Views over Evolution
The first view, that the germs of life may have come to this
planet on a meteoric visitor from some other world, as a
storm-driven bird may take its parasites to some distant island,
is not without adherents to-day. It was put forward long ago by
Lord Kelvin and others; it has been revived by the distinguished
Swede, Professor Svante Arrhenius. The scientific objection to it
is that the more intense (ultra-violet) rays of the sun would
frill such germs as they pass through space. But a broader
objection, and one that may dispense us from dwelling on it, is
that we gain nothing by throwing our problems upon another
planet. We have no ground for supposing that the earth is less
capable of evolving life than other planets.
The second view is that, when the earth had passed through its
white-hot stage, great masses of very complex chemicals, produced
by the great heat, were found on its surface. There is one
complex chemical substance in particular, called cyanogen, which
is either an important constituent of living matter, or closely
akin to it. Now we need intense heat to produce this substance in
the laboratory. May we not suppose that masses of it were
produced during the incandescence of the earth, and that, when
the waters descended, they passed through a series of changes
which culminated in living plasm? Such is the "cyanogen
hypothesis" of the origin of life, advocated by able
physiologists such as Pfluger, Verworn, and others. It has the
merit of suggesting a reason why life may not be evolving from
non-life in nature to-day, although it may have so evolved in the
Archaean period.
Other students suggest other combinations of carbon-compounds and
water in the early days. Some suggest that electric action was
probably far more intense in those ages; others think that
quantities of radium may have been left at the surface. But the
most important of these speculations on the origin of life in
early times, and one that has the merit of not assuming any
essentially different conditions then than we find now, is
contained in a recent pronouncement of one of the greatest
organic chemists in Europe, Professor Armstrong. He says that
such great progress has been made in his science--the science of
the chemical processes in living things--that "their cryptic
character seems to have disappeared almost suddenly." On the
strength of this new knowledge of living matter, he ventures to
say that "a series of lucky accidents" could account for the
first formation of living things out of non-living matter in
Archaean times. Indeed, he goes further. He names certain
inorganic substances, and says that the blowing of these into
pools by the wind on the primitive planet would set afoot
chemical combinations which would issue in the production of
living matter.
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