On The Origin Of Life On Earth

摘要

An amazon of words flowed from Charles Darwin's pen. His books covered the gamut from barnacles to orchids, from geology to domestication. At the same time, he filled notebooks with his ruminations and scribbled thousands of letters packed with observations and speculations on nature. Yet Darwin dedicated only a few words of his great verbal flood to one of the biggest questions in all of biology: how life began. The only words he published in a book appeared near the end of On the Origin of Species: "Probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed," Darwin wrote. Darwin believed that life likely emerged spontaneously from the chemicals it is made of today, such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. But he did not publish these musings. The English naturalist had built his argument for evolution, in large part, on the processes he could observe around him. He did not think it would be possible to see life originating now because the life that's already here would prevent it from emerging.