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Asked by 07squibbk to Alastair, Emma, Hywel, Keith, Vicki on 21 Jun 2010 in Categories: General.
Question: What are your thoughts and views on how the earth and humans began?
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Alastair Sloan answered on 21 Jun 2010:
Well, As for how the Earth began, there is is alot of evidence to explain how the early molecular gasses in space became pulled together and squashed because of gravitational forces. As time passed, enough material “clumped together” forming a “gravity well”. What that does is act like a huge gravitational hoover and “gathers” all the material in the vicinity and eventually, enough material gathers and gravity becomes high enough to form everything into a ball. That’s also why planets are ball shaped, because it is the most efficient response to immense gravity. This can be modelled and proved.
As for life on Earth. I believe that sometime when the newly formed Earth was cooling, the simple chemicals that were around then formed the genetic structure called RNA, which is capable of self replicating. From that, DNA developed and then the first single celled organisms. Because of the evidence we have for this, and more importantly, for evolution I think Darwin’s theory is correct. BUT – it is only a theory and there are still many unanswered questions
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Vicki Stevenson answered on 21 Jun 2010:
According to astrophysicists the earth was made about 4.6 billion years ago, and is a lot younger than the universe (about 14 billion years old).
It is possible that a nearby supernova caused a shock wave which caused interstellar dust and gas to rotate and develop gravity. Most of the mass concentrated in the middle began to heat up (becoming the sun), dust particles formed rings around the sun – larger pieces began to collide and form together into planets including the earth. It took about 15 million years for the earth to form.
Once the earth formed, I think that initially they were simple cells floating around in the sea, then these developed into more complex cell based life, which gradually developed into the first animals – sponges seem to be the first animals and they seem to be able to propagate by fragments of them falling off and developing into new sponges. Things gradually got more complex from there until animals and humans developed.
I tend to go for the scientific view on things.
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Keith Brain answered on 21 Jun 2010:
I am a believer in the main line of scientific thought, that the Universe was created about 15 billions years ago in some sort of “big bang”, with the earth forming around the sun around 5 billion years ago, from the leftover bits and pieces of some older stars and other bits of space gas. Why do I believe this? Because there are lots of bits and pieces of evidence from many different scientific disciplines that come up with the same sorts of answer, from geology (studying how continents move, rock layers form and deposit), chemistry (looking at how some nature elements decay or are transformed by heat and pressure), astrophysics, astronomy, and biology (because the rates of evolution can be calculated by looking at difference in the genetic codes among different species of animals).
For humans, the argument is that we evolved from amongst the great apes, by a process similar or identical to that described by Darwin. Why do I think believe this? Because of genetic similarity with apes, because our anatomy and physiology are similar to all mammals (particularly the great apes), and because the theory of evolution is so simple and elegant – that the fittest individuals for a given environment survive to have offspring – coupled with the observation that genes are not stable, but can randomly mutate, and that these mutations are sometimes beneficial. There is useful idea, often applied in science, called “Ockham’s razor”, which is that the simplest idea that explains the data is probably the right one. Darwin’s ideas seem to fit the bill!
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