ABSTRACT
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. This fundamental presupposition is implemented in the search for physical and chemical processes that might have brought about the emergence of life under prebiotic conditions. The naturalistic conception of the origin of life is by now part of the general scientific worldview that developed historically beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries. This worldview was stimulated first by the rise of the physical sciences and was joined during the nineteenth century by the development of modern biology. Specific cultural, social, and political changes constituted the framework within which this worldview grew. One of the major tenets that came to characterize this intellectual and cultural transformation was the rejection of supernatural purposes as causal explanations of natural phenomena. These scientific and philosophical developments reached their culmination when Darwin’s theory of evolution, published in mid-nineteenth century, came into fruition in the first half of the twentieth century. It was the “neo-Darwinian synthesis,” taking place in the 1940s, that established natural selection as the major evolutionary mechanism and rejected all purposive explanations of evolution previously entertained (Mayr 1991:135, 138; McMullin 1998:704; Provine 1988:58–62).
