Professor Schafer dismissed the extra-terrestrial or cosmic theories of the
origin of life on this planet as open to fatal objections and inherently improbable. The origin of life, we were driven to believe, was due, not to any sudden alteration, but to a gradual and continual process of change from material which was lifeless, through material on the borderland between inanimate and animate, to material with all the characteristics we associated with the term life. But the problem would remain insoluble if we were confined to the supposition that the evolution of life had only occurred once in the past history of the globe. This hypothesis he could not accept, and was forced to the conclusion that if living matter had been evolved from lifeless in the past, its evolution was possible in the present and the future.
Previous page
