Abstract
There were two main historical views on the origin of life in the Western civilization. In one, life appeared at some time in the distant past. In particular, in Judeo-Christian tradition the Book of Genesis was interpreted as revealing that God had created all living beings as they appear now. Another view was held by the ancient Greeks, who thought that life can form at any time spontaneously and directly from inanimate materials. In the 19th century, Pasteur’s careful sterilization experiments ended the concept of everyday spontaneous generation of life from inanimate substances. Then it was reasoned (as a variant of the first historical view mentioned above) that life must have had at least one initial origin from inanimate substances in the distant past. Such origin-of-life theories were pioneered by Oparin in the 1930s, based on the idea that living structures have been assembled by spontaneous chemical reactions from preexisting compounds. How life actually originated on the Earth, is a great unsolved problem of modern science.
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