Origin of Life Initiatives

In the beginning, the transition from physics and chemistry to biology laid the foundation for Earth’s vast biosphere. In 1794, Erasmus Darwin (pictured left), Charles’s grandfather, entered the origin of life fray with his popular book Zoonomia, noting –

“Would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament?”

Amazingly, while every known early culture recorded an explanation of the origin of life, it remains one of modern science’s most profound mysteries. As Charles Darwin notes in The Origin of Species in 1859 –

“It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravity?”

Currently, three major origins-of-life initiatives aim to explain how the framework of life emerged. However, modern science is not equipped to study historical events since these cannot be directly observed or tested in the present.

Studying the origin of life is vastly more complex than studying current events.

Modern Science

The strength of modern science is founded on the use of quantitative and qualitative empirical evidence, inductive reasoning, and experimental testing. Modern science aims to understand how nature works.

Albert Eisenstein (pictured right) used modern scientific methods to derive the E = MC² equation to explain how energy and mass are related. However, it is impossible to use the scientific method to validate an origin-of-life hypothesis, since its processes are not current events.

Modern science and historical science are fundamentally different scientific methods with different aims and uses.

Historical Science

Unlike modern scientific methods, historical science methods play a crucial role in understanding geology, paleontology, cosmology, and the origin of life. Historical science methods aim to explain what happened in the past but cannot explain how nature works.

The methods of historical science include indirect evidence, retrodiction, consilience, modeling, and reconstruction. Since past events cannot be directly observed or tested, they cannot be studied using modern scientific methods.

By contrast, the modern scientific methods developed during the Scientific Revolution aim to explain how nature works. Isaac Newton (pictured left) applied the scientific method to become one of the most influential scientists of all time.

Darwin’s Published View

Darwin’s (pictured right) aim centered on studying how nature currently works – an openly mechanistic approach. The title of The Origin of Species includes the phrase “by means of natural selection.” Darwin studied how nature works through adaptation in the present time.

However, historical sciences are not equipped to explain how nature works. More specifically, historical sciences are not equipped to study how non‑living chemistry autonomously transitions into integrated biological systems.

The challenge to understanding abiogenesis is the missing gap blocking the scientific development of any comprehensive theory of evolution. Surprisingly, Darwin used a non-scientific explanation to work around the gap in the last paragraph of The Origin of Species –

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.”

Darwin’s Private View

Privately, however, Darwin held a radically different view of abiogenesis. In an 1871 letter to Joseph J. Hooker (pictured left), Darwin explains –

“I am always delighted to see a word in favour of Pangenesis, which some day, I believe, will have a resurrection… But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.”

However, neither the “Creator” nor the “warm little pond” hypothesis is scientifically valid. All origin-of-life hypotheses have an unexplainable gap between inert chemistry and integrated biological systems. Autonomous abiogenesis has never been observed.

Yet a cohesive scientific theory of biological evolution must explain how the origin-of-life gap can be resolved. To address the origin-of-life gap dilemma, evolutionary scientists have invested in initiatives to develop a new model of life’s origin.

However, origin-of-life research is profoundly more challenging to study than evolutionary biology. Evolution must explain how adaptive changes in living systems give rise to the origin of species. However, abiogenesis must explain how living systems autonomously arise from nonliving precursors.

Natural selection can only act on living systems.

Recent Origin Initiatives

The Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, the Harry Lonsdale’s Origin‑of‑Life Challenge, and the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) teams are currently the most visible and influential origin‑of‑life initiatives.

Harvard Origins

The Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, introduced in 2005, was the most progressive initiative to study abiogenesis of the twenty-first century. The initiative was the first to develop a university‑wide, interdisciplinary, cross‑faculty origin‑of‑life program.

And, unlike other approaches, Harvard (pictured right) pursued a broad, multi‑mechanistic research agenda. The agenda spanned from planetary environments and prebiotic chemistry to RNA replication, protocell assembly, and early metabolic evolution.

The RNA World model gained popularity in the early 1980’s following the discovery that RNA can act as an enzyme.

RNA World

RNA was found to both store genetic information and perform enzymatic functions, solving the “chicken‑and‑egg” paradox of DNA and proteins.

In 2011. Harold Lonsdale (pictured left), a scientist and businessman, funded a $2 million Origin of Life Challenge: How Did Life Begin. The winner of the funding competition was based on the best proposal to study the self-organizing RNA World hypothesis.

RNA became the only known molecule capable of self-replicating and catalyzing biochemical reactions. John Sutherland of the Medical Research Council Laboratory in Molecular Biology, Cambridge, and Matthew Powner of University College, London, were named as the competition winners.

RNA World Critics

Stuart Kauffman (pictured right), a theoretical biologist at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Calgary, is a leading proponent of self-organization concepts. However, Kauffman has been a critic of the RNA world hypothesis. In an interview with Suzan Mazur, Kaufmann explains –

“They [evolutionary molecular scientists] tried for 40 years to get single-stranded RNA molecules to replicate, perhaps hundreds of chemists, and they all failed. It should work. But it hasn’t. And after 40 years or 50 years, you think — maybe it’s the wrong idea. People really tried hard.”

Even if chemists could create self-replicating molecules in the laboratory, Kauffman explains –

“Now, there’s another huge question. Just because a smart chemist can create a collectively autocatalytic peptide set in a test tube, that leaves open the question of how one could arise on the early Earth without a smart chemist.”

In the search to explain how abiogenesis may have emerged, scientists expanded into astrobiology as models of early Earth.

Astrobiology

Astrobiology aims to answer fundamental questions about the origin, distribution, and evolution of life in the universe. Research builds interdisciplinary collaborations across the fields of astronomy, astrochemistry, Earth and life sciences.

In 1960, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) began funding biological studies through NASA’s Exobiology program. In the 1990’s, the program was expanded into the current NASA Astrobiology program.

The NASA Astrobiology program has supported a broad range of abiogenesis initiatives. Recently, individual grants totaling $40 million have been issued, including an $8 million grant to Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfeld to define life.

However, in an interview with journalist Suzan Mazur, Woese summarized the current state of origin of life research, noting –

“That’s the problem. We don’t know what it [life] is.”

In 2011, NASA launched the $2.5 billion Curiosity rover, officially known as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). The stated goal of the mission is –

“Determine if Mars was ever able to support microbial life.”

However, the search for life beyond Earth has its critics.

Astrobiology Critics

George Gaylord Simpson (pictured right), one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the twentieth century, dismissed astrobiology outright, calling it –

“A wild spree more than a sober scientific program.”

According to American microbial physiologist Howard Gest –

“No evidence (exists) for extraterrestrial microbes”

Robert Hazen, an evolutionary research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Geophysical Laboratory, explains what really drives interest in astrobiology –

“Astrobiology is growing tremendously because there is a stable source of funding. Let’s face it. Science is a social endeavor. If people can get jobs, they’re going to go into the field.”

David Demer, director in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shares his thoughts on the future of astrobiology –

“In my judgment, it is implausible that life came to Earth in the form of extra-terrestrial spores or microorganisms.”

In the words of David Koch (pictured left), chemical engineer, multi-million-dollar donor to the National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution –

“Life started somehow. The details of how it started I don’t think anyone will ever be able to prove.”

A scientific theory of biological evolution that explains how Earth’s biosphere emerged naturally is incomplete without explaining how abiogenesis developed.

Genesis

Charles Darwin understood that an explanation of how Earth’s vast biosphere developed also requires an explanation of how life originated. However, since a scientific explanation of how life originated did not exist, Darwin wrote in his Autobiography –

“The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I, for one, must be content to remain an agnostic.”

Written by Moses, the Genesis account was embraced by the founders of the Scientific Revolution, including William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (pictured right). As an Irish mathematical physicist and engineer who formulated the first and second laws of thermodynamics, Kelvin explains –

“We feel that the power of investigating the laws established by the Creator for maintaining the harmony and permanence of His works is the noblest privilege which He has granted to our intellectual state.”

A scientific explanation of how life originated naturally did not exist then, and one still does not exist.

2020 Update

In 2019, the Royal Society announced the Origin Of Life: $10 Million Prize competition, spearheaded by Perry Marshall, an American marketing consultant. The challenge overview is “What is the secrete of life?”

“Origin of Life is the hardest question in science. No one knows how the first cell came about. But there’s a simpler, more fundamental question: Where did the information come from? An answer will trigger a quantum leap in Artificial Intelligence. This may be as big as the transistor or the discovery of DNA itself. A new $10 million prize seeks a definitive answer.”

- Prize entries are being accepted at herox.com/evolution2.0.
- Voices From Oxford’s official prize announcement page

According to WIKIPEDIA (2020),

“The origin of life on Earth is a scientific problem that is not yet solved. There are many ideas but few clear facts.”

2026 Update

Since 2012, origin‑of‑life research has not produced a consensus mechanism. Instead, the field has converged on a systems‑level perspective in which life’s emergence is treated as –

multi‑component
multi‑scale
environmentally scaffolded
chemically and informationally integrated

However, current reviews explicitly confirm that persistent questions remain and that no single causal mechanism has been scientifically validated. The abiogenesis gap remains mechanistically unresolved — then and now.

The aim of developing a cohesive, valid, scientifically grounded theory of evolution to account for Earth’s vast biosphere is increasingly improbable. As Steve Koppes, writing for the University of Chicago News (November 2025), explains –

“The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, all of which remain unverified.”

Origin of Life Initiatives is an Origin of Life article.

Darwin Then and Now is an educational resource on the intersection of evolution and science, highlighting the ongoing challenges to the theory of evolution.

Move On

Explore how to understand twenty-first-century concepts of evolution further using the following links –

- The Understanding Evolution category showcases how varying historical study approaches to evolution have led to varying conclusions. Subcategories include –
  - Studying Evolution explains how key evolution terms and concepts have changed since the 1958 publication of The Origin of Species.
  - What is Science explains Charles Darwin’s approach to science and how modern science approaches can be applied for different investigative purposes.
  - Evolution and Science feature study articles on how scientific evidence influences the current understanding of evolution.
  - Theory and Consensus feature articles on the historical timelines of the theory and Natural Selection.
- The Biography of Charles Darwin category showcases relevant aspects of his life.
- The Glossary defines terms used in studying the theory of biological evolution.