UNIT SIX — REVIEW • HOW DID LIFE BEGIN? 



Something happened. There were no witnesses whom we can question 

 now. No dependable records were made. Is it possible to find out what hap- 

 pened .f* Can we solve a crime mystery without witnesses or "clues" or records? 



Looking into the remote past, we ask questions about beginnings: How 

 did the earth begin .-^ How did life begin? But the answers must be largely 

 speculative. There is no direct evidence. But we cannot help wondering, 

 How could it have been? We cannot help guessing. But we must not pretend 

 to l^now — just how the world began, for example, or how life first appeared. 

 Certainly we do not know merely because we have learned what the ancient 

 Assyrians or Egyptians believed. How could those ancients really know? 



As in attacking a murder mystery, we can undertake to solve these com- 

 plex and difficult problems in two quite distinct ways. We can solve the 

 mystery according to the way we feel about the persons or objects involved. 

 We can say, for example, "It must have been the butler, for I do not like his 

 eyes or his hair," or "It couldn't have been the duchess, for she came from our 

 town." In much the same spirit, we can explain night and day, for example, 

 by our need for darkness to sleep in. Or we can say that life could not have 

 evolved, because we do not like to be compared to lobsters or lions. 



The other general method starts out by asking. What are the facts? Of 

 course we cannot get the facts 2ihou\. just what happened. If we could, there 

 would be no mystery to solve. But there are facts, and we have to get all the 

 facts that bear upon our problem — without prejudice. We might consider, 

 for example, that there are some very nice people with hair or eyes like the 

 butler's, or that even in our town there have been some people who really 

 were not very nice. Or we might consider that day and night are sufficiently 

 explained by observing the movements of the sun around the earth. 



As to the origin of life, we have to consider facts about the history of the 

 earth — not what is told by people who remember what they were told — but 

 facts. We must have facts about the contours of the earth's surfaces and about 

 the constant distribution of earth material and waters. We must have facts 

 about the structure of the earth's crust, about the chemistry of the oceans 

 and of soils, about the varieties of life-forms and their distribution. These 

 facts by themselves tell us only what we can see now. To form any sensible 

 ideas as to what happened millions of years ago — and even to "believe" that 

 there have been millions of years rather than a few hundred or a few thousand 

 — we have to go a step farther. We have to make up our minds about what 

 we shall assume about happenings in general. Do things just happen? Is 

 there any order in the universe that we can discover? Is there any connection 

 between what happened yesterday and what will happen tomorrow? If we 

 assume that anything can happen, that there is no sense, no understandable 



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