The origin of life on Earth: hypotheses and doubts

The best minds of antiquity and modernity have led and continue to argue about how the appearance of biological beings on one of the innumerable planets in the universe has become possible. The fact that this issue - painful, is evidenced by numerous myths and traditions, in a poetic form describing the origin of life on Earth. Of course, many centuries have passed since the days of Ancient Egypt and Babylon, mankind has accumulated a considerable amount of scientific knowledge, but this issue is still open. And the controversy on this matter is still all the same irreconcilable.

Despite many different hypotheses, they can all be combined into three basic concepts of the origin of life : creationism, evolutionism and the theory of panspermia. Of course, this is a very conditional division, and within each of the concepts there are many more currents that disagree with each other. It should also be borne in mind that adherents of a hypothesis may recognize the partial rightness of another concept. The hypotheses about the spontaneous generation of living things from inanimate nature, as well as the concept of biochemical evolution expressed in the 1920s by the Russian scientist AI Oparin, stand apart.

Let us briefly consider these theories. Creationism is without a doubt the most ancient of them. He considers the origin of life on Earth as the process of God's creation. The sacred texts of the religions of the world say that living beings, however, like the entire material world, were created by God or gods. In its fundamental flow, creationism does not recognize evolution and natural selection, believing that all beings were created once and in the form in which they now appear. But most of the adherents of the theory of the emergence of life as an act of God's will partially acknowledge the theory of the evolution of species.

At one time, Charles Darwin made a furor among contemporaries, suggesting that the development of man and all modern species of plants and animals underwent a process of natural selection. Organisms had to adapt to changing environmental conditions and evolve. Thus, the origin of life on Earth followed the path of development from the simplest organisms to more complex ones. If we continue this theory "in depth", we should assume the existence of one "common ancestor" for all living things.

The theory of panspermia considers the origin of life on Earth as a result of the introduction from the cosmos into the atmosphere of our planet of the simplest organisms. The hypothesis is based on the properties of some of the simplest cells to safely overcome such suicidal conditions for more perfect organisms, as close to absolute zero temperature, complete vacuum and radiation. In this concept there is also a place for the doctrine that living organisms were deliberately left on the planet by aliens, and that life was born simultaneously with the Big Bang - the beginning of the universe.

Of course, all the hypotheses of the origin of life on Earth have their own "strong" and "weak" places. Only the doctrine of spontaneous creatures was completely refuted (for example, it used to be that flies "produce" rotten meat, and lice self-germinate in dirty hair). The experiments of Louis Pasteur showed the inconsistency of this theory. So far, no results have been shown in the laboratory studies begun by Oparin and continued by the English biochemist Haldane. These scientists argued that the simplest cells could be generated by the evolution of complex carbon compounds.