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Essay on Life and Times of Darwin: Precipitating Forces
Leading into the Origin of Species
Charles Robert Darwin was born in the village of Shrewsbury (England) on February 12, 1809, and he died on April 19, 1882. Shrewsbury, 160 miles northwest of London and close to the border of Wales, is approximately 4,000 miles from the United States of America and “on that same day, the 16th President of the United States of America” (Miller, 1982: 34); Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was born in Kentucky.
How old is life? When do green organisms appear? Why ask such questions? Sheer human curiosity prompts such questions. I was recently told that “science has no business in speculating about origins” (Shipman, 1994: 56), a topic better left to religion, but then which religion? The fact that life is a continuous process and all organisms share very general characters suggests to biologists that all “living organisms share an origin” (Stone, 1980: 77), a common ancestry.
Numerous other individuals had seen many similar things that Darwin had seen in his travels, but it was Charles Darwin who was to see what everybody else has seen and then think what nobody has thought. The origin of life from nonliving materials has perplexed generations of biologists. Our perceptual problem is that all existing forms of life are admittedly so complex that their genesis from nonliving materials seems improbable. We cannot answer the question, how simple can life be? If you only have a Cray super computer, and no knowledge of prior computer engineering, no memory of adding machines, vacuum tubes, Univocal, calculators, and other intermediates, could you imagine the abacus? Just as scaffoldings are necessary to construct buildings, but then are removed leaving only the completed building behind, biologists are left to speculate about the scaffoldings of life, those simple molecules, assemblages, and forms that by necessity preceded more complex present day organisms, but have now disappeared................
