Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

The Origin of Life Hypotheses abound on how life originated. Most theories analyze the ingredients of life and speculate how they may have been generated by the Earth’s early activity.  It was in 1952 that a young US physicist, Stanley Miller, working with Harold Urey, advanced the idea that the first molecules of life (including aminoacids, the building blocks of proteins) were formed accidentally by the Earth’s early volcanism and then triggered into reproducing systems by the energy of the sun and lightning strikes. His calculations of how lightning  may have affected the Earth's primitive atmosphere gave rise to the quest for the experiment that would reproduce the birth of life in a laboratory (with hints of Frankenstein and all the rest). One catch remained, though: the product of Miller’s prebiotic chemistry would still be inactive chemicals. Miller simply revised a theory of chemical formation of life that dates back to the Russian chemist Alexander Oparin, who in 1924 first proposed that life could have been induced in the primeval soup.   Back to the beginning of the chapter "The Evolution of Life: Of Designers and Design" | Back to the index of all chapters