Wikipedia: Abiogenesis

Wikipedia writes:Pasteur had demonstrated that Aristotle was wrong. And he seemed to have demonstrated simultaneously that Charles Darwin was also wrong. Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, published in 1859, had presented an argument that modern organisms had evolved, over immense periods of time, from simpler ancestral forms, suggesting, without actually stating, that at the original point of origin there had existed an ur-organism with no prior ancestor. Darwin himself declined to speculate on this implication of his theory - "" - but the reaction of some scientists was categorical. "Science brings a vast amount of inductive evidence against this hypothesis," stated Lord Kelvin. "Dead matter cannot become living without coming under under the influence of matter previously alive." Lord Kelvin had in mind, not Pasteur, but the findings of his own specialty, physics. Darwin's implication breached the second law of thermodynamics. "If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics," wrote the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, with no reference to Darwin or biology, "I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humilitiation." The second law was sacrosanct.The second law states that "the total entropy of any thermodynamically isolated system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value." In plain English, things left alone will become less organised, not more. The waves destroy sandcastles, they do not built them; a hot body will become cooler, and its surroundings warmer, until both are equal; and non-life, by definition non-organised, will never give rise to the more organised form which even the simplest microbe represents. Lord Kelvin was quite right: the second law prohibited the spontaneous emergence of life.Or so, on theoretical principles, it would seem. But both biological theory and experimental evidence soon suggested otherwise. First the theory: In 1936 Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin, in his "The Origin of Life on Earth", demonstrated that organic molecules could be created in an oxygen-less atmosphere, through the action of sunlight. These molecules, he suggested, combine in ever-more complex fashion until they are dissolved into a coacervate droplet. These droplets could then "grow" by fusion with other droplets, "reproduce" through fission into daughter droplets, and so have a primitive metabolism in which those factors which promote "cell integrity" survive, and those that don't become extinct. Around the same time J.B.S Haldane suggested that the earth's pre-biotic oceans - very different from their modern counterparts - would have formed a "hot dilute soup" in which organic compounds, the building blocks of life, could have formed. In 1953, taking their cue from Oparin and Haldane, the chemists Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey carried out an experiment on the "primeval soup". Within two weeks organic amino acids, the basic building blocks of life, had formed. The second law had been breached, or so it appeared.It was not really breached. What Miller and Urey had demonstrated was that the second law only applies to thermodynamically isolated systems, and that systems are in fact rarely isolated: they exist within larger systems, and a local increase in organisation is always possible. Neither had Miller and Urey actually created life; they had merely demonstrated that a more complex molecule ” the amino-acids ” could emerge spontaneously from simpler chemicals, in the presence of an external energy source in an atmosphere largely devoid of oxygen (the experiment involved shooting a spark, representing lightning, into their flask of supposedly primitive earth-gases).