The Stairway to Life

An Origin-of-Life Reality Check

By: Change Laura Tan, Rob Stadler

Narrated by: Fred Hoff

Spontaneous generation of living organisms - life arising without progenitor or seed - was a common belief in the time of Aristotle. Over the next 2,000 years, support for spontaneous generation slowly retreated to its final stronghold: spontaneous formation of the first living organism.

From recently acquired insights into the complexity of the simplest organisms, Tan and Stadler specify requirements for spontaneous formation of life and evaluate the prospects for natural processes to satisfy these requirements. The Stairway to Life is a thought-provoking inquiry that breaches the final stronghold of spontaneous generation.

©2020 Rob Stadler (P)2021 Rob Stadler

Amazing

I love the scientific integrity and devotion to revealing the building blocks of life. It was refreshing to hear the ground truth of what would truly be needed for abiogenesis to happen, if it were to happen naturalistically.

Excellent Book!

I plan to listen to this book again and I may even buy the paper copy. I would like to walk back through each chapter and educate myself on the science as I go. Admittedly, much of the information was new to me and I did not understand everything. Still, the scientific evidence presented is insurmountable. I knew enough to get that point from the book. It is a shame that smart people have completely closed their eyes to the absolute impossibility of abiogenesis. There is no harm in admitting that we did not spring from a cosmic mud puddle. We are smarter than that… might it be that we owe our origin to an intelligent designer? Even the rebound atheist, Antony Flew was willing to admit that.

I had no idea how much was going on in one cell

I found the book very interesting, worth the time I spent listening. I would recommend.
One of the last chapters sounds like it needs some editing though. I hope more people will take a listen. The universe is insanely complex and so is life.
And this will help you appreciate it a little more.

true science

science vs. fiction masquerade as science. highly recommended.
the authors list 12 indispensable steps the non-life world has to ascend to become life. they demonstrate intelligent help is needed every step of the way.

Phenomenal. poignant. essential.

as a follower of the creation evolution saga for decades i have read a ton of the staples and many tangents- this one belongs at the top of essentials. . its refreshingly technical, but unlike secular pop science garbage , its not technical because it uses unfamiliar technical language deliberately intended to obscure understandingl- most titles shy away from the barrier of jargon separating students of biology and chemistry from the average joe -and with good reason, most need it diluted with pedestrian terms to take in (which this book delivers in spades using apt and strikingly accurate analogies) but anyone who digs a little deeper has seen the awesome complexity of living molecular systems making paleys watch pale in comparison. the snapshots Tan has delivered are examples of the paradoxically unevolvable scenarios that make abiogenesis appear in its true light- another irrational fairy tale of the cult of scientism.
anyone can pick this up and come out the other side with massive gains, it could be more work for some than others.. but the concepts and the crash course of essential understanding for each concept is all here, well articulated and neatly organized.
if you're an admirer of the wonders of creation,
you. need. this. book.

Tough to follow

I’ve read quite a few books on the origins of life, and this is by far the least easy to follow

thoroughly researched & presented. Biased agenda

Offers a nice synthesis of the major historical advances towards our understanding of how life began. But this book is heavily biased towards creationism. While the ability to recapitulate abiogenesis in the lab has proven to be a complex and complicated journey, the immediate jump to creationism is lazy and one dimensional. Perhaps there are other unexplored phenomena to discover, and prebiotic conditions that haven't been conceptualized...yet. The story of our scientific advancements in this arena, while important to critique and understand the limitations of the studies, would be better told with a neutral tone to further pique curiosity, rather than turn people away from the scientific method.