Darwinism and the Origin of Life

Abstract

Historically, ideas on the origins of life have been mingled with evolutionary explanations. Darwin avoided discussing the origin of the very first species in public although he acknowledged the possibility that life originated by natural causes. Some of his followers adopted this materialistic position and advocated some sort of spontaneous generation in the distant past. Nevertheless, Pasteur's experiments were a major obstacle for scientific acceptance of the sudden emergence of life. The scientific study of the origin of life, established in the 1920s, required abandoning the idea of a unique chance event and considering a view of life emerging as the result of a long evolutionary process. At the turn of the twentieth century, some authors adopted non-Darwinian views on the origin of life, exemplified in this paper by the neovitalism of some Catholic scientists. We propose that Darwinism represents a genuine example of an adaptive scientific framework. By recognizing the shift in the features characterizing Darwinism, we can understand its relationship with theories on the origin of life in a non-dogmatic line.