13 



II. THE ORIGINS OF LIFE: 

 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SEARCH 



THE EARLY QUESTIONERS 



There is within modern science a curious anomaly, almost a 

 paradox. Since the rise of modern science during the Renaissance, its 

 fashioners have realized that the daily tasks of science could not be 

 set by the great philosophical questions. The philosophers and the 

 prophets over all history had raised the key questions; What is 

 motion? What are being and becoming? What are the stars? Whence 

 the Earth, life, man, and all the rest? But they could not supply 

 growing insights, for all their keenness in setting great questions and 

 opening logical conjecture. A more modest science could bring 

 answers. But science by choice begins with small questions: How do 

 bronze balls roll down inclines? What are the shapes of planetary 

 orbits? What happens to the weight of charcoal as it burns? One had, 

 above all, to supplement the inborn senses; the telescope, the micro- 

 scope, the balance, the careful computations, these were the new 

 tools of science. 



With such tools and maturing skills, with concepts and analyses 

 beyond the reach of the common language of the general philoso- 

 pher, the scientists broke new ground in every direction. But they 

 left aside the great questions, often the questions of origins and of 

 ends, for such questions were not ripe for answers. It takes a mature 

 discipline of geology, for example, to ask where mountains come 



"But if (and oh, what a big if) we could conceive in some warm 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 instantly devoured or absorbed, which 



would not have been the case before living creatures were formed. " 



Charles Darwin's letter to Hooker, February 1871 



(Copy courtesy of Prof. Melvin Calvin, University 



of California, Berkeley) 



