Origin of life

Origin of life

How did life originate? This question has perplexed scientist and philosphers throughout human history. There was a time when it was believed that life arose spontaneously from nonliving matter. It was thought that fish and frogs were produced from mud, maggots arose from decaying meat, insects were formed from plant juice and that microbiologist arose spontaneously from air or water. It was the great French microbiologist and  demonstrated once and for all that life originates only from pre-existing life.

Scientific Hypothesis for Origin of life

How then did life originate in the first place ? Charles Darwin in a letter to his friend and distinguished botanist Sir Joseph Hooker provided a clue to this puzzle when he wrote “ if (and oh, what a pit if) we could conceivein some warm little will all sort of ammonia and phosphoric salts, heat electricity etc. present that a protein compound was chemically formed, needs to undergo still more complex changes at the present day such a matter could be instantly devoured, or observed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed”. The idea that life could have originated on the primordial earth, even though it might not today, because the condition on the primordial earth were rather different from those that we see today, has since became the basis of the most widely accepted scientific theory of the origin of life. A detailed theory on this idea was proposed in the year 1923 by the Russian biochemist A.J.Oparain and in 1928 independently one of the most outstanding biochemist of our time J.B.S.Haldane.

SEE ALSO

The Primitive Earth