Two biologists, father and son, both bearing the same name, share with our readers some highly interesting hypotheses regarding the beginning of life on Earth.

Around 4.5 billion years ago, on the periphery of the Milky Way, a cloud of molecules rotating around a small star thickened into bits of matter, which were tiny amid the immensity of the stars. Soon one of these bits of matter started to behave strangely; an atmosphere appeared above its surface and on the surface itself water, which contained complicated chemical compounds. Finally, in addition to the blue of the sky and white of the clouds, the planet was decorated in a strange green colour, while the thin atmosphere wrapping the globe became saturated with a poisonous gas: oxygen.

These were the consequences of the emergence of life on Earth. Where did it come from? Let’s go back in time to the very beginning. What follows is a family chronicle of all living beings.

The roots of the family tree

In Charles Darwin’s notes, we find a hand-made sketch presenting a relationship diagram of all living organisms: a ‘tree of life’ modelled on a ‘family tree’. Interestingly, Darwin himself did not in any way speculate about the beginnings of life and wrote nearly nothing about it; he believed that we will never find out how life was created, yet he was interested in knowing how it had evolved from simpler forms to millions of species, including humans. Darwin was not the first person who figured that all species originated from one common ancestor. The same idea came to the mind of George-Louis Leclerc, better known as Buffon, in the 18th century, and many others later on. It really wasn’t until the second half of the 20th century that modern genetics supplied proof for this.

All living organisms, from bacteria to humans, have genes recorded on long strands of a chemical substance