First draft prepared in June 2025.
This article considers the commonly held belief that life began spontaneously in “a little warm pond”, and the variations on that belief. It will be seen that there is no evidence for that belief, nor will there ever be any evidence for that belief.
Expressed very simplisticly, the hypothesis regarding life that is taught in schools and universities is approximately this:
It is common for this process to be considered in two separate stages, these being the stage prior to any life existing, and the stage after the first living thing existed. The first stage is sometimes referred to as “prebiotic” (i.e. before life). Within academia the first stage might be considered in terms of chemistry or physics, but not in terms of biology because “biology” means the study of life but in the prebiotic stage there was, by definition, no life that could be studied. The second stage might be considered in terms of chemistry, physics and biology.
Please note that these academic classifications are somewhat arbitrary; it could be argued that what we call chemistry and what we call biology are both subsets of what we call physics. For the purposes of this article the distinctions are not relevant.
How can we measure the complexity of an object or of a system? Such a question immediately prompts other questions such as these:
For now we will skip over these questions and presume that our ordinary day-to-day understanding of ‘things’ is more or less correct; there is "this tree" and there is "that tree" and "those trees", I am not you and you are not me, and each fish or bacteria is its own 'thing'.
So, how can we measure complexity in order to be able to meaninfully make statements such as:
The measure we are going to use is the size of a thing's instruction manual. For this exercise we will assume that every ‘thing’ of interest has an instruction manual that describes its form and function. Each such manual is written by the same person, and that person always uses a consistent writing style and level of detail. It doesn't matter what that style and level of detail are because we don't need an absolute measure of complexity, rather we need a relative measure in order to compare the amount of complexity in one thing with the amount of complexity in another thing.
Let us imagine that our technical author writes the instruction manual for a bicycle, and that the bicycle manual contains 6 pages, and then using exactly the same style and level of details, writes the instruction manual for a motorized rickshaw and that this second manual contains 54 pages. We could then say that a motorized rickshaw is nine-times more complex than the bicycle. The instruction manual for a lorry might not be much larger than that of the rickshaw, because even though the lorry is physically much larger the complexity of the two vehicles is similar. However the instruction manual for an international passenger aeroplane might contain several hundred pages because it is much more complex than the lorry.
When the technical author writes the technical manuals for living things the manual for a nematode might contain seven pages, and in that case the manual for a snail might be thirty pages, and the manual for a bacteria might be less than one page. For a fish or a bird or a mammal, perhaps 850 pages. The exact numbers don't matter. The important idea is simply that the size of a thing's instruction manual is a measure of the thing's complexity, because the imaginary technical author always uses the same writing style and always applies the same level of detail to every description.
The size of the instruction manual could also be considered a measure of the thing's “information content”. Complex things have a higher information content than do simple things, much like heavy things contain more matter (more atoms) than do light things, and large things occupy more space than do small things.
We can now observe that, according to the academic hypothesis about life, the first life had low complexity (low information content) and that the present life includes things of high complexity (high information content). The first living thing would have a very thin instruction manual while a present-day bird would have a very fat instruction manual.
In order for the academic hypothesis of life to be a viable explanation for how life came to its present form we need a mechanism by which complexity can increase spontaneously.
What is that mechanism?
Not only do we need such a mechanism, but it needs to be more effective than the various mechanisms that spontaneously reduce complexity. That is to say, spontaneous increases in complexity must be more effective at increasing overall complexity than are spontaneous decreases effective at reducing overall complexity.
Spontaneous loss of complexity is common, and occurs rapidly (on humanly observable time-frames). If we burn a plant that has a 23 page instruction manual, the life is eliminated, the form and function is eliminated, and within an hour or two we are left with some molecules that can be described in an instruction manual of less than one page. The burning process rapidly eradicated the complexity of the original thing. After the burning of the plant, we still have the same amount of matter (albeit in different form, and different location) and the same amount of space, but the information-content has been reduced. We can easily find other complexity-reducing mechanisms that are able to rapidly eradicate complexity, and this is true for both individual things such as “a bee”, or “a fish”, or “a tree” and also for compound (or collective) things such as “a hive” or “a shoal” or “a forest”.
The academic hypothesis needs to be able to refer to a mechanism that can spontaneously increase complexity, and do so at a rate that significantly exceeds the rate at which complexity is reduced or eliminated by other spontaneous mechanisms.
There is no such mechanism, and therefore the academic hypothesis cannot be correct. Without such a mechanism, the academic hypothesis has no more credibility than a hypothesis that ascribes life to the wave of a magician's wand.
However, the situation for the academic hypothesis is much worse than merely lacking a mechanism that can explain the increase in complexity. In order to contemplate the origin of life we have made use of several tools, such as ‘reason’, ‘language’, ‘consciousness’, and various abstract concepts such as complexity, order, and structure. These are the incorporeal aspects of life (i.e. things that exist but that do not occupy space, are independent of time, and do not consist of matter). The academic hypothesis doesn't even attempt to explain how these incorporeal things came into existence and became available to, or attached to, the corporeal things. There is no mechanism known by which ‘rationality’ or ‘consciousness’ or any other abstract concept could come into existence from the spontaneous interactions of space, energy and matter.
When the topic of life is discussed the proponents of the “little-warm pond” hypothesis will mention the need for lots of time to elapse. The basic idea is that given sufficient time, highly improbably things must inevitably happen. This is just more deceitful blathering nonsense. Let us consider how a longer time affects the outcome of spontaneous interactions of matter and energy.
Consider first sand, such as might exist on a beach or in a sandy desert. There are spontaneous (i.e. unplanned, unguided by consciousness) interactions between the sand particles and the air and water. Energy is supplied by ground movment (e.g. earth tremors) and by the sun. The solar energy causes things to move (air to blow as wind, water to evaporate relocate and condense as droplets that form streams, etc). What is the likelihood that, over a long period of time, the sand will somewhere form into a square tower? To make that happen something would need to gather the sand particles together and bind them together in a specific way. What is that binding material or force? What applies the force specifically to create the square tower shape? What prevents other spontaneous events from collapsing the tower? When these matters are considered, the likelihood of a square tower forming spontaneously can be seen to be zero: There is no mechanism for constructing it, and there are mechanisms that will prevent its construction.
Second, consider a collection of 1000 well made bricks? If left alone, how long will it take for them to form a recognisable wall? They will be spontaneeously acted upon by wind, water, frost and these things will move the bricks and, over time, break them apart. What mechanisms will bring the bricks together in the form needed to construct a wall? There is no such mechanism. The passing of time does not make the wall more likely, because as time passes the spontaneous actions of wind, water and temperature will cause the bricks to move apart, and to disintegrate. The likelihood of bricks spontaneously forming a wall is zero after one minute of spontaneity and it is still zero after 100 million years of spontaneity. In other words it will never happen; it is impossible and not merely unlikely. Moreover, there is no mechanism by which the bricks will spontaneously form in the first-place; bricks do not emerge from clay by themselves, but rather the clay has to be first shaped and then baked at high temperature. To make the correct shape some sort of mould is needed. To bake many bricks requires some sort of furnace, which itself will not spontaneously form. The order of the events is also important; if the clay is first baked, then it cannot afterwards be shaped by moulding, instead it would have to be cut, which would require some sort of cutting tool and jig and such things would themselves need to be made, somehow.
What is true for sand and bricks is also true at the atomic and molecular level of the universe. The molecules will never spontaneously assemble into complex structures because the things that happen spontaneously to molecules will break complex structures apart and/or combine atoms or molecules into highly stable forms such that the constituent atoms are then no longer available to be recombined to form the molecules of life.
The idea that life formed spontaneously is ignorant nonsense and teaching this nonsense to children and adolescents as some sort of credible explanation or, worse, “a fact” is a massive deceit on the part of academia and the education industry, since they know perfectly well that they cannot provide any explanation or evidence for what they claim to have happened. The people who stand in classrooms and teach this nonsense have either never given it any serious thought, or they are charlatans on the same level as the people who claim to discern meaning in the tea-leaves at the bottom of a cup.
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