ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the philosophical aspects of the origin-of-life problem. The scientific study of the origin of life is based on the philosophical postulate that living systems emerged on the primordial Earth by natural means. The naturalistic conception of the origin of life is by part of the general scientific worldview that developed historically beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries. The discovery of the interdependence of genetic material and protein enzymes in extant cells and the specter of the chicken-and-egg problem became principal stimuli for research in the origin-of-life field. The evolutionary hypothesis of the origin of life, guiding investigations in the field, obviously assumes a continuous transition between the emergence of life and biological evolution. One of the crucial discoveries of molecular biology that transformed the thinking on the origin-of-life problem was the functional interdependence of nucleic acids and proteins. R. Dawkins’s conclusion leads the science of the origin of life to a dead-end.
