How did life emerge on the ancient earth? Since the middle of the twentieth century, scientists have applied a plethora of experimental and theoretical approaches in an attempt to answer this question. Yet it is still considered one of the most challenging questions facing science today. Holding different theories and favoring different scenarios, all researchers, however, are united in a conviction that the organization of the first living systems out of chemical building blocks was a natural process. Moreover, scientists have no doubt that it was an evolutionary process.

The evolutionary view presents a radical departure from the previous conception of the origin of life held by both laypersons and naturalists for most of human history. On the basis of everyday experience, people were obviously aware that various organisms were being sexually generated from their parents. Since the rise of monotheistic religions, the general belief was that God originally created the “founding fathers” of the major types of living beings that kept perpetuating their fixed kind generation after generation. In parallel, people were also convinced that plants and many animals repeatedly arise under the influence of moisture and heat not from parents but rather from mud, tree bark, excrement, and decaying plants and animal matter. This belief in “spontaneous generation” accompanied humanity from antiquity till the modern age, having been sustained in different epochs by both religious and materialistic lines of reasoning (Farley 1977; Fry 2000).