11. How Life Arose¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 11, "How Life Arose," presents a dialectical materialist account of life's emergence and evolution, challenging both creationist and mechanistic explanations. The chapter's core argument is that life arose not through random accident or divine intervention, but as a necessary, qualitative leap in matter's development, governed by natural physical and chemical laws.
The foundation is the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis, developed in the 1920s by Aleksandr Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane, who independently proposed that life emerged from a reducing primordial atmosphere through spontaneous chemical reactions powered by ultraviolet radiation. Oparin explicitly acknowledged his debt to Engels, who had earlier argued that life emerges as a new property at a definite stage in matter's development. The hypothesis was initially ignored because orthodox biochemists, following Pasteur's refutation of spontaneous generation, failed to distinguish between life arising now and life arising once under primordial conditions. Laboratory experiments, including the famous Urey-Miller experiment of 1953, later confirmed that amino acids and other organic compounds could form under such conditions.
The chapter refutes creationist arguments about the astronomical odds against life arising by chance. Instead, it draws on Stuart Kauffman's work on complexity, which suggests that in a rich primordial soup, an "autocatalytic set" of self-reinforcing reactions could form spontaneously, exhibiting lifelike properties without DNA or cell membranes. This represents a phase transition, not a random event. The earliest organisms were prokaryotic cells, which dominated for 2.4 billion years before the emergence of nucleated eukaryotes enabled greater complexity and sexual reproduction.
The fossil record does not show gradual change but sudden appearances, as in the Cambrian Explosion approximately 570 million years ago. Stephen Jay Gould's theory of punctuated equilibria explains this: long periods of stability interrupted by sudden, catastrophic change and mass extinctions. The chapter criticises the meteorite-catastrophe theory for mass extinctions as insufficient, arguing that the laws governing evolution must be found within the evolutionary process itself, not in extraneous factors. A lack of dialectical method, the author insists, leads to such dead ends.