Few people realize that Darwin’s theory of biological evolution did not explain, or attempt to explain, how the first life—presumably a simple one-celled organism—might have first arisen. Instead, Darwin’s theory sought to explain the origin of new forms of life from simpler preexisting forms. Nevertheless, in the 1860s and 1870s many biologists thought that they could devise a materialistic evolutionary explanation for the origin of first life fairly easily. Why? They assumed that life was composed of a rather simple substance called protoplasm that could be easily constructed by combining
...more
