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8 - The origin of life: a review of facts and speculation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2010

Mark A. Bedau  and
Carol E. Cleland
By
Leslie E. Orgel
Mark A. Bedau
Affiliation:
Reed College, Oregon
Carol E. Cleland
Affiliation:
University of Colorado, Boulder
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Summary

The problem of the origin of life on the Earth has much in common with a well-constructed detective story. There is no shortage of clues pointing to the way in which the crime, the contamination of the pristine environment of the early Earth, was committed. On the contrary, there are far too many clues and far too many suspects. It would be hard to find two investigators who agree on even the broad outline of the events that occurred so long ago and made possible the subsequent evolution of life in all its variety. Here, I outline two of the main questions and some of the conflicting evidence that has been used in attempts to answer them. First, however, I summarize the few areas where there is fairly general agreement.

The Earth is slightly more than 4.5 billion years old. For the first half billion years or so after its formation, it was impacted by objects large enough to evaporate the oceans and sterilize the surface. Well-preserved microfossils of organisms that have morphologies similar to those of modern blue-green algae, and date back about 3.5 billion years, have been found, and indirect but persuasive evidence supports the proposal that life was present 3.8 billion years ago. Life, therefore, originated on or was transported to the Earth at some point within a window of a few hundred million years that opened about four billion years ago.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Nature of Life
Classical and Contemporary Perspectives from Philosophy and Science
 , pp. 121 - 128
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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