We have looked at a number of Darwin’s comments in his book and correspondence during this series of articles.
It is clear, of course, that he was a strong advocate of evolution through natural selection, but he did highlight some of the difficulties he saw with his theory, though he imagined that forthcoming research would clarify the problems. In fact, we believe that the subsequent research has raised the level of these problems.
Pond of life
One area that had not yet begun to be tackled was in the field of chemistry. How did inanimate matter give rise to the first living cell? Charles Darwin commented on the matter in a letter to Joseph Hooker (1871):
