What Is Life? - Reconsidered

The problem of the origin of life is very old one. While there have been some distinguished supporters for theories suggesting extra-terrestrial origin and subsequent transport of life to earth, the remaining scientific community has built up progreesively more convincing, if more complex , reconstruction of the possible events leading to the origin of life on primitive earth. As it happens so often, our present beliefs about the origin of life on earth go to Charles Darwin in whose inmitable style "But if (and oh, what a big if) we could concieve in small little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantaly devoured or observed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.