ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 considers both the requirements of life (e.g., a membrane to protect cell contents, and metabolism to provide energy) and the leading hypotheses for life's place of origin (e.g., Darwin's "warm little pond" and "black smokers" at the bottom of the sea). The science is most speculative in this chapter because few physical signatures of the origin of life have survived.
The earliest evidence is from a form of carbon associated with living cells, possibly dating to 4.1 billion years ago, but it is uninformative with respect to the form and function of the earliest cells. For those characteristics the oldest glimpse is afforded by stromatolites, mats of sediment formed by primitive bacteria, but these date "only" to 3.5 billion years ago.
The chapter also introduces the concepts of descent with modification and natural selection, and asks whether evolution is random. The answer is yes and no -- it is largely random in the descent with modification component but definitely nonrandom with respect to natural selection.
What does this have to do with cognitive evolution? More than you may think, because primitive transport mechanisms for exchanging chemicals across membranes were the ancestors of our sensory mechanisms.
