Darwin Day: The Last, Biggest, Hardest Puzzle of All-How Life Began

Speaker Gerard Harbison, PhD will discuss the origin of life. In 1928 JBS Haldane proposed that life originated by a gradual process of chemical evolution 3.8 billion years ago. In 1953 Stanley Miller's attempt to reproduce conditions on the ancient Earth yielded amino acids. Since then hypotheses include an organic soup that produced RNA, concentrated chemical activity on the surface of clay (University of Glasgow), and the nutrient rich environments filled with reactive gases issuing from deep-sea hydrothermal vents. MIT physicists have proposed systems driven by an external source of energy that become increasingly efficient at organizing energy. Who's right?