5. Primordial Soup Hypothesis

Alexander Ivanovich Oparin

In 1924, a Russian biochemist, Alexander Ivanovich Oparin mentioned that organic molecules are the necessary building blocks for the evolution of life but the atmospheric oxygen prevented the synthesis of the organic molecules. He also argued that a “Primordial Soup” of organic molecules could be created in an oxygen-less atmosphere through the action of sunlight. These would combine in even more complex ways until they formed coacervate droplets which would “grow” by fusion with other droplets and “reproduce” through fission into daughter droplets and so have a primitive metabolism in which factors that promote “cell integrity” survive and those that do not become extinct.

 

Around the same time, a British-Indian biologist J. B. S. Haldane (John Burdon Sanderson Haldane) had concluded the primordial soup hypothesis as follows:

>> The early Earth had a chemically reducing atmosphere.

>> This atmosphere exposed to energy in various forms led to the production of simple organic compounds like monomers.

>> These compounds accumulated in a “soup” that may have concentrated at various locations like shorelines, oceanic vents.

>> By further transformation, more complex organic polymers and ultimately life would developed in the soup.

J. B. S. Haldane

Haldane also suggested that our Earth's prebiotic oceans were very different from what the oceans are now; that prebiotic oceans would have formed a “hot dilute soup” in which organic compounds could have formed. This idea was called “Biopoiesis” which means the process of living matter evolving from self-replicating but non-living molecules.