Primordial soup

Primordial soup, or prebiotic soup (also sometimes referred as prebiotic broth), is the hypothetical set of conditions present on the Earth around 4.2 to 4.0 billions of years ago. It is a fundamental aspect to the heterotrophic theory of the origin of life, first proposed by Alexander Oparin in 1924, and John Burdon Sanderson Haldane in 1929.So with animals, some spring from parent animals according to their kind, whilst others grow spontaneously and not from kindred stock; and of these instances of spontaneous generation some come from putrefying earth or vegetable matter, as is the case with a number of insects, while others are spontaneously generated in the inside of animals out of the secretions of their several organs It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living being are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sort of ammonia and phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present such matter would be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed .When ultra-violet light acts on a mixture of water, carbon dioxide, and ammonia, a vast variety of organic substances are made, including sugars and apparently some of the materials from which proteins are built up. before the origin of life they must have accumulated till the primitive oceans reached the consistency of hot dilute soup. Primordial soup, or prebiotic soup (also sometimes referred as prebiotic broth), is the hypothetical set of conditions present on the Earth around 4.2 to 4.0 billions of years ago. It is a fundamental aspect to the heterotrophic theory of the origin of life, first proposed by Alexander Oparin in 1924, and John Burdon Sanderson Haldane in 1929. The notion that living beings originated from inanimate materials comes from the Ancient Greeks—the theory known as spontaneous generation. Aristotle in the 4th century BCE gave a proper explanation, writing: Aristotle also states that it is not only that animals originate from other similar animals, but also that living things do arise and always have arisen from lifeless matter. His theory remained the dominant idea on origin of life from the ancient philosophers to the Renaissance thinkers in various forms. With the birth of modern science, experimental refutations emerged. Italian physician Francesco Redi demonstrated in 1668 that maggots developed from rotten meat only in a jar where flies could enter, but not in closed-lid jar. He concluded that: omne vivum ex vivo (All life comes from life). The experiment of French chemist Louis Pasteur in 1859 is regarded as the death blow to spontaneous generation. He experimentally showed that organisms (microbes) can not grow in a sterilised water, unless it is exposed to air. The experiment won him the Alhumbert Prize in 1862 from the French Academy of Sciences, and he concluded: Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment. Evolutionary biologists believed that a kind of spontaneous generation, but different from the simple Aristotelian doctrine, must have worked for the emergence of life. French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck had speculated that the first life form started from non-living materials. 'Nature, by means of heat, light, electricity and moisture', he wrote in 1809 in Philosophie Zoologique (The Philosophy of Zoology), 'forms direct or spontaneous generation at that extremity of each kingdom of living bodies, where the simplest of these bodies are found.' When English naturalist Charles Darwin introduced the theory of natural selection in his book On the Origin of Species in 1859, his supporters, such as a German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, criticised him for not using his theory to explain the origin of life. Haeckel wrote in 1862: 'The chief defect of the Darwinian theory is that it throws no light on the origin of the primitive organism—probably a simple cell—from which all the others have descended. When Darwin assumes a special creative act for this first species, he is not consistent, and, I think, not quite sincere.' Although Darwin did not speak explicitly about the origin of life in On the Origin of Species, he did mention a 'warm little pond' in a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker dated February 1, 1871 A coherent scientific argument was introduced by a Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin in 1924. According to Oparin, in the primitive Earth's surface, carbon, hydrogen, water vapour, and ammonia reacted to form the first organic compounds. Unbeknownst to Oparin, whose writing was circulated only in Russian, an English scientist John Burdon Sanderson Haldane independently arrived at similar conclusion in 1929. It was Haldane who first used the term 'soup' to describe the accumulation of organic material and water in the primitive Earth Today the theory is variously known as the 'Heterotrophic origin of life theory' or the 'Oparin-Haldane hypothesis' Biochemist Robert Shapiro has summarized the basic points of the theory in its 'mature form' as follows: