Question: How did life evolve from nonliving matter?

Julian Onions answered on 3 Jul 2020:

The simple answer is, we don’t know. No one has ever achieved that as an experiment.
A number of people have got some of the building blocks along the way. We first need organic chemicals, and these were originally called organic as it was though only living organisms could make them. However for over a hundred years now, we know how to make all manner of organic compounds.
Making them naturally seems quite possible, as Urey and Miller demonstrated in an experiment many years ago, when the simulated conditions on the early earth and showed it could make organic compounds. We also have detected them in meteorites too – so that is not the issue.
You basically need 3 components to make a living cell, DNA as the instruction manual, the cell wall to contain everything, and the chemical reactions to give energy. The second two are fairly easy to come up with, but DNA, together with it’s replication mechanism seems somewhat harder to make from scratch. Therefore it is suspected there is a missing intermediate step that bridged the gap. Some ideas are things like “The RNA world”, “The PAH World” whereby much simpler mechanisms are used, but allows DNA to be supported. It is a bit like building a brick archway, it seems impossible to build that, but that is because you don’t see the support that was used in its construction that has since disappeared.
In summary no one knows, but lots of people are working on it.