OPINION: The Origin of Life- the Biggest Unanswered Question in Biology?

The origin of life is the deepest mystery in the whole of science. Based on what is known about the origin of life, the mystery remains; it remains at its most profound when asked by chemists and biochemists. Many books and learned papers have been written about it, but it still remains a mystery. There is an enormous gap between the simplest living cell and the most complicated naturally occurring mixture of nonliving chemicals. We have no idea when and how and where this gap was crossed. We only know that it was crossed somehow, either on Earth or on Mars or in some other place from which the ancestors of life on Earth might have come. The interstellar process which brought the first replicators to Earth is a mystery as difficult to understand as the origin of life itself because we have no historical record of the most critical events in the early solar system.

The origin of life is the biggest unanswered question in biology. Evolution explains the origin of all species once life has started, but there really is no good theory that explains exactly the steps that created life on earth. There is the RNA world hypothesis, which supposes that before life was based on DNA and proteins, the world only had RNA, which acted as both a replicator and an enzyme. But there really is no good theory that explains how you go from a soup of amino acids and nucleotides to a cell wall-enclosed RNA world-living organism. The transition from RNA to DNA is also not clear.

PS: I am NOT claiming that we need a "creator" or "god" to explain the origin of life. I am sure there is a natural, non-theistic solution to the problem, but we just don't really understand the mechanism behind the origin of life at this point in time.

No one knows how life began