Charles Darwin & the origin of life

Although best known for his ideas about the origin of species, Charles Darwin also thought about the origin of life on Earth.

In 1871 Darwin described his view of the environment in which life originated; he wrote that life may have appeared: “in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc.”.

Darwin wrote this 80 years before Stanley Miller and Harold Urey synthesized amino acids in their laboratory equivalent of Darwin’s “warm little pond”.

The Miller-Urey experiment is over 50 years old and scientists continue to revise their ideas about the conditions present in the early Earth, and the “warm little pond” scenario has been challenged by other hypotheses including one that life may have arisen under cold conditions. These scenarios will eventually sort themselves out as more research is conducted.

That’s the nature of science.