Life Begins: Crash Course Big History #4

Hi, I’m John Green and welcome to Crash Course
Big History where today we are going to get a life. Or at least the Earth is going to
get a life. But first, today we have to start with a disclaimer.
The origin of life is in many ways a “blank spot” in the pages of history. Like, the mystery
surrounding the big bang or dark matter – the origin of life is still pretty puzzling to
us. Like, thanks to scientific research, we have a general idea of what needed to happen to
bring about life, but we’re pretty fuzzy on the details. Mr Green, Mr Green! I mean, if we don’t know,
then why are we studying it as history? Maybe we should just like, let scientists figure
all that stuff out and then they’ll get back to us, like, after this class is over? Well, Me From the Past, I’m sure the thousands
of scientists working on that question appreciate your patience, but even when we have blank
pages in the annals of history, it’s still history! Like, there’s still competing ideas
and theories about the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but the fact that there are
open questions doesn’t mean it didn’t happen! Sometimes we don’t have a clear narrative
of events, and it’s up to us to collect more evidence and refine those theories. But first,
we have to know about the current evidence and the current theories. I mean, ultimately,
that’s what history is! [Theme Music] I’m Hank Green, and this is still Crash Course
Big History. Last time we left off with a newly-born Earth that was molten hot and pelted
by asteroids. Then millions of years of torrential rainfall cooled the surface and created the
first oceans. We know that life emerged in the oceans between
3.5 and 4 billion years ago. We have solid fossil evidence for life 3.5 billion years
ago and many scientists are pretty confident that life was around 3.8 billion years ago. It’s pretty clear that life is a different
thing from the rest of the universe, but what makes up that difference? I’m kind of surprised
that this turns out to be a super puzzling question that we have yet to come up with
a 100% satisfying answer to. But some of the major characteristics of most life are: it
adapts to the environment, it has a metabolism that processes energy to keep itself going
(like humans do with pizza), and it reproduces – whether it be a cell splitting in two or
two animals… doing their thing in nature. Even these simple criteria have their problems
though. Some animals like mules are born unable to have offspring. Some micro-organisms can
shut down their metabolisms for long stretches of time, but neither are exactly dead or not
life. Given the incredible variety of species,
definitions for life are, by necessity, very broad. But one such definition by big historian Fred
Spire, is, and I quote “a regime that contains a hereditary program for defining and directing
molecular mechanisms that actively extract matter and energy from the environment, with
the aid of which, matter and energy are converted into building blocks for its own maintenance,
and if possible, reproduction.” In other words, what makes you different from
a star is that while a star burns down till it dies and doesn’t actively float around the
cosmos looking for more fuel, a living organism does actively seek out pizza to keep itself going,
preferably long enough to, you know, have some babies. But how do we know what we know? How do we
know that life is just a different kind of molecular mechanism, not something more profound? Well,
we can test these claims. And we do! Using science. Because life looks so radically different
from the inanimate universe, people once thought that life was made of completely different
stuff. Then, in 1828, a German chemist, Friedrich Wöhler, used inorganic chemicals to synthesize
an organic chemical. This was a big deal – just as Newton’s theory of gravity showed that
the heavens and Earth followed the same physical laws, Wöhler’s experiment proved that life
and non-life follow the same chemical laws, which implied that life could emerge from
non-life. Even this idea wasn’t completely new. For
centuries, the Aristotelian idea that life just spontaneously emerged from non-life was
widely believed. For example, if you put some rotten meat out in the sun, eventually the
meat would transform itself into maggots. You can probably work out the weaknesses in
this theory. Seventeenth century scientists took meat and various other objects thought
to spontaneously generate life, boiled them to kill off any eggs previously laid by insects,
sealed them in jars and nothing happened. Oh, Aristotle, first you told us that snot
was our brain coming out of our noses, and now you made all those nice people waste their
steak dinner! This, however, did not rule out some form
of life-force in the air. Some invisible force from the Earth’s atmosphere that could enter
an object and literally breathe life into it. But spores from plants can also travel
in the air, as can microorganisms. So in the mid-nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur boiled
some organic broth, friendly to life and placed it in a flask with a swan neck, to trap plant
spores in smaller particles. If a life-force was in the air, it could enter freely, while
spores and other particles would get trapped in the U-bend. And what happened? Nothing!
A century and a half later, those flasks are still devoid of life. The conclusion? The
ancients were wrong. After a dose of claim-testing, it became clear that life must emerge from
the inanimate world by chemical processes that are discoverable by science. But what did early life look like? Well, for
a whopping 2.1 billion of the 3.8 billion years of the evolutionary epic, history was
made by tiny single-cell organisms called prokaryotes. That’s roughly 55% of the entire
story of life. Now, some of those prokaryotes evolved about 1.7 billion years ago into slightly
bigger single-celled organisms called eukaryotes, and then, you know, that kept happening and
then eventually – us! But for now, let’s just talk about prokaryotes.
Prokaryotes lived in the seas and ate chemicals in their surrounding environment. Now these
microscopic prokaryotes might not sound very impressive, but they do make up the vast majority
of your family tree. They’re also distant relatives of the modern bacteria that are
everywhere, crawling around the room that you’re in right now, crawling all over you, crawling inside
of your intestines. That’s right, somewhere, right now, there is a bacterium that will give you food poisoning,
in an under-cooked hamburger, and it is your cousin! But the thing is, even in its earliest stages,
single-cell life was massively complex compared to the inanimate universe. I mean, I know
these are tiny, little specks, but compared to everything else that had happened on Earth
until them, they were an immense tangle of chemical networks and building blocks. But how did an object as ridiculously complex
as a prokaryote first emerge? Well, first of all, it’s very difficult to think of how
life would form in an oxygen-rich atmosphere like present-day Earth. Oxygen is kind of
a nasty, highly-reactive chemical. In fact, if the oxygen levels in this room were substantially
higher and I was to just rub my hands together really fast, I could burst into flames! And
while that would make for a nice viral YouTube video, I would rather not be on fire than
get lots of views! 3.8 billion years ago, the free oxygen content
of the atmosphere was at negligible levels, which had some not-so-pleasant consequences.
For millions upon millions upon millions of years, life dwelled fairly deeply in the ocean,
eating chemicals and staying where the Earth’s heat kept it warm. Eventually, some prokaryotes
floated near to the top of the ocean and started using sunlight, water, and the carbon dioxide
that was abundant in the Earth’s atmosphere to sustain their own complexity using this
sweet chemical process they’d come up with called photosynthesis. The waste product of
this chemical process is oxygen, and these photosynthesizing prokaryotes pumped a lot
of it into the atmosphere. By around 2.5 billion years ago the amount
of free oxygen in the atmosphere was up to about 3%. Oxygen can be nasty, and so scores
and scores of tiny single-celled organisms couldn’t handle it, and died off in a massive
wave, sometimes known as The Oxygen Holocaust. So many species of single-celled organisms,
each with the potential to evolve into more complex life were wiped out. Even at this
early stage, our evolutionary ancestors were squeezed through a bottleneck. And this would
not be the last such disaster that nearly wiped everything out. Next time you have a
bad day, remember that it is amazing that you are alive at all, much less a member of
a self-aware species, living at the height of human technological progress. Speaking of ancestors, somewhere between 1.6
and 2 billion years ago, the eukaryotes evolved. And because you, your dog, the chicken you
ate last week, and the mushroom you ate the week before all descended from them, they
really put the “you” in “eukaryotes.” And eukaryotes contained organelles, like
cellular organs that enhanced their abilities. About 1.5 billion years ago, eukaryotes invented
sex. Up until that point, single-celled organisms split in two or cloned, with no need to find
a partner for romance and DNA exchange. Sexually reproducing eukaryotes possibly obtained
these abilities through cannibalism – just eating each other, which may have led to some accidental
exchange of DNA. After that, the evolutionary advantages of sex probably resulted in it
catching on. Having a partner means having two sets of genes and thus a wider range of genetic
diversity from which evolution can pick and choose. Sex, is a huge deal. It enhanced evolution
and therefore deserves to be classed as one of the most revolutionary advances in the
history of life on Earth. And, a huge leap forward in the rise of complexities since
the very beginning of the Universe. So where did these complex single-celled organisms
come from in the first place? Well, Charles Darwin’s own hypothesis was that life evolved
in some, quote, “warm, little pond, suitable for fostering life.” Other scientists postulate
that life may have formed from organic chemicals next to the warmth of underwater volcanoes.
And still others champion the idea of panspermia which states that life may have evolved elsewhere
in the solar system and then been transported here by an asteroid, which seeded the Earth. Like I said, this is a ‘blank spot’, where
many different historical theories are seeking evidence to clarify what happened. It is possible,
actually, that this problem could be solved in our lifetimes, which is pretty exciting. Anyway, whatever physical forces were at play,
primitive organic chemicals eventually came together into balls with protective membranes.
They would’ve reproduced and proliferated much as life does today, but the earliest
blobs of organic chemicals would have reproduced clumsily, inaccurately, with many useful adaptations
getting lost. Essentially, these molecular mechanisms were badly programmed. In 1950s, James Watson, Francis Crick, Mauris
Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin discovered how living cells replicate, using DNA, or
deoxyribonucleic acid. DNA is a double-stranded molecule that contains a list of orders for
how it wants a living cell to be constructed. And then, a single strand, RNA, reads those
program orders and sets in motion the production of the proteins necessary to accomplish them.
All life on Earth has DNA, which is one of the reasons we know that all living things on Earth,
from farmers to fish, from moles to microbes, have a common ancestor. It’s why you share
98.4% of your DNA with a chimpanzee, and why you share nearly half of your DNA with the
banana that it likes to eat. Not quite cannibalism, but we do eat a lot of our distant cousins. But where do DNA and RNA come from? Another
mystery. How could such complex programming evolve from simpler organic forms? One leading
contender is the RNA World Hypothesis, which postulates that there might’ve been an earlier
version of just RNA, which was capable of both coding and self-replicating, and out
of which separate and more complex structures evolved, DNA. DNA and RNA operate in extremely
complex ways themselves, which is what you’d expect with something with as many connections
and varied building blocks as life. By the way, we’re not expecting you to come
away from this video with a complete understanding of how DNA works. There is a link in the description
to our Crash Course Biology video on DNA, though, if you want this mind-boggling concept
to come down a few boggles on the boggles-scale. Remember this as well: when looking at a historical
narrative, it’s always useful to know how things work. But it is still more useful to
know why they work, because they can influence the future sequence of events. Like, you don’t
have to know exactly how to design, build, assemble, and fire a fifteenth century longbow
to understand the French and English conflict in the Hundred Years War; all you need to
know is that longbows made things pretty unpleasant for a lot of French people. Like, “There’s
a piece of wood sticking out of me!”-unpleasant. DNA replication is an amazing, flabbergasting
process that allows life to copy itself and sustain its own complexity. It copies a living
organism with stunning precision. But even this impeccable copying process can occasionally
be… somewhat, peccable. Once every billion copies or so, there is an error. These errors
result in a slight mutation. These can have no effect, they can be very good, or they
can be very bad. If useful, it allows an organism to be more successful and likely
to pass on its genes. If not so useful, things go poorly, and the gene does not get passed
on. On the scale of millions of years, these copying errors are the engine of evolution
and the origin of new species. They allow the tiny layer of fragile organic materials
sitting atop of the hulking geological structures of the Earth to be shaped and reshaped like
play-doh from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to trilobites to dinosaurs to Abraham Lincoln. As Charles Darwin put it at the end of the
Origin of Species, “there is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers,
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” More on that next time.

Comments 100

  • thanks guys I learneed a lot from this video

  • I think it was the biologist/ monk Gregor Mendel centuries ago that prove that life can not come from inert non living material (chemical or bio- chemicals)! Without the 'breath of life' from God no life can come into being, not even single celled life~ t is nonscience to even think that life can evolve anywhere in the Universe from inert substances, even proteins and DNA or RNA! I don't care if chemicals had trillions of years to form into socalled life, it is the height of stupidity to believe in such craziness! If we can't create life in modern laboratories then how can we think such could happened in a not so friendly early Oxygen rich Earth enviroment? Yes oxygen has been around on Earth since was very young and still in diapers.Hah! So to speak . . .

  • But…but….theres a 2000 year old book written by an imaginary deity telling us he made them!! This is blasphemy!

  • ah man you guys are great! I started with the crash course chemistry to understand atoms more because I was studying space and stuff, but then ended up doing the astronomy etc and now onto this 🙂 It's addictive!

  • We have your Blank Spot…….
    The earliest organism suddenly appeared on Earth with No Simple Precursor, 3.8 Billion years ago.


  • Hello, this is my [harsh] opinion about religious and sci-believers "war".

    THAT'S EVOLUTION THEORY. USE YOUR BRAIN BEFORE BELIEVING A THEORY FULL OF ASSUMPTIONS, WHICH ISN'T PROVEN TO BE TRUE. IF IT'S EVOLUTION "LAW", THEN I'D BE PROBABLY 'SORRY'. If you believe that worms and snakes are your ancestors, I feel sorry for you but … I won't say anything more. HAHAHA

    Hey, fellow Christians (LIKE ME)! You should know the difference between LAW and THEORY because SCIENCE and RELIGION should never fight you know? They have different points but SCIENCE never said that this is true, this is not and science could never say that because every discovery and theory would always have at least 1% flaws. And so does RELIGION. Religion also has flaws but believing is in the eye of the beholder.

    Seeing is believing but is it the truth or just an illusion to confuse our minds? Is this the truth or it's just what "someone" or "something" wants us to believe? Well, it's up to us, humans, what to believe and what to avoid.

  • Thank you for including Rosalind Franklin in the discovery of DNA!

  • Please talk slower next time. Some of us are not that fluent and can't understand really fast. Yeah, but cool vid.

  • The atom follows a blueprint to build a replica of the parents that it is instructed to build. This process is too complex for any scientist to comprehend… this is why science cannot create an atom and instruct it to form into human beings. We just are not intelligent enough.. so who was intelligent enough to create the atom that forms into a human being by following a blueprint???

  • 8:53 10:41 3:44

  • everybody's talking about other people talking about this in relation to religion but nobody is actually talking about this in relation to religion lmao

  • back when crash course was good..

  • I actually ate chicken yesterday and mushroom a week before give a like if u did too!

  • The meaning of life? Eat pizza until you can do some baby making. Question answered.

  • Truth are agreeable to everybody. Agreeable to everybody. That is the truth.

  • It seems to me there is some ideological possession from both the evolution and creationist Institutions. When people are trained and conditioned from childhood to certain teachings, ways of thinking and world views … their position is not so much self derived as institutionally indoctrinated. An encouraging thing to see is that no matter from which institution, all are individually decent truth loving people, as far as I can tell.

    A sociology of error can occur when we see mistaken people, as deliberately dishonest, lacking in decent commitment to truth. Most people think and speak with an integrity to what they think is true. None of them want to mislead or harm others and they argue out of concern for the truth and other people.

    As far as I know everyone discussing matters here loves truth and by speaking up for it shows that they care for others enough to take the time and effort to confront error with the 'real' truth. (I think you're all on the same side … every one of you wants everyone to live in truth … yes?)

    A person infected with a virus should not be treated as if they are the virus, they need good food, rest, and can’t be expected to perform physically like a healthy person. Before Peterson made ideological possession a term, I used to think of it according to the symptoms, e.g nationalism, religious, political, sports fan fanatic and so on. Getting a self reinforcing indoctrinated delusion out of an infected mind requires that individual to use sensible reality as an external source of truth which is more authoritative than the texts and teachings they have been led to trust as reliable.

    (Please note well: I use sensible reality as the source of my dictionary, encyclopaedia and library. Sensible reality is the primary source of truth in the mind, it’s just the way awareness functions.)

    I have good news (pun intended) Both evolution and creation agree living things are not changing at a rate significant enough to change how living things function such that we have to factor it into our living. i.e. WHETHER LIFE WAS CREATED OR EVOLVED IT'S STAYING AS IT IS FOR OUR LIFETIMES, AND FOR MANY GENERATIONS. In this respect, it's a non issue and not worth wasting more than the time it takes to see this point.

    But, the world views coming from belief in creation/evolution … are serious. YOU ARE INVOLVED IN AN IDEOLOGICAL/WORLD VIEW, DEBATE. If creation is linked to God and some things in the bible … that's a potent mixture of false and true added to origin beliefs. Similarly if evolution is linked some things considered Science … that also is a potent mixture of true and false added to origin theories. It's not so obvious because parts of ‘Science’ are a more evolved (pun intended) transformed type of the former political religious tools of old.

    As far as my evolution beliefs go, the basic set of things agreed upon by PhD debaters from both sides I consider likely to be true. Not having seen much of it first hand it is impossible for me to have a solid position i.e. I’m trusting a group of intrepid debaters that their battle to come to agreement on some facts has a core of truth. As far as creation goes, I don’t see any evidence either way so that is my position. And like I mentioned above, in that respect it’s a non issue.

    And for the icing on the cake … Everyone needs to know that our current society, especially it's education systems, were knowingly transitioned from a political religious system of management where Christianity was the faith many people truly believed so as to subvert themselves willingly to unfair authorities … transitioned to a new type of political science/Science system were some parts of science are a false Science which people trust in and in doing so they subvert themselves willingly to unreasonable authorities. All the good science, the physics, Chem and Biology used continually and proven reliable, well that’s the foundation for belief in some artificial Science. The good one is called science and the fake misleading stuff is wears a mask called 'Science'. Those that take science on faith are members of a new type of social collective. NOTE WELL please, It is my observation that the new system where some artificial Science has replaced religion … is many times more effective than the old religious indoctrinations.

    No, I'm not joking or trying to wind everyone up. Truth is, all you creationist's and evolutionists' are together victims of deception and should unite to help each other.

    If you want more info just let me know. IF YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT SOME PART OF MY COMMENT I WOULD GREATLY APPRECIATE IT IF YOU COULD COPY IT AND RESPOND TO ME FROM IT. (The ideologically infected often respond to what they see in their mind, not what someone has written.)

  • Imagine the power of being able to create life. You can control the variables that limit life and control the evolution

  • the whole crash course channel is doing amazingly good, which makes me wonder why don't we see or be taught with these materials when we have the most potential to learn in the graduation system, which is a shame. I watched world history, biology, and history of science playlists. all amazingly good. but I enjoyed particularly this playlist. it is heavy, but it answers almost every question I have, I still used surfing for some explained concepts that I was not familiar with, but sooner or later they covered all the material for my inquiries at least in my case

  • There is a big hunk of video missing between inorganic matter and prokaryotes lol

  • heck yeah

  • 1:48 they’ll never be satisfied never be satisfied (Hamilton)

  • watching this instead of using my biology textbook WHO'S WITH ME

  • Hank is a blessing to all Biology students

    and my eyes

  • I know when Life begins. God tells us in the Scriptures. He first forms us AND THEN breathes the Breath of Life into us AND THEN we become a Living Soul. This is when we can think and feel!! Not at conception.

  • I like big history (& crash course is an excellent source) because it does well to look at the existence of all we understand holistically. That is to say big history and holistic thinking take reductionist ideas like isolating & testing cause & effect relationships and combine them rather than agreeing to disagree or even implying mutual exclusion. In this way our sensitivity of experience compounds with each addition degree of knowledge learned. Take the analogy of the 3 blind men and the elephant; one sizes up a leg, another the tail, and the last an ear, however none can describe the elephant in its entirety. Together their cumulative answer is closer to the whole truth, but still incomplete. In a similar fashion no one has an answer like 42, but perhaps the root or the mean of all our predictions is 42 or M Theory or something. Hence why I argue for the importance of not simply specializing in a single skill or field of knowledge, but also having a foundation of the greater whole so as to have direction as we focus into the nitty-gritties of increasing complexity from which we create order from entropy.

  • "it's still history," atheists would say, but denies the gospel accounts as historical . . .

  • A protein cannot form without instructions. Instructions must always come first.

  • I love the green brothersss !!!!!!😍😍😍😍😍

  • Hi, you only show hipothetical realities and talk about assumptions, but where are the proof that it was really that way? It looks like more a fancyfull imagination than facts that possible were true. It is named especulation with the data but no demonstrated science. So in spite of the fact it pretends to be presented as science it could be named as magical conceptions with a covering of "science".

  • Is it possible to find in this explanation an apex of the true reality as living entities came to be ? You play imaginativally with supposed facts that declare them as a thruth. It is called fantasy, although you present it as factual science.

  • You can explain me in hindi of chapter origin human

  • The sly puns are great

  • In order for the first life to have lived long enough to evolve the ability to self replicate, it would have had to have been immortal.

  • I will point out that the universe cannot create itself as this is a logic flaw. We have never observed nature simply coming into existence and thus we ought to be open to other ideas and questions that science cannot answer.

    Christians know “God did it”
    Atheists say “evolution did it”
    Be sure we are using even scales to argue.

  • Why don't you guys answer the question which came first the chicken or the egg?

  • RNA 👌🏻😫

  • Stop making people fool by using fancy science words

  • Can you recreate life from life over billions of years?

  • 3:15 why always germans

  • Without a creator there would not be good or evil just science, but to me there is an obvious good and evil

  • Perfect example of intelligent design aka there is a God.

  • Darwin revised his famous line at the end of "Origin of Species" to include credit to a "Creator." All of his subsequent versions include the words "breathed by the Creator." Hank, I wonder why you didn't include that tidbit?

  • Amazing! Funny and smart! Thank you!

  • Bout time for a refresh.

  • In mathematics if the chances of something occurring are smaller than 1/10 to the power of 50
    we generally say the chances of that event are NIL.
    the odds that a single large protein molecule can develop by chance are 1/10 to the power of 113.!

  • Panspermia does not answer the origin of life.

  • LIfe was not created and has no beginning. Life is God, and the Life of God created the Universe. The assumptions that a mundane world must first exist to evolve life from it, is purely an assumption without any evidence at all. It would make more sense that Life has the ability to begin the world to exist, then to say a non living world produced life.

  • Definition of SCIENCE: " If we Don't know HOW= GOD DIDN'T DO IT!"

  • To whoever is reading this, please don't bother with the comment section. It's full of idiots who still believe in magic.

  • 4:49 I thought our sun had parents so that means that stars can give birth

  • 10:30 so randomness and a super duper duper luck created RNA ? how can protein got formed ? by the same randomness and luck ? if you think you are a scientific person you have to ask these questions.


  • At 0:00 did anyone see that sperm go into the globe?

  • 1:24 & 6:39
    …. We made from water every living thing. …
    (Al-Anbiyaa' 21 : 30)

  • It won't be long until the religious will say "Huh! Our god is so intelligent for inventing abiogenesis."

  • "Today we are going to get a life."
    Me: putting down her pen We are?

  • It never made sense to myself, that if modern humans with dexterity and brains, lived on the Earth for two hundred thousand years, that they could not progress through a stone age life style to landing on the Moon , about a dozen times over. Our observed time of humanity , that knew what time is, goes about about twelve thousand years, and so just like a Stanley Kubrick movie " 2001 Space Odyssey " we took only about eleven thousand years to transfigure the same human talent and form we now have, from the Stone Age to Landing on the Moon. REASON itself says, given the POTENTIAL, if our modern humans lived on the Earth for the past two hundred thousand years, where is their Moon landing ? Something is just not right.

  • 10:25 this is not a banana this is a chom chom.


  • Abiogenesis is an embarrassment!

  • if anyone thinks that this happened by chance, you should definitely read signature in the cell

  • No one can define life. Life is a divine favour from the Lord. You may say am bringing up religion or God yes because after all this we will all round up to the creator

  • How can bom life make life what day heck is like say you phone can move by its self

  • Where did life on earth come from? It came from God.
    Where did God get His life? He's always had it.
    I know it sounds ridiculous to us, but it's true. God just is and always was. It's truly amazing. And I'm not trolling.

  • These guys clearly do not respect their viewers. Speculation gone wild. Evolutionists lack the embarrassment gene. Proteins cannot form without instructions. Information always comes first.

  • No Hank is too fast and his jokes make me lose focus. It's not healthy.

  • To be real science, experiments must be repeatable. These videos should be more correctly termed theories or hypotheses. Any real scientist knows this.

  • Hank, your delivery mesmerizes me.


  • 13 minutes of 'we don't really know'

  • Condoms

  • What's with the accent hank

  • What nonsense. If life could form from non-life would you not think us humans could make life?

    Of course we can't, nor have we ever observed life to arise from non-life.
    One item they seem to ignore is that all life is based on massive amounts of complex, coded, and specified, information.
    What science tells us about such information is that it only arises from an intelligent source. It never arises by time and chance.

    Even the simplest of life cannot be formed in a test tube by our brilliant scientists. We can't even make a protein let alone the vast number of micro machines necessary for life.

    So get a life and quit believing this nonsense of how life could just arise naturally by itself.

    It took an intelligent Creator to make life. That we have life is one great evidence for the existence of an all knowing God.

  • The video is called "Life begins".

    We get a little history lesson (ends at ~4:57), and then:

    "After a dose of claim testing it became clear that life must emerge from the inanimate world by chemical processes that are discoverable by science".

    Then a talk about Prokaryotes.

    What do you mean, "it became clear…"?

    This beginning of life is what I tuned in for, not a history lesson, then a "life already exists" talk.

    Hand waving…

  • I like how the guy starts off by saying that we have no idea how life started and that there is a huge "Blank Spot" in these pages of History. Then he immediately starts talking about how all this stuff for sure happened 3-4 billion years ago as if it were concrete fact, as though he got in a time machine & saw it all unfold. The guy even says throughout the video that a lot of different scientific theories compete with each other over what really happened. Bottom line is nobody can agree on how life originated. I think it's dangerous to assume everything just evolved when we have literally no proof of that occurring…

  • Anyone else here happy to be alive?

    …No one? Just me?


  • I salute you sir

  • BLA BLA BLA… Show the real evidence at lab.

  • Can you speak in honorable way.

  • Intelligent design is a slam dunk. Information ALWAYS comes first because a protein cannot form without instructions. Not by chemical bonding and not by chance. Yes, it's really that simple.

  • Ya know what i think i think radiation made microbes then comet /astroid or nothing we never knew crashed into earth billions of years ago maybe the meteor that made dinos exist then made underwater life and so on and so on but hey what do i know ¯_(ツ)_/¯

  • 8:20 So eating each other led to sex…the beginning of foreplay!

  • Full marks for mentioning that the origin of the information and the coding of it found in the DNA molecule is still a huge mystery, which it is. But suggesting that this mystery will be solved by scientists in our lifetime is, to say the least, very optimistic. The problem scientists face is that their faith requires that the code must be generated randomly, since they believe that the universe is entirely the product of mindless random events.

    However there is not one example in all of history of a code being generated randomly. If you want to understand this, try writing a computer program that way. All codes are generated by intelligent action. They have to be, because the number of right answers is vastly smaller than the number of wrong ones.

    This is a main reason why it is becoming more and more obvious that there is actually a designer involved.

  • this is not science this is faith

  • So basically me, watching this video and thinking about existential questions, is kind of the same thing as a rock rolling down a hill. Interesting…

  • if we originated from living prokaryotes, where did they come from and how did they become alive. cased closed.

  • So science is based somewhat on faith too?

  • In undergrad my genetics professor made the point that RNA can replicate itself, RNA can mutate, any time DNA is used it has to be transcribed into RNA, RNA binds to other RNA molecules that are attached to amino acids, those amino acids are ordered based on the sequence in the original RNA molecule copied from DNA, those amino acids are then bound together to make the building blocks of cells. He said the best argument for the RNA world hypothesis is that we are still RNA organisms more than we are DNA organisms even 3.5 billion years later.

  • aren't you people's have enough to see the lies of White people's ,only research what we as seeds from the ancient once already know

  • The origin of life is only a puzzle to God-haters.

  • this guys yacking makes me dizzy

  • Maybe, probably, could have, we dont really know, might have, but one second later its truth written in stone. Of course RNA just formed by itself and self replicates, even though all the building blocks could not be available, no matter what random chance you invoke. But theres no freaking way you are going to give glory to god. Everything made itself. We are soulless protoplasm. So what if we kill each other.

  • Hank and Tom Green. The most ambitious crossover in Crash Course Big History.

  • Evolution doesn’t even attempt to solve origin of life. It presupposes life. Evolution has also been shunned by many biologists as scientific studies have shown it poorly accounts for the “tree of life.” It’s also pretty absurd and there isn’t a lot of scientific evidence that nature produces a self replicating single felled organism. Top scientists can’t even replicate a cell if given all the necessary materials and all they have to do is properly assemble them in ideal lab conditions. It’s never been done. So to think it would randomly happen in nature is absolute nonsense. The best explanation for origin of life is ID. By far.

  • Life created free atom-inorganic molecules so on…
    Naturalist theory/ chemosynthetic theory/ heterotroph theory- oparin n haldane
    Is that true?

  • You skipped a step.
    The part to get from the broth to life must come by some means of chemistry alone.

  • Can you explain the amino acids randomly assemble into self replicating molecule part.

    What came first rna dna or protein.

    Or something simpler.

    The actual origin of life from non living matter. Theories.


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