During the 1920s and 1930s a more sophisticated version of this “chemical evolutionary theory” was proposed by Russian biochemist Aleksandr I. Oparin. He too suggested that life could have first evolved as the result of a series of chemical reactions. But he envisioned many more chemical transformations and reactions over hundreds of millions of years. Oparin postulated these additional steps and additional time, because he understood more about the complexity of cellular metabolism than did Haeckel or Huxley.8 Nevertheless, neither he nor anyone else in the 1930s fully appreciated the
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