How life arose according to DARWIN

We all have a very clear idea of ​​what he thought Charles Darwin on species evolution: his generation and the development of him until reaching his present state but, what was the theory on the origin of the life of Charles Darwin?

If we study his main work, The origin of species, we will realize that it does not speak of the origin of life itself, but of each of the species. Until a few years ago it was believed that it was because Darwin did not have a clear idea about it but, after studying letters with friends and colleagues, researchers discovered that Darwin did think about it. In this lesson from a TEACHER we will address the question ofhow life arose according to Darwin? Why didn't he express it publicly?

In the first edition of his main work, The origin of species, from 1859, Charles Darwinwrote:

"All organic beings that have ever lived on Earth could be descendants in some primordial way."

In the rest of this work, Darwin consciously avoided commenting on the origin of life. It was not until the last part of the work that Charles Darwin made mention of the origin of life again. At the end of his work, mention is made of the "Creator" and, although in some writings it has been said that Darwin invoked a divine intervention, it is believed that this was an addition to the gallery, which later he regretted.

Throughout the editions that were published, Darwin added some notes and clarifications about the work and, among them, about the origin of life. In these it is seen that Darwin was, throughout his life, clarifying his opinion on the origin of life or, at least, the way of expressing it. At first, Charles Darwin took a conservative and cautious stance and said that science at the time was not advanced enough to explain the origin of life.

In the third edition of the Origin of Species, in 1861, Darwin wrote:

"It is not a valid objection that science has not yet shed light on the lofty problem of the essence or origin of life."

Although, in a letter that he sent that same year to his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker, he told her that he was a "junk thinking" talking about the origin of life and proposing "you might well think about the origin of matter".

Darwin's Real Opinion on the Origin of Life

On 1871In a letter to that same friend, Darwin writes for the first time his opinion on the origin of life. Darwin makes the following statement:

"It is often said that all the conditions that gave rise to the first appearance of a living being are now present. But if (and what a great if) we could conceive that, in a warm little pond with all kinds of ammonia and salts phosphoric, light, heat, electricity, a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo further changes complex. In the present, such a compound would be instantly eaten, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before the living creatures were formed [...] "

On 1872, Henry Charlton Bastian published a book on the subject called "The beginnings of life". In it, two hypotheses were proposed about the origin of life: archaeobiosis and heterogenesis. Heterogenesis proposed that current life came from matter of pre-existing living organisms while archaeobiosis proposed the origin of life from non-living materials ". After reading the work, Darwin wrote to his friend Wallace to say that he generally agreed with the theory of archaeobiosis Bastian although he was not entirely convinced.

Although Darwin was in favor of the theory of archaeobiosis as the origin of life, he always pointed that he was not entirely convinced by the tests and trials that researchers of the time contributed.

Darwin's hypothesis on the origin of life is broadly based on the existence of a small warm pond.

This small pond would have all kinds of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat and electricity. Thanks to these conditions, Darwin imagined that chemically a protein compound could have been formed, which could undergo even more complex changes that would give rise to a very primitive living being.

In the present, such a compound would be instantly eaten or absorbed by some organism but at that time there would be no living creatures that could kill it.

The reason why, in a public way, the ideas of how life arose according to Darwin were not known is simple: Darwin supported that, in some way, what at that time was called the "spontaneous generation" it was involved in the origin of life.

Other authors argued that spontaneous generation was the origin of species, which went against their research. If he had publicly supported the idea of ​​spontaneous generation of the origin of life, he could have dug the grave to his own investigations since, the common public would have thought: "if life could have been generated spontaneously, why could species have been generated in the same way after species?".

Darwin made sure to always defend that the origin of life and the origin of species they were two different processes, but he did not know if the public would understand the great importance of making this distinction. Life could have happened, "accidentally" and with the right conditions in a given moment, but the species would evolve and would not have formed one by one per generation spontaneous.