
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Abiogenesis. My friend, we have no clue. We don’t know how it happened… we just don’t. There have been experiments that showed that if you just blast electricity (like lightning) at rocks in water through methane gas you can get it to create amino acids and stuff, and some of them created weird spherical structures that accumulated and “grew”… but as to how the first real living thing started living, we just don’t have the data to work with right now. All we know is that somehow, really simple life that grew based off a chemical inside (genes) that could change and grow formed, and from there on natural selection makes sense. But that initial starting point: we just don’t know yet.
So, here is why there are monkeys. Organisms are constantly evolving. Genetically, our closest ancestors are chimpanzees and bonobos, but we didn’t come from them. A couple million years ago there was a group of apes that wasn’t human or chimp or bonobo. At some point a population of this group split off, maybe food got scarce so some decided to head off in a different direction to look for more. Who knows really, but they split up and went their different ways and didn’t see each other much again. So now as millennia go by, the group that left has been isolated from the original population. During that time, small changes (evolution) have been happening in both groups. But the changes are different depending on the environment and resources that both groups are dealing with. Carry this on a few million more years and they’ve become completely different species. One group split off many more times, most of the split off groups eventually dying out, leaving humans. The other branch probably branched multiple times in that time (I’m less familiar), but two of the branches continue to survive, the chimps and bonobos. Since they split from each other after the human branch split, we’re equally related to both, but they are more closely related to each other. But all three species have continued evolving since they split from a common ancestor. When a species evolves, it isn’t a direct line where all of one species turns into another. It’s two or more populations of a species splitting up and those populations slowly becoming differentiated over time.
Evolution is more or less a fancy way of saying that our method of reproducing is not perfect. Our DNA is a complicated and surprisingly fragile thing. Over time with life, random errors/damage happen, known as mutations. When we reproduce, some of those mutations may be passed along at random, which may result in the offspring having some differences. Over many generations this can result in some lineages changing their appearance or other traits, while others may not change that much. Further driving evolution is a process known as natural selection. Basically, with natural selection, organisms that have developed traits that help them in their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce, passing on these traits, while changes that are a hindrance are more likely to get the organism killed before it can reproduce.
The Big Bang is unfortunately still one of science’s greatest mysteries. Part of the issue is the Big Bang is thought to be the source of all the known matter in the universe, so we effectively have no way to really find out what was going on before. The closest we can get is the instant after the big bang when all the matter in the universe was suddenly rapidly expanding outwards. As pressure was released due to the expansion, matter started to take the form of protons, neutrons, and electrons, forming the first atoms. The universe to this day is still expanding even though locally matter has coalesced into asteroids, planets, stars, galaxies, nebula, black holes, etc
The origin of life is another tough one, because we have no real way to truly know or replicate the conditions. Wherever the first primitive origins of life formed on earth have long been destroyed due to the ocean crust subducting back into the mantle and our planet having vastly more oxygen in the air and water than it did when life first formed, as oxygen is toxic and destructive to cells that have not evolved defenses against the element’s reactivity, though its theorized hydrothermal vents may have been the key, the high heat and nutrient and mineral rich water providing the soup of materials needed for a self-replicating molecule to first form. But even then its very hard to try and study how this process might have turned into the first primitive cells, as the cells we all known have had 3 billion years of evolution behind them, and there’s no way to create a truly sterile environment anymore, microbes are everywhere now and would be happy to consume bits of organic matter or new primitive cells before we could even get a chance to known they exist.
For the big bang, and abiogenesis, we have absolutely no idea how or why these happened.
We can extrapolate the big bang happened by taking the current state of the universe and running the clock backward. Everything is expanding, so if you hit rewind the expansion undoes itself and you end up with a singularity. Where the singularity came from, or why it, seemingly, randomly started rapidly expanded, we have no idea.
We can extrapolate abiogenesis happened because we exist. Life came from somewhere, so it stands to reason it started in some way. The term we use to describe it starting is abiogenesis. We have *ideas* as to how it happened, but we don’t know the specific conditions that led to it.
For evolution, we can watch it happen. Genetics tend to be fairly fluid and change, sometimes rapidly. We have done experiments with bacteria and can watch evolutionary changes happen very rapidly in controlled environments. Evolution also isn’t structured. Organisms that survive pass on their genes. The genes that continue to be passed on become more pronounced over time. The ones that don’t get passed on simply dissappear. Natural selection gets twisted to make it seem as though some kind of selection processes is actually happening, but it’s not really. You either survive and pass on what you have or don’t. If you do, you’ve pushed evolution further. If you don’t, then whatever you have ends with you.
the basic thing to understand here are the time scales, e.g. we talk about WW2 as a very long time ago, the roman empire is ancient history, etc. but it is nothing compared to 2 million years, let alone 2 billion years ago
evolution works slowly, it appears it’s standing in a single lifetime, but as soon as you start increasing the time scales it’s obvious… e.g. 100K years ago dogs did not exist, only wolves, and all the dog breeds you see today are products of human selection
When you get a chance, take a basic biology class at a community college (or just on youtube, they’re free), it will help
How the world came to be, we don’t fully understand. The “big bang” is our best guess so far, that’s more about physics and you can definitely take those clases on youtube or at a community college.
The secret to understanding evolution is to answer the question “why is <X> the way it is” with the answer “because every X that wasn’t that way got eaten before it could have babies.”
That’s a little simplistic, but it clears some of the confusing bracken out of the way so you can think about it.
Evolution is difficult to understand and easy to attack precisely because it takes SOOO LOONG under natural circumstances. However, an easier way to examine it is with fruit flies (that’s how we do experiments) and in a more easily accessible venue, dogs, because we have been deliberately evolving dogs and we went from 1 wolf species to THOUSANDS of dog breeds. They’re not separate species yet (all dogs can breed with all others) but they’re certainly pretty far along towards it.
The thing that’s hard about abiogenesis is also time – the process of genesis probably took .8 billion (800 million) years. THAT IS A LONG TIME. And that amount of time is difficult for us to picture, and the number of chemical changes taking place to create biology is also enormous but in that amount of time they’re relatively reasonable to expect they would happen.
I try to picture it with a carton of eggs and one pool ball – i can easily understand that if you randmly drop the pool ball and it’s forced into the carton, after 100 drops it’s pretty likely it’s going to have landed in each egg cup at least once, and it would take a couple hours. Now imagine billions of pool balls and trillions of cups. Over hundreds of millions of years you might be able to see how the pool ball egg cup thing scales up.
You have a journey ahead of you, it’s much more fascinating than made up religious stories, i wish you luck.
Evolution, the Big Bang, and Abiogenesis are three completely different things.
The Big Bang is an idea built on our observations of the position and relative velocity of stars and galaxies that are very far away, from which we can figure out that around 13.7 billion years ago, quite literally everything in existence was compacted into a very small region of space and time. Extrapolating further back gets difficult as we have good reason to believe that physics functioned differently, and we don’t really know what happened in the first few moments where everything was **reaaaaaaally** hyper-compacted. The Big Bang is sort of discussed in two parts; the first part is the idea that everything was further compacted into a singularity that birthed the universe (which is the theory), and the second part is just the observation that everything was very very very compact in the immediate aftermath of some event (which is more or less an observed fact).
Abiogenesis is just that life originated on it’s own from a mix of chemical and electrical reactions, powered by heat from volcanic activity deep in the early Earth’s oceans.
Evolution is an observation that species change over time, and the changes that increase likelihood of successful reproduction tend to be selected by natural mechanisms.
Evolution and the origin of universe are two different things, but both have modern theories which explain much of what we observe quite well. Monkeys are not ancient creatures left over from the evolution of people. They are modern, contemporary animals that themselves have evolved from earlier forms. The overwhelming evidence indicates that both humans and apes have a common ancestor and that the two lines diverged from each other a long time ago. We have a great deal in common with other animals, especially apes. More that 90% of our DNA is identical to that of modern apes, but 10% is a big difference. The evolution of the cosmos however, is different thing and I”ll leave it to others to explain it.
The most important thing to take away with evolution is understanding Deep Time. The city-state of Ur is considered the oldest human civilization, and it was founded around 4,000BC (6,000 years ago). This compared to the age of our planet, the age of our star, the age of our galaxy is hardly blink of the eye. The comparison often made is, if you lay the universe out on a calendar, so the Big Bang (14 billion years ago) happened at the first second of January 1st – all of written human history is the last second before midnight on December 31st.
That is all to say, there is an enormous amount of time that passed before we could even write, so much it’s hard for the brain to process (much like the enormity of space itself). Human history is told in thousands of years, evolution unfolds over millions of years. That’s why you won’t see chicken lay an egg one day, and the baby that hatches out is a newly evolved species. It doesn’t happen on time spans we live in. Nor is it so dramatic or instant. Its very tiny changes happening over incredibly long stretches of time.
To specifically answer the “if we evolved from monkeys, why do monkeys still exist?” claim. We didn’t. Both us, monkeys, and chimps evolved seperately from a common ancestor species. Humans evolved differently, because Africa was losing it’s jungles at the time. Our ancestors evolved better survive on the ground, instead of in the trees. Meanwhile monkey ancestors, living in areas that still had bountiful trees, had no reason to evolve better suited to the ground – and in fact evolved to be more suited to the trees.
As for the Big Bang, and Abiogensis; we haven’t come up with conclusive answers. We just have theories.
One idea for the Big Bang, assumes multiverse theory is correct. When two other universes collided, the Big Bang happened at the point of impact and birthed our universe.
The most recent idea I heard for Abiogenesis is it happened at deep ocean vents. There’s a lot of heat energy to be had at these vents, and they are also rich in organic matter spewing out from underground. The rock of these vents is very porous, like a sponge. Those tiny pores create a round scaffold on which proteins could build a cell wall. We feel the cell wall is one of the most critical steps for life to exist, as it separates the lifeform from the environment.
You should check out channels on YouTube that focus on teaching science to the masses… PBS actually has a few YouTube channels like “Be Smart”. Here’s their video on where life came from.
Another PBS channel to check out is PBS Eons. Here’s their video on evolution
Another channel to check out is Kurzgesagt. Here’s their video on the Big Bang
We don’t really know. We observe shared mechanisms among species, that seems to shape a lineage. We understand how environmental pressure could apply a selection effect on natural variability, thus yelding new aptitudes. We observed some of that, not super impressive because of the limited time scale, but still, it kinda validate the hypothesis.. but we don’t know for sure, and we don’t claim we know, and here lies the superiority of science versus belief : we don’t pretend we know the truth, but we work hard at seeking it.
I’d recommend getting a copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Very digestible book, great way to get a overall understanding of how everything (may have) came to be.
I would highly suggest watching as much youtube videos of famous scientists like Neil Degrass Tyson and famous Physicists such as Hawking and Richard Feynman.
Astrophysics is one of my favorite things to learn about in random videos online from famous PhD Physicists and other similar subjects about evolution from famous PhD Chemists/Biologists/etc because no matter how much I know science continues to amaze me.
I highly recommend you watch the show “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” with Neil DeGrasse Tyson narrating. Not only will it answer these questions but it will enlighten you as to how light works, magnetic fields, star classifications, the development of humans, and so so much more. It talks about some of the most important parts of our development in not only our evolution, or the earths evolution but also the evolution of the universe and how it’s all connected. You’ll learn about some important scientific discoveries and key moments in our history and who was responsible for them as well. It’s very well done and extremely educational while being easily digestible for even those who aren’t so scientifically savvy. It talks about everything you’ll want to know.
This is both the worst and best ELI5 title of all time because these are all things that even the most-educated of us still don’t fully understand.
You should read Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, who was himself was devoutly Christian. It is not hard to read, and is basically him saying, “i cant help but notice…” as he was going from island to island and seeing different breeds of the same bird, then he explains how:
1. Species compete within themselves for resources, and those with beneficial deviations that aid in gathering resources mean those individuals live linger and have more offspring than ones that have hindering deviations. (he studied birds and their size/beaks/food sources)
2. More offspring eventually means that the ‘beneficial deviation’ becomes the norm and the process continues.
Biological evolution shares some similarities with linguistic evolution.
As groups separate, language changes either when a new word is needed or just randomly (slang).
After decades or centuries you have distinct languages. Some parts remain similar while others don’t.
Even within English it’s evolving. English from 200 years ago would be understood but with sheer focus.
Biological diversity needs to also survive its environment to continue.
Seek out popular science books written for the layperson by credible authors.
Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene really helped my understanding of evolution. It is not overtly atheistic, which is something that characterises his later work, it is just a book that trys to explain to the layperson how the study of evolution has progressed since Darwin. It was written in the 70s, so it is a little dated, but it really helps to introduce the reader to some important ways of thinking about the processes in play.
Stephen Hawkins’ A Brief History of Time is similarly a book to help the layperson understand modern physics. It won’t tell you why the big bang happened, but it will tell you why we can’t answer that question satisfactorily and, as a result, answers to that specific question seem less important.
Abiogenesis is a topic hinted at in both The Selfish Gene and A Brief History of Time, although neither try to tackle it head on. But reading those two books will help you to understand the big processes at play that have shaped life ever since it appeared. The opinion I was left with was that life is inevitable given enough time and the right conditions and I really hope that this will be demonstrated in my lifetime by a discovery of evidence of life elsewhere.
Above all, these books made me appreciate the scientific method. That has some interesting implications for a deterministic universe and free will. I spent some time reading about consciousness and the mind/body problem and Susan Blackmore has written a few books on this topic which I would recommend, such as The Meme Machine. (The Meme Machine interestingly takes up an idea postulated at the end of The Selfish Gene about cultural evolution. Interestingly the term “meme”, which describes a largely online phenomenon, has a much broader and more interesting context and can trace its roots to the conclusion in The Selfish Gene)
The Gaia Hypothesis by James Lovelock is another book I’d recommend which is of a similar vein. Again it is a bit dated now but has been of massive influence in our current way of looking at topics like climate change.
For something more recent I would recommend Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, which is a fascinating anthropological view of our species.
All these books I’m recommending are pretty well known and they may come with preconceptions that they are intimidating and only for smart people. They are very much for the layperson though and although some of them are dated now, they introduce topics which are still very resonant now.
I’m a bit envious of your journey of discovery OP. Choose your sources wisely and you will be fascinated by what you find out.
Consider it as a computer game. first stage is simple and then become complex as you move on
# “We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”
# “It’s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it’s dense, isn’t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually–if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning– you’re not something that’s a result of the big bang. You’re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as–Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so–I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I’m that, too. But we’ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it. ”
― Alan Watts