THE SCIENTIFIC
MONTHLY
JULY, 1916
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF LIFE UPON THE EARTH[1]
By Henry Fairfield Osborn
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
LECTURE I. PART I
Introduction
WE may introduce this great subject by putting to ourselves four leading questions: first, is life something new; second, is life evolution the same as stellar evolution; third, is there evidence that similar physico-chemical laws prevail in life and in lifeless evolution; fourth, are life forms the result of law or of chance?
First: does the origin of life[2] represent the beginning of something new in the cosmos, or does it represent the continuation and evolution of forms of matter and energy already found in the earth, in the sun, and in the other stars? This is the first question which occurs to us, and it is one which has not yet been answered. The more traditional opinion is that something new entered this and possibly other planets with the appearance of life; this is also involved in all the older and newer hypotheses which group around the idea of vitalism or the existence of specific, distinctive and adaptive energies in living matter. The more modern scientific opinion is that life arose from a recombination of forces preexisting in the cosmos. To hold to this answer, that life does not represent the entrance either of a new form of matter or of a new series of laws but is simply another step in the general evolutionary process, is certainly consistent with the development of me-
- ↑ Fourth course of lectures on the William Ellery Hale Foundation, National Academy of Sciences, delivered at the meeting of the academy at Washington, on April 17 and 19, 1916. The author is greatly indebted for many notes and suggestions in physics and chemistry to his colleagues in the National Academy and Columbia University, especially to M. I. Pupin, F. W. Clarke, G. F. Becker and W. J. Gies.
- ↑ In order to consider this problem from a fresh, unbiased, and original point of view the author has purposely refrained from reading the recent treatises of Shafer, Moore and others on the origin of life. In the chemical section the author is, however, indebted to the very suggestive work of Henderson entitled "The Fitness of the Environment."
