ABIOGENESIS
From Philosopedia
ABIOGENESIS
Abiogenesis is theory that living things are, or once were, developed from inanimate matter by what used to be called “spontaneous generation,” or by natural chemical processes. Spontaneous generation has been discredited; for example, nonliving rotten meat cannot give rise to maggots—without a live fly to lay an egg, the rotten meat stays dead meat.
However, Dr. Louis Lerman, a geophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, theorizes that bubbles forming on the surface of primordial seas collected chemicals and concentrated them for synthesis into complex molecules. According to his theory, through multistage reactions, constantly repeated by uncounted generations of bubbles, the molecules grow in size and complexity, ready for the transition to living, reproducing cells.
Joseph McCabe in 1950 said that the position of the rationalist is, like that of biologists generally, that the attempt to show that “life” or “vitality” is an immaterial something which could not have been evolved from matter has failed and it would therefore be absurd to suppose that, while our million species of advanced organisms are the outcome of evolution, the earliest and most primitive of all were not evolved.
