Origin of life

Abstract

This book is built of very large blocks of 1 live contemporary biology made to cohere by a thick coating of an unusual compound— a philosophic amalgam of materialism (“critical naturalism”), purpose and teleology, God and Christianity; “the spurious concept of chance finds no place to insinuate itself.” The origin of life, though outwardly granted to “natural law,” is treated mainly as an area already exhibiting certain phenomena of importance to the book's argument. Sequence in organization leading to life is meagerly discussed; the coacervates and their literature are not mentioned; the full scale of viruses is viewed not as steps toward the living but as arrivals. The scant pages on the origin of life could have been written thirty or more years ago. © 1952 by the American Genetics Association.