Saquist said:
If life self replicated, posessed a metabolism and adapts to its enviroment then some of these characteristic would need to be located in non living matter that shares carbon based traits
You seem to be hinting at something like: where did life get the ability to replicate, or somesuch; i.e. the other Evolutionary (not Darwinian) problem of the
origin of Life.
Current thinking extends from colonisation from space, to abiogenesis - the emergence of living things from a non-living background.
This is still one of the biggest questions about Life - we know a bit about how it works, or what makes it tick, but not about how it got started.
Presumably, because it can adapt and replicate, it must have arrived or emerged with these traits, or it developed them quickly. Otherwise the first 'attempts' would have been mostly failures. Given there was enough time and enough background - the chemicals and interactions, but also compartmentalisation or structure, something "happened".
All the important bits must have been, or must have gotten into place fairly quickly - early lifeforms must have had a reliable way to replicate their "building plans", along with sufficient function to maintain and transcribe it into actual structure.
Compartment "walls", membranes, co-operative and cyclic processes, coenzymes or "channels" that direct energy somewhere (like down a channel).
We know a lot about how a prokaryote is put together - which means we understand how mitochondria are built, and function. There are plenty of gaps in what we know. But do we know enough to explain its genesis? Maybe not.