During this phase of my education, I have frequently come across the phospholipid bilayer.  This describes the chemical and physical nature of the membrane surrounding all cells.  When I consider this structure, my thoughts often turn to the thought experiment of abiogenesis.  I heard it described as a thought experiment in a thread I was reading on the topic, and I like that way of approaching it, so I decided to adopt the terminology.  I feel that it is barely credible to call abiogenesis a hypothesis, or a series of hypotheses due to the issue of testability and falsification.  I am not trying to discredit the value of the arguments and explanations that highly intelligent people have put forth.  I do think that you can demonstrate clearly, for example, that a phospholipid bilayer can spontaneously form in water.  I also think you can demonstrate that certain nucleic acids can self-polymerize in random fashion.  I think the experiments of Stanley Miller were fascinating, and certainly plausible evidence that under the hypothesized conditions of the early Earth components of amino acids will form spontaneously.  How you get from there to a cell is a challenging question, but I am not trying to argue against abiogenesis as an explanation for how life arose.  What I question here is how you can show that without such conditions life would not have arose.  Is a spontaneously dividing phosolipid bilayer necessary for a process that gives rise to life?  Is it sufficient?  My questions are only meant to demonstrate the difficulty in approaching the origin of life from a scientific perspective.

  A cell is extraordinarily complex, seemingly unnecessarily so.  Cascades of enzymes associate with each other through intricate paths of intersection.  Redundancy is an ubiquitous component of the system.  I am consistently amazed by the mechanisms that keep us alive.  My professors often mention that they would not have designed a certain pathway in a certain way.  I think this is due to this perceived redundancy in the pathways.  Why for example, is it necessary to

I find this equally intriguing and I believe I wrote it sometime during 2012-2013, but I don't remember what I was going to say next in the final incomplete sentence.  Even though it is not finished, what I wrote seems thought-provoking enough that I feel I should still publish it. :-)