Abstract
The most monumental event in life’s history on our planet is its origin. Many early scientists, trying to understand the phenomenon of life, thought that ‘dead’ matter and energy alone cannot explain life, and that there must be a vital essence in living organisms that distinguishes them from the non-living world. Our current understanding refutes this, and shows that life is a chemical system, and follows the same rules as any other chemistry. The chemistry of life is extraordinarily complicated and intricate, but it is still chemistry. So some time that living chemistry must have arisen from the non-living chemistry of its environment. However, despite nearly 150 years of modern science since Darwin speculated on life’s appearance in ‘some warm little pond’ in his letter to J. D. Hooker on 1 February 1871, we still do not know how life originated on Earth.
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Notes
- 1.
A video of a modern recreation of the Miller–Urey experiment can be seen at (http://chemistry.beloit.edu/Origins/pages/spark.html).
Further Reading
On the Pathway to the Origin of Life
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Schulze-Makuch, D., Bains, W. (2017). The First Cell and the Origin of Life Challenge. In: The Cosmic Zoo. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62045-9_3
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