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Ways to celebrate earth month 2024 at the university of chicago, the origin of life on earth, explained.

The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, all of which remain unverified. To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms. What water, chemistry and temperature cycles fostered the chemical reactions that allowed life to emerge on our planet? Because life arose in the largely unknown surface conditions of Earth’s early history, answering these and other questions remains a challenge.

Several seminal experiments in this topic have been conducted at the University of Chicago, including the Miller-Urey experiment that suggested how the building blocks of life could form in a primordial soup.

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• When did life on Earth begin?

Where did life on Earth begin?

What are the ingredients of life on earth, what are the major scientific theories for how life emerged, what is chirality and why is it biologically important, what research are uchicago scientists currently conducting on the origins of life, when did life on earth begin .

Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Scientists think that by 4.3 billion years ago, Earth may have developed conditions suitable to support life. The oldest known fossils, however, are only 3.7 billion years old. During that 600 million-year window, life may have emerged repeatedly, only to be snuffed out by catastrophic collisions with asteroids and comets.

The details of those early events are not well preserved in Earth’s oldest rocks. Some hints come from the oldest zircons, highly durable minerals that formed in magma. Scientists have found traces of a form of carbon—an important element in living organisms— in one such 4.1 billion-year-old zircon . However, it does not provide enough evidence to prove life’s existence at that early date.

Two possibilities are in volcanically active hydrothermal environments on land and at sea.

Some microorganisms thrive in the scalding, highly acidic hot springs environments like those found today in Iceland, Norway and Yellowstone National Park. The same goes for deep-sea hydrothermal vents. These chimney-like vents form where seawater comes into contact with magma on the ocean floor, resulting in streams of superheated plumes. The microorganisms that live near such plumes have led some scientists to suggest them as the birthplaces of Earth’s first life forms.

Organic molecules may also have formed in certain types of clay minerals that could have offered favorable conditions for protection and preservation. This could have happened on Earth during its early history, or on comets and asteroids that later brought them to Earth in collisions. This would suggest that the same process could have seeded life on planets elsewhere in the universe.

The recipe consists of a steady energy source, organic compounds and water.

Sunlight provides the energy source at the surface, which drives photosynthesis. On the ocean floor, geothermal energy supplies the chemical nutrients that organisms need to live.

Also crucial are the elements important to life . For us, these are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. But there are several scientific mysteries about how these elements wound up together on Earth. For example, scientists would not expect a planet that formed so close to the sun to naturally incorporate carbon and nitrogen. These elements become solid only under very cold temperatures, such as exist in the outer solar system, not nearer to the sun where Earth is. Also, carbon, like gold, is rare at the Earth’s surface. That’s because carbon chemically bonds more often with iron than rock. Gold also bonds more often with metal, so most of it ends up in the Earth’s core. So, how did the small amounts found at the surface get there? Could a similar process also have unfolded on other planets?

The last ingredient is water. Water now covers about 70% of Earth’s surface, but how much sat on the surface 4 billion years ago? Like carbon and nitrogen, water is much more likely to become a part of solid objects that formed at a greater distance from the sun. To explain its presence on Earth, one theory proposes that a class of meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites formed far enough from the sun to have served as a water-delivery system.

There are several theories for how life came to be on Earth. These include:

Life emerged from a primordial soup

As a University of Chicago graduate student in 1952, Stanley Miller performed a famous experiment with Harold Urey, a Nobel laureate in chemistry. Their results explored the idea that life formed in a primordial soup.

Miller and Urey injected ammonia, methane and water vapor into an enclosed glass container to simulate what were then believed to be the conditions of Earth’s early atmosphere. Then they passed electrical sparks through the container to simulate lightning. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, soon formed. Miller and Urey realized that this process could have paved the way for the molecules needed to produce life.

Scientists now believe that Earth’s early atmosphere had a different chemical makeup from Miller and Urey’s recipe. Even so, the experiment gave rise to a new scientific field called prebiotic or abiotic chemistry, the chemistry that preceded the origin of life. This is the opposite of biogenesis, the idea that only a living organism can beget another living organism.

Seeded by comets or meteors

Some scientists think that some of the molecules important to life may be produced outside the Earth. Instead, they suggest that these ingredients came from meteorites or comets.

“A colleague once told me, ‘It’s a lot easier to build a house out of Legos when they’re falling from the sky,’” said Fred Ciesla, a geophysical sciences professor at UChicago. Ciesla and that colleague, Scott Sandford of the NASA Ames Research Center, published research showing that complex organic compounds were readily produced under conditions that likely prevailed in the early solar system when many meteorites formed.

Meteorites then might have served as the cosmic Mayflowers that transported molecular seeds to Earth. In 1969, the Murchison meteorite that fell in Australia contained dozens of different amino acids—the building blocks of life.

Comets may also have offered a ride to Earth-bound hitchhiking molecules, according to experimental results published in 2001 by a team of researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. By showing that amino acids could survive a fiery comet collision with Earth, the team bolstered the idea that life’s raw materials came from space.

In 2019, a team of researchers in France and Italy reported finding extraterrestrial organic material preserved in the 3.3 billion-year-old sediments of Barberton, South Africa. The team suggested micrometeorites as the material’s likely source. Further such evidence came in 2022 from samples of asteroid Ryugu returned to Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission. The count of amino acids found in the Ryugu samples now exceeds 20 different types .

In 1953, UChicago researchers published a landmark paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry that marked the discovery of the pro-chirality concept , which pervades modern chemistry and biology. The paper described an experiment showing that the chirality of molecules—or “handedness,” much the way the right and left hands differ from one another—drives all life processes. Without chirality, large biological molecules such as proteins would be unable to form structures that could be reproduced.

Today, research on the origin of life at UChicago is expanding. As scientists have been able to find more and more exoplanets—that is, planets around stars elsewhere in the galaxy—the question of what the essential ingredients for life are and how to look for signs of them has heated up.

Nobel laureate Jack Szostak joined the UChicago faculty as University Professor in Chemistry in 2022 and will lead the University’s new interdisciplinary Origins of Life Initiative to coordinate research efforts into the origin of life on Earth. Scientists from several departments of the Physical Sciences Division are joining the initiative, including specialists in chemistry, astronomy, geology and geophysics.

“Right now we are getting truly unprecedented amounts of data coming in: Missions like Hayabusa and OSIRIS-REx are bringing us pieces of asteroids, which helps us understand the conditions that form planets, and NASA’s new JWST telescope is taking astounding data on the solar system and the planets around us ,” said Prof. Ciesla. “I think we’re going to make huge progress on this question.”

Last updated Sept. 19, 2022.

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1.8: Evolution of Life

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This timeline shows the history of life on Earth. In the entire span of the time, humans are a relatively new addition.

Today, the most accepted theory of life on Earth is evolution, and there is a vast amount of evidence supporting this theory. However, this wasn’t always the case.

An introduction to evolution and natural selection can be viewed at http ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcjgWov7mTM .

As you view Introduction to Evolution and Natural Selection, focus on these concepts: the relationship between evolution and natural selection, the relationship between natural selection and variation, the evolution of the peppered moth.

Darwin and the Theory of Evolution

The idea of evolution has been around for centuries. In fact, it goes all the way back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. However, evolution is most often associated with Charles Darwin . Darwin published a book on evolution in 1859 titled On the Origin of Species . In the book, Darwin stated the theory of evolution by natural selection. He also presented a great deal of evidence that evolution occurs.

Evolution is a change in the characteristics of living things over time. As described by Darwin, evolution occurs by a process called natural selection . In natural selection, some members of a species, being better adapted or suited to their environment, produce more offspring than others, so they pass "advantageous traits" to their offspring. Over many generations, this can lead to major changes in the characteristics of the species. Evolution explains how living things are changing today and how modern living things have descended from ancient life forms that no longer exist on Earth. As living things evolve, they generally become better suited for their environment. This is because they evolve adaptations. An adaptation is a trait that helps an organism survive and reproduce in a given environment.

Despite all the evidence Darwin presented, his theory was not well-received at first. Many people found it hard to accept the idea that humans had evolved from an ape-like ancestor, and they saw evolution as a challenge to their religious beliefs. Look at the cartoon in Figure below . Drawn in 1871, it depicts Darwin himself as an ape. The cartoon reflects how many people felt about Darwin and his theory during his own time. Darwin had actually expected this type of reaction to his theory and had waited a long time before publishing his book for this reason. It was only when another scientist, named Alfred Russel Wallace, developed essentially the same theory of evolution that Darwin put his book into print.

Charles Darwin’s name is linked with the theory of evolution. This cartoon from the 1870s makes fun of both Darwin and his theory.

Although Darwin presented a great deal of evidence for evolution in his book, he was unable to explain how evolution occurs. That’s because he knew nothing about genes. As a result, he didn’t know how characteristics are passed from parents to offspring, let alone how they could change over time.

Evolutionary Theory After Darwin

Since Darwin’s time, scientists have gathered even more evidence to support the theory of evolution. Some of the evidence comes from fossils , and some comes from studies that show how similar living things are to one another. By the 1930s, scientists had also learned about genes. As a result, they could finally explain how characteristics of organisms could pass from one generation to the next and change over time.

Using modern technology, scientists can now directly compare the genes of living species . The more genes different species share in common, the more closely related the species are presumed to be. Consider humans and chimpanzees. They share about 98% of their genes. This means that they shared a common ancestor in the not-too-distant past. This is just one of many pieces of evidence that show we are part of the evolution of life on Earth.

Misconceptions About Evolution

Today, evolution is still questioned by some people. Often, people who disagree with the theory of evolution do not really understand it. For example, some people think that the theory of evolution explains how life on Earth first began. In fact, the theory explains only how life changed after it first appeared. Some people think the theory of evolution means that humans evolved from modern apes. In fact, the theory suggests humans and modern apes have a common ancestor that lived several million years ago. These and other misconceptions about evolution contribute to the controversy that still surrounds this fundamental principle of biology.

• Life began on Earth at least 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, and it has been evolving ever since.
• Darwin stated the theory of evolution by natural selection, presenting a great deal of evidence to support his theory.
• Evolution is a change in the characteristics of living things over time. Evolution occurs by natural selection.
• Characteristics of organisms are passed from one generation to the next through their genes.

Making Connections

Explore more.

Use this resource to answer the questions that follow.

• Natural Selection at evolution.berkeley.edu/evosit...election.shtml.
• What is meant by differential reproduction?
• What is the end result of this process?
• What three things are necessary for evolution by natural selection?
• What is evolution?
• What is natural selection?
• Briefly, explain the theory of evolution.

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Unit 27: History of life on Earth

About this unit.

This unit is part of the Biology library. Browse videos, articles, and exercises by topic.

Formation of Earth and early life

• Earth formation (Opens a modal)
• Beginnings of life (Opens a modal)
• Origins of life (Opens a modal)
• Hypotheses about the origins of life (Opens a modal)
• The RNA origin of life (Opens a modal)
• RNA world (Opens a modal)

The diversification of life

• Ozone layer and eukaryotes show up in the Proterozoic eon (Opens a modal)
• First living things on land clarification (Opens a modal)
• Biodiversity flourishes in Phanerozoic eon (Opens a modal)
• Human evolution overview (Opens a modal)

Radiometric dating

• Chronometric revolution (Opens a modal)
• Carbon 14 dating 1 (Opens a modal)
• Carbon 14 dating 2 (Opens a modal)
• Potassium-argon (K-Ar) dating (Opens a modal)
• K-Ar dating calculation (Opens a modal)
• Atomic number, atomic mass, and isotopes (Opens a modal)

Advertisement

How we will discover the mysterious origins of life once and for all

Seventy years ago, three discoveries propelled our understanding of how life on Earth began. But has the biggest clue to life's origins been staring biologists in the face all along?

By Michael Marshall

30 October 2023

The constant changing landscape of Earth may be a vital part of the story of the origins of the first ecosystems.

MARK GARLICK/Spl/Alamy;

HOW did life on Earth begin? Until 70 years ago, generations of scientists had failed to throw much light on biology’s murky beginnings. But then came three crucial findings in quick succession.

In April 1953, the race to uncover the structure of DNA reached its climax. Geneticists soon realised that its double helix form could help explain how life replicates itself – a fundamental property thought to have appeared at or around the origin of life. Just three weeks later, news broke of the astonishing Miller-Urey experiment, which showed how a simple cocktail of chemicals could spontaneously generate amino acids, vital for building the molecules of life. Finally, in September 1953, we gained our first accurate estimate for the age of Earth, giving us a clearer idea of exactly how old life might be.

At that point, we seemed poised to finally understand life’s origins. Today, conclusive answers remain elusive. But the past few years have brought real signs of progress.

For instance, we have found that life’s ability to replicate is not wholly reliant on DNA. We also have a far better idea of the conditions on early Earth when life first appeared – and we are beginning to conduct experiments into how it emerged that are much more sophisticated than Miller-Urey.

A radical new theory rewrites the story of how life on Earth began

It has long been thought that the ingredients for life came together slowly, bit by bit. Now there is evidence it all happened at once in a chemical big bang

So, 70 years on from that incredible year of breakthroughs, how has our picture of life’s origins changed? And what remains to be figured out before we can satisfactorily answer biology’s ultimate question?

Definitions of life

“I think in the 50s we knew very little about life,” says …

Article amended on 3 November 2023

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Understanding Evolution

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Important events in the history of life

A timeline can provide additional information about life’s history not visible on an evolutionary tree. These include major geologic events, climate changes, radiations of organisms into new habitats, changes in ecosystems, changes in continental positions, and widespread extinctions. Explore the timeline below to review some of the important events in life’s history.

(If the timeline doesn’t work, view the  Text-only version .)

• More Details
• Evo Examples
• Teaching Resources

Read more about  the origins of life on Earth  with this advanced tutorial or about  human evolution  in this brief summary.

To learn more about the formation of the Earth, the building blocks of life, and the conditions required for life to arise, visit  A Place for Life: A special astronomy exhibit of Understanding Evolution .

To get a more detailed timeline of the history of life and learn more about deep time in general, visit the  ChronoZoom Time Atlas of Earth History and Big History .

Learn more about the origin of life in context:  From the origin of life to the future of biotech: The work of Andy Ellington , a research profile.

Learn more about human evolution in context:  When it comes to evolution, headlines often get it wrong , a news brief with discussion questions.

Teach your students about timelines:  A long time , a classroom activity for grades K-2.

Teach your students about the history of life:  What came first? , a classroom activity for grades 6-8.

Find  additional lessons, activities, videos, and articles  that focus on the history of life.

How we know what happened when

Mechanisms: the processes of evolution

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• Introduction to Ecology; Major patterns in Earth’s climate
• Behavioral Ecology
• Population Ecology 1
• Population Ecology 2
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• Strong Inference
• What is life?
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• Evolution by Natural Selection
• Other Mechanisms of Evolution
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Earth History and History of Life on Earth

• Origin of Life on Earth
• Gene expression: DNA to protein
• Gene regulation
• Cell division: mitosis and meiosis
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• Chromosome theory of inheritance
• Patterns of inheritance
• Chemical context for biology: origin of life and chemical evolution
• Biological molecules
• Membranes and Transport
• Energy and enzymes
• Respiration, chemiosmosis and oxidative phosphorylation
• Oxidative pathways: electrons from food to electron carriers
• Fermentation, mitochondria and regulation
• Why are plants green, and how did chlorophyll take over the world? (Converting light energy into chemical energy)
• Carbon fixation
• Recombinant DNA
• Cloning and Stem Cells
• Adaptive Immunity
• Human evolution and adaptation

Learning Objectives

• Connect changes in the Earth’s atmosphere with evolutionary changes in the Earth’s biosphere.
• Explain the fundamentals of stratigraphy.
• Identify the appropriate uses and limitations for various methods of dating, including carbon-14, potassium-40.
• Identify major geological periods with respect to the history of life on Earth.
• Recognize the features of adaptive radiations and mass extinctions.

Geology, Earth history, and biological evolution

Evolution writ large takes a great deal of time. Natural selection will favor different genetic variants as geologic conditions change, such as climate, chemical composition, and sea level. A key of Charles Darwin’s thinking was his study and familiarity with the latest advances in the science of geology, including the works of Hutton and Lyell. And interpretation of the fossil record, and inferring the sequence of evolutionary changes, would be impossible without a grounding in the fundamentals of stratigraphy.

Fossils are found in sedimentary rocks

There are 3 different kinds of rocks:

• igneous – rock formed from cooling of lava. Any organismal remnants are destroyed by the extreme heat of the lava.
• metamorphic – rock whose crystal structure is altered by extreme heat and high pressure when buried miles deep in the Earth’s crust; may be formed from either igneous or sedimentary rock. Any fossils contained in sedimentary rock are destroyed during the transformation to metamorphic rock.
• sedimentary – rock formed by deposition of fine sand and particles of organic and inorganic debris at the bottoms of oceans and lakes, compressed and often visible as layered rock formations. May contain fossils.

Dating and ordering the geological record

Stratigraphy applies to sedimentary rock formations. The fundamental principle is that newer layers are always deposited on top of older layers. Therefore, a vertical dig reveals a historical record, with deeper digs revealing older sedimentary deposits. However, crustal movements and uplifts may cause these layers to tilt, fold and even become inverted in some locations.  In addition, erosion can cause loss of layers and gaps in the rock record, called unconformities .

Stratigraphy of the Grand Canyon. Image from Wikipedia

Radiometric dating

Stratigraphy reveals the order of geological events, but not their absolute dates. Depending on the age of the rocks or samples and their type, various radioisotope decay methods may be used to estimate the absolute ages of rocks found in different layers. This page by Dr. Roger Wiens  has a thorough explanation of how carbon-14 and potassium-40 and other isotopes are used to date rocks and fossils of different ages. In brief:

• Potassium-40 (K-40) decays to argon-40 (Ar-40); half-life = 1.26 billion years; used to date formation of igneous rocks. Ar-40 found trapped in the rock is compared to amount of K-40 remaining. A 1:1 ratio of K-40 to Ar-40 indicates the igneous rock has an age of 1 half-life, or 1.26 billion years.
• Uranium-238 (U-238) decays to lead-206 (Pb-206); half-life = 4.5 billion years; used to date zircons (see “How to Date a Planet” video above). Again, the ratio of U-238 to Pb-206 reveals how many half-lives have passed since the zircon crystal was formed.
• Carbon-14 (C-14) decays to nitrogen-14 (N-14); half-life = 5715 years; used to date organic matter. In this case, the amount of the daughter isotope (N-14) is uninformative, because N-14 is the common isotope of nitrogen and occurs at high levels in all organic matter and in the atmosphere. Only the amount of C-14 compared to the amount of C-12 matters. The ratio of C-14 to C-12 has been mostly constant over the last 100,000 years, so newly created (by photosynthesis) organic matter starts out with a certain ratio of C-14 to C-12 that is similar to the present-day atmospheric ratio of C-14 to C-12. Depletion of C-14 relative to C-12 is used to date the age of organic matter. After 5700 years, the ratio of C-14 to C-12 will be only half of the initial ratio of C-14 to C-12.

Amount of parent isotope remaining after passage of time, indicated in half-lives. from https://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/wiens.html

This figure shows exponential decay of a parent radioactive isotope, contrasted with the linear decrease of sand in an hourglass. For samples containing organic carbon, the fraction of C-14 remaining in the sample can be used to determine how many half-lives, and hence years, have passed since the organic matter was formed.

A common misconception is that scientists use carbon-14 to date rocks or fossils that are millions of years old, such as fossil dinosaur bones from 100 million years ago. Instead, scientists date igneous rocks found in layers above and below the sedimentary rocks containing the fossils. Why isn’t carbon-14 useful for dating fossil dinosaur bones?

Plate Tectonics and Continental Drift

During this time the continents have been in constant motion across the surface of the earth, splitting and merging. This video animation reconstructs continental movements for the last 560 million years:

Often the major eras and periods of Earth history are arranged on a clock face in an effort to visualize the amount of time that has passed since each period, as such:

Major periods of earth history, shown as a clockface, with time going from 4.5 billion years ago at the 12:00 start position proceeding clockwise to the present at the 12:00 position. Image from Wikipedia: By WoudloperDerivative work: Hardwigg – File:Geologic_clock.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11926892

However, humans are very bad at thinking about time.  But we’re pretty good at thinking about distance.  So let’s “map” the different periods of Earth history and major evolutionary milestones onto a—you guessed it—map.  Let’s take a trip from Disney World to a classroom inside the Clough building on Georgia Tech campus.  If the location of Disney World in Orlando, Florida is the origin of the Earth (A), and the Clough building is present day (B), that means we have 441 miles to travel 4.6 billion years.

• The oldest evidence for life is about 3.8 billion years old.  That means we’ve traveled almost a quarter of the whole distance to about 70 miles from Orlando,  a bit south of Ocala, before there is any evidence of life on Earth. 
• While there was no oxygen in early Earth’s atmosphere or oceans, by about 3.5 Ga, we start seeing the first traces of O2 in the atmosphere. These increases in ocean and atmospheric oxygen levels become quite large with appearance of cyanobacteria about 2.7 billion years ago (Bya). That means it takes almost half trip: we’ve traveled about 200 miles and we’re at the GA/FL border before we start seeing evidence of increasing oxygen levels on Earth. The first eukaryotes appear in the fossil record after oxygen begins to accumulate about 1.5 BYA, about halfway between Tifton and Macon, near Cordele, GA.  This isn’t much of a landmark, but we could stop and get lunch.  Oxygen didn’t accumulate all at once, and evidence indicates that the oceans weren’t fully oxygenated until 850 milling years ago (Mya), which puts us all the way up to Macon, GA – only about 80 miles from Tech.

Here is our map so far:

Now let’s zoom in a little:

• Much of the life on earth was singled celled until shortly before the Cambrian “explosion,” when we see emergence of all modern animal phyla. The Cambrian radiation (meaning rapid evolutionary diversification) occurred approx. 540 Mya, which puts it north of Macon in High Fall State Park.  This is the first part of the Paleozoic (early animals) era.
• The largest mass extinction in the fossil record occurred at the end of the Permian period (299-252 Mya), near McDonough, GA.
• The first mammals appear during the Jurassic period (200-145 Mya), or just inside the I-285 Perimeter.
• Dinosaurs became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period (145-66 Mya).  This is solidly inside the Perimeter.
• The first apes appear in the fossil record about 25 Mya, or near the intersection of I-20 and the I-75/I-85 Downtown Connector.  We’re almost to Tech campus now!

• Human evolution occurs entirely on Tech campus. The fossil Lucy ( Australopithecus ) dates to approximately 3 Mya, or right around Tech Tower.
• Modern Homo sapiens arise and migrate out of Africa inside Clough Commons. Neanderthals go extinct inside the classroom with us. Recorded human history occurs in the current Holocene epoch, from 11,700 years ago to the present, or about 6 feet from where you are sitting in the classroom. The Holocene epoch is the last part of the Quarternary period (2.59 Mya-present), which in turn is the last part of the Cenozoic era (66 Mya-present), which in turn is the last part of the Phanerozoic eon (540 Mya-present).

Co-evolution of life and the planet

The geochemistry of the Earth’s atmosphere, water and land surfaces have shaped the evolutionary history of life. And in turn, major changes in the biosphere have profoundly altered the chemistry of the Earth’s water, atmosphere, and land surfaces. The figure below shows milestones in the 4.5-billion year history of the Earth, changes in atmospheric oxygen levels, and the timing of the origin of microbial life and the origin of eukaryotes.

Atmospheric and oceanic conditions have changed over time alongside (and promoting) conditions of organismal evolution Credit: Brian Kendall, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Waterloo

Adaptive Radiations

The Cambrian “explosion” refers to an increase in biodiversity of multicellular organisms at the start of the Cambrian, 540 million years ago. Multicellular life appeared only several tens of millions of years before the start of the Cambrian, as enigmatic fossils ( Ediacaran biota ) exhibiting body plans unlike present-day animals. These largely disappeared and were replaced by Cambrian fauna, whose variety includes all of the body plans found in present-day animal phyla. The appearance of Cambrian fauna span millions of years; they did not all appear simultaneously as the term “explosion” inaccurately implies.

Periods of increasing biodiversity and rapid speciation are called evolutionary radiations . They occur when new ecological niches become available, as after a mass extinction. They may also occur in response to an evolutionary innovation. One example would be the evolution of jaws. The ability to bite gave predators a huge advantage. Prey species adapted in a variety of ways, such as faster speed, body armor, defensive weapons such as horns and stingers, chemical defenses in the form of poison, larger body size, smaller body size, etc.

The Cambrian radiation also coincides with an increase in free oxygen to near-present day levels.

O2 build-up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Red and green lines represent the range of the estimates while time is measured in billions of years ago (Ga). Stage 1 (3.85–2.45 Ga): Practically no O2 in the atmosphere. Stage 2 (2.45–1.85 Ga): O2 produced, but absorbed in oceans and seabed rock. Stage 3 (1.85–0.85 Ga): O2 starts to gas out of the oceans, but is absorbed by land surfaces. Stages 4 and 5 (0.85–present): O2 sinks filled and the gas accumulates.

The increase in oxygen enabled the evolution of larger bodies and organs and tissues, such as brains, with high metabolic rates.

The increase in oxygen is a dramatic example of how life can alter the planet. Evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis changed the planet’s atmosphere over billions of years, and in turn caused radical shifts in the biosphere: from an anoxic environment populated by anaerobic, single-celled prokaryotes, to eukaryotes living in a micro-aerophilic (low-oxygen) environment, to multicellular-organisms in an oxygen-rich environment.

Human impacts are the latest in a succession of major evolutionary influences. We are now altering the planet with as yet undetermined consequences for life on Earth.

No other planet in our solar system has oxygen gas in the atmosphere. Oxygen is highly reactive, and quickly consumed by oxidation reactions. On Earth, oxygenic photosynthesis continually replenishes the oxygen consumed by respiration and other oxidative processes (e.g., rusting of iron, weathering of rocks). The history of oxygen gas in the Earth’s atmosphere sums up the history of life.

• The early Earth had no oxygen gas

banded iron formation, Karijini National Park, Western Australia from Wikipedia

• Oxygen dissolved in the water column led to more efficient (aerobic) metabolism, and eventually enabled the evolution of eukaryotes (around 2 BYA), and the first multicellular organisms (around 800 MYA).
• Oxygen gas in the upper atmosphere formed the ozone layer. The ozone layer absorbed harmful UV rays and allowed animals and plants to colonize land surfaces (350 MYA).
• Burial of large quantities of organic material in anaerobic sediments (eventually turning into coal and petroleum) allowed oxygen to accumulate in the atmosphere to present-day levels. Q: why is burial of organic carbon necessary for oxygen to accumulate in the atmosphere?

Here’s a link to an HHMI Interactive on the oxygen history on earth. Select region 2 and click on “Howie” to step into an explanation of the two hypotheses of how oxygen outgassed into the atmosphere.

Temperature and sea level

The Earth experienced large swings in global temperature, from “snowball” to hothouse, and intermittent glaciation. Note the conditions during the entire period of hominid evolution (circa 3 Mya) and recorded human history (circa 10 Kya). Also note the change in scale on the X axis (time).

Reconstruction of global temperature in the Phanerozoic. Note that these are a series of different linear scales on the time axis. Click the image to enlarge and for more information on the sources of data used to construct this timeline. From Wikimedia Commons; Image Credit: Glen Fergus.

Reconstruction of Phanerozoic atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Time axis is a log scale. Click the image for more information about the data and analysis used to construct this timeline. by Gavin Foster, Dana Royer and Dan Lunt

Multiple factors caused these large swings in global temperature, including changes in solar output, extreme volcanic activity, meteor strikes, and atmospheric greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. The figure above by Foster et al. shows that carbon dioxide levels above 400 ppm are now the highest in the past 10 million years.

And this recent comic from XKCD graphs what we know about the Earth’s temperature from ~20,000 BC to present day, with projections for the future based on current CO2 emission patterns:

A Timeline of Earth’s Average Temperature Since the Last Ice Age Glaciation. https://xkcd.com/1732/

Earthviewer  app for tablets allows visualization of Earth through time

Another Youtube video explaining basic principles of stratigraphy

Land plants gave oxygen to predators

Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective  a long and thorough, and yet very readable, explanation of how radiometric dating works, how the techniques are calibrated, the sources of error. The “Christian perspective” is about countering young-Earth misconceptions from any religious belief.

Recent papers of interest

M. O. Clarkson, S. A. Kasemann, R. A. Wood, T. M. Lenton, S. J. Daines, S. Richoz, F. Ohnemueller, A. Meixner, S. W. Poulton, E. T. Tipper. Ocean acidification and the Permo-Triassic mass extinction. Science , 2015 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa0193

UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure – Dating methods such as carbon-14 and potassium-40 are important tools for studying the history of life on Earth, and are used in other scientific fields such as archaeology and geology. The ability to accurately date rocks and fossils using various dating methods is essential for advancing scientific research, determining the location and viability of fossil-fuel-based industrial endeavors, and developing infrastructure projects that require knowledge of geological history.

5 Responses to Earth History and History of Life on Earth

So, from the youtube video, it’s predicted that the continents will merge back together?

Apparently so, but this is beyond my area of expertise.

Maybe only old farts like me will like this, but I do like it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMwxwRA9Xr8

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/science/fungi-fossils-plants.html Story about discovery of billion-year-old microfossils with morphology and chitinous cell wall of fungi, predating colonization of land by plants. What did these fungi eat?

https://www.trollart.com/wp-content/uploads/photo-gallery/imported_from_media_libray/Ages-of-Rock-CORRECT-copy.jpg?bwg=1543862013

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Module 3: History of Life

Why it matters: history of life, why discuss the history of life on earth.

Human beings are just one of countless examples of life on Earth. The sheer amount of diversity can seem overwhelming. However, over the years, scientists have developed tools and methods to organize all known living organisms. With the phylogenetic tree and the taxonomic classification system, scientists have grouped and organized organisms by domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.

The term kingdom is likely familiar to you, and you may even know the genus and species names of some organisms, as these names are used to create scientific names such as Canis lupus familiaris  (dogs) and Felis catus  (cats). But how does this type of organization matter in everyday life?

Evolutionary biologists could list many reasons why understanding phylogeny is important to everyday life in human society. For botanists, phylogeny acts as a guide to discovering new plants that can be used to benefit people. Think of all the ways humans use plants—food, medicine, and clothing are a few examples. If a plant contains a compound that is effective in treating disease, scientists might want to examine all of the relatives of that plant for other useful drugs.

Learning Outcomes

• Explain the theory of evolution
• Define species and identify how species form
• Discuss the ways populations evolve
• Read and analyze a phylogenetic tree that documents evolutionary relationships

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• Why It Matters: History of Life. Authored by : Shelli Carter and Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Biology 2e. Provided by : OpenStax. Located at : http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected] . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/biology-2e/pages/1-introduction

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The meaning of life: early continental and analytic perspectives.

The question of the meaning of life is one that interests philosophers and non-philosophers alike. The question itself is notoriously ambiguous and possibly vague. In asking about the meaning of life, one may be asking about the essence of life, about life’s purpose, about whether and how anything matters, or a host of other things.

Not everyone is plagued by questions about life’s meaning, but some are. The circumstances in which one does ask about life’s meaning include those in which: one is well off but bothered by either a sense of dissatisfaction or the prospect of bad things to come; one is young at heart and has a sense of wonder; one is perplexed by the discordant plurality of things and wants to find some unity in all the diversity; or one has lost faith in old values and narratives and wants to know how to live in order to have a meaningful life.

We may read our ancestors in such a way that warrants the claim that the meaning of life has been a human concern from the beginning. But it was only early in the nineteenth century that writers began to write directly about “the meaning of life.” The most significant writers were: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy. Schopenhauer ended up saying that the meaning of life is to deny it; Kierkegaard, that the meaning of life is to obey God passionately; Nietzsche, that the meaning of life is the will to power; and Tolstoy, that the meaning of life lies in a kind of irrational knowledge called “faith.”

In the twentieth century, in the Continental tradition, Heidegger held that the meaning of life is to live authentically or (alternatively) to be a guardian of the earth.  Sartre espoused the view that life is meaningless but urged us nonetheless to make a free choice that would give our lives meaning and responsibility. Camus also thought that life is absurd and meaningless. The best way to cope with this fact, he held, is to live life with passion, using everything up, and with an attitude of revolt, defiance, or scorn.

In the Anglo-American tradition, William James held that life is meaningful and worth living because of a spiritual order in which we should believe, or else that it is meaningful when there is a marriage of ideals with pluck, will, and the manly virtues; Bertrand Russell argued that to live a meaningful life one must abandon private and petty interests and instead cultivate an interest in the eternal; Moritz Schlick argued that the meaning of life is to be found in play; and A. J. Ayer asserted that the question of the meaning of life is itself meaningless.

All of these set the table for a veritable feast of philosophical writing on the meaning of life that began in the 1950s with Kurt Baier’s essay “The Meaning of Life,” followed in 1970 by Richard Taylor’s influential essay on the same topic, followed shortly by Thomas Nagel’s important 1971 essay on “The Absurd.” See “Meaning of Life: The Analytic Perspective” for more on the course of the debate in analytic philosophy about the meaning of life.

Table of Contents

• The Origin of the English Expression “the Meaning of Life”
• Questions about the Meaning of Life
• The Broader Historical Background
• Schopenhauer
• Kierkegaard
• Some Common Aspects of the Lives of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy
• References and Further Reading

1. Background

A. the origin of the english expression “the meaning of life”.

The English term “meaning” dates back to the fourteenth century C.E. Its origins, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), lie in the Middle English word “meenyng” (also spelled “menaynge,” “meneyng,” and “mennyng”).

In its earliest occurrences, in English original compositions as well as in English translations of earlier works, meaning is most often what, on the one hand, sentences, utterances, and stories, and, on the other hand, dreams, visions, signs, omens, and rituals have or might have. One asks about the meaning of some puzzling utterance, or of the writing on the wall, or of the vision that appeared to somebody in the night, or of the ritual performed on a hallowed occasion. Meaning is often conceived of as something non-obvious and somewhat secretive, discernible only by a seer granted with special powers.

It is much later that life is spoken of as something that might, or might not, have meaning in this sense. Such speech would have to wait upon the development of the concept of life as something like a word, a linguistic utterance, a narrative, a story, a gesture, a puzzling episode, a sign, a dream, a vision, or a surface phenomenon that points to some deep inner essence, to which it would be proper to inquire into its meaning, or to apply epithets like “meaningful” or “meaningless.” One of the earliest instances of the occurrence of the concept “life” as such a thing, as signifying something that might or might not have something like meaning, appears in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c. 1605), where Macbeth characterizes life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But notice that even here the words “meaning” and “life” are not linked.

The OED ‘s definition of “meaning” in something like our sense is “The significance, purpose, underlying truth, etc., of something.” Further elaboration of early uses of the word gives us, “That which is indicated or expressed by a (supposed) symbol or symbolic action;  spec.  a message, warning, idea, etc., supposed to be symbolized by a dream, vision, omen, etc.” A bit later, in one of its senses, meaning takes on the sense in which it is the “signification; intention; cause, purpose; motive, justification,” . . . “[o]f an action, condition, etc.” Finally we get the sense that most nearly concerns us here: “Something which gives one a sense of purpose, value, etc., esp. of a metaphysical or spiritual kind; the (perceived) purpose of existence or of a person’s life. Freq. in  the meaning of life .” (All this is from the OED .)

The first English use of the expression “the meaning of life” appeared in 1834 in Thomas Carlyle’s (1795-1881) Sartor Resartus II. ix, where Teufelsdrockh observes, “our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom.” The usage shortly caught on, and over the next century and a half the phrase “the meaning of life” became common. The adjective “meaningful” did not appear until 1852, the noun “meaningfulness” until 1904.

b. Questions about the Meaning of Life

The most familiar form of the question(s) about the meaning of life is simply, “What is the meaning of life?” Although the form of the question is one, when it is asked, any one (or more) of several different senses may be intended. Here are some of the more common of them.

(1) In some cases, what the seeker seeks is the kernel, the inner reality, the core, or the essence, underlying some phenomenon. Thus one might ask what his essence, his true self is, and then feel that he has found the meaning of his life if he discovers that true self.

(2) In other cases, the question is about the point, aim, object, purpose, end, or goal of life, typically one’s own. Here, in some cases, the question is about some pre-existing purpose that the questioner might (or might not) discover; in other cases, the question might be about some end or purpose the agent might invent or create and give her life. The latter questioner, when she is successful, may believe that her life has a meaning because she herself has given it one.

(3) In yet other cases, the question of the meaning of life is that of whether our lives, and anything we do within them, matter, or have any sort of importance. If one can show that they matter, and in virtue of what they do, one will have provided a substantive answer to the question of the meaning of life. A common, but not universal, assumption on this score is that our lives have significance and importance only if they issue in some lasting achievement the ravages of time will not destroy.

(4) In still other cases, what bothers the questioner is the discord, plurality, and chaotic nature of his apparent empirical life as it is actually lived. He can make no sense of it; there is no rhyme or reason to it. The drive here, one might well think, is to see one’s life as intelligible, as something that makes sense. The discovery or invention of some kind of unity in his life would amount to an answer to his question, “What is the meaning of life?”

(5) Yet another thing the question about the meaning of life can be is a request for a narrative or picture, a way of seeing life (perhaps a metaphorical one) that enables one to make sense of it and achieve a sense of meaning while living it. And so we get “Life is a bowl of cherries” and various and sundry religious narratives.

(6) Sometimes what the questioner is really wondering is whether it makes sense to go on and his question is “Is life worth living?” He may actually be contemplating suicide. His predicament has to do with meaning if he is assuming that it makes sense to continue living only if (his) life has a suitable meaning, something which, at the moment, he can’t see it as having.

(7) Finally, the question of the meaning of life can be the question of how one should live in order to have a meaningful life, or, if such a life is impossible, then what the best way to live meaninglessly is.

The seven questions just distinguished may be, but need not be, discrete and self-contained. A given seeker may very well be interested in several of them at once and see them as intimately connected. For example, a person may be interested in his core or essence because he thinks that knowledge of that may reveal the goal or purpose of his life, a purpose that makes his life seem important and intelligible, and gives him a reason for going on, as well as insight into how he must live in order to have a meaningful life. It is commonly the case that several of the questions press themselves on the seeker all at the same time.

One or more of these questions were of concern to the philosophers discussed below. Some were concerned with nearly all of them. Distinct from all the above are second-order, analytic, conceptual questions of the sort that dominate current philosophical discussion of the issue in analytic circles. These questions are not so much about the meaning of life as about the meaning of “the meaning of life” and its component concepts (“meaning,” “life”), or related ones (“meaningfulness,” “meaninglessness,” “vanity,” “absurdity,” and so forth).

c. The Broader Historical Background

Although nineteenth century thinkers were the first in the West to put the question precisely in the form “What is the meaning of life?” concern with questions in what may be called “the meaning-of-life family,” that is, ultimate questions about life, the world, existence, and its purpose may be found, in the East and the West alike, almost as far back as we can trace human thought about anything. Thus Gilgamesh (c. 2000 B.C.E.) asked why he must die; the composers of The Rig Veda (c. 1200 B.C.E.) wondered where everything came from; Job (c. 500 B.C.E.) asked why he must suffer; the ancient Taoists (Laozi c. 500 B.C.E. and Zhuangzi c. 300 B.C.E.) asked what the origin or principle of everything is, and how one must live to be in accord with it; ancient Upanishadic seekers (500-300 B.C.E.) were much vexed with the nature of the true self and its end or goal; the Buddha (c. 500 B.C.E.), before he became the Buddha, sought an understanding of life that would enable one to overcome suffering; the author of The Bhagavad Gita (c. 200 B.C.E.) was concerned, as other Indian thinkers tended to be, with the identity and nature of the true self, and also with the question of how to live; the ancient Greeks of the classical period (c. 430-320 B.C.E.) talked about the goal or end of life and how to reach it; Epicurus (341-270 B.C.E.) followed suit and developed his own unique take on these matters; Qoheleth, the author of Ecclesiastes (c. 200 B.C.E.), was struck by the vanity or futility of everything and wondered how to deal with it; Greek and Roman Hellenistic philosophers (c. 300 B.C.E. – 250 C.E.)—Epicurean, Stoic, Cynic, Skeptic, and Neo-Platonist—wondered about the good and how to achieve it; Marcus Aurelius (121-180 C.E.) mused on his cosmic insignificance.

The Christian-dominated medieval period did not produce thinkers who asked in any radical way about the meaning of life, because everyone already had a perfectly good answer, the one provided by the Christian story. Still, even in medieval times, there was room for at least three questions in the meaning-of-life family. First, there was occasion for the questions when things ran counter to the Christian story, or to what one expected. Thus Boethius (480-525) was perplexed by the deep questions when, after a life of honor, piety, and power, he fell into disgrace, had everything stripped from him unaccountably and unjustly, and found himself faced with imprisonment that lead eventually to his execution. Second, though the great Christian philosopher-theologians thought they knew the meaning of life in outline, they still asked and answered questions about the details of the final or highest good of man. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), for example, who accepted with unblinking assurance the general answer supplied by Christianity, found himself wondering about the exact nature of the summum bonum (the highest good) and about how to square the Christian view of it with that of Aristotle. Third, other Christian believers, medieval ones as well as present-day ones with medieval outlooks, committed to an overall view of what is going on, may be vexed by the question of what God intends for them specifically and may worry about their “calling,” the particular purpose, role, or plan God has especially for them. Hence we find confirmed believers worried deeply about the question, “What is the meaning of my life?”

In any event, since the early modern period, there has been a resurgence of interest in fundamental meaning-of-life questions. Writers as diverse as Shakespeare (1564-1616), Pascal (1623-1662), Dr. Johnson (1709-84), Kant (1724-1804), and Hegel (1770-1831) have asked, in different forms, questions about life’s ultimate point, goal, or purpose, and they are just a few of the many religious, philosophical, and literary figures who have raised and (sometimes) answered ultimate questions in the meaning-of-life family prior to Schopenhauer’s work early in the nineteenth century. There have been philosophers too since Schopenhauer’s time who have addressed the big questions, but not explicitly in terms of “the meaning of life.” This article will confine itself largely to those philosophers who have explicitly put their concerns in those terms.

The standard explanation of the rise of questions about life’s meaning in the early modern period points to three or four distinct but related things: (1) the scientific revolution; (2) the Protestant Reformation; (3) voyages and travels of exploration and discovery, in which were encountered peoples with very different outlooks on the nature of the universe and the meaning of life; and (4), as a result of all of these, the evaporation of a widely held, firmly believed Christian conception of the nature of things.

2. Nineteenth Century Philosophers

Let us turn now to the story of what philosophers from Schopenhauer in the early 1800s to Ayer and Camus in the 1940s have had to say about the meaning of life.

a. Schopenhauer

The first Western philosopher to link the ideas of life and meaning, and to ask expressly “What is the meaning of life?” was the great German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). At least he was the first to ask the question and get it noticed by other philosophers. Schopenhauer, a contemporary of Carlyle, wrote in German, in which “the meaning of life” is “ der Sinn des Lebens .” Profoundly influencing the thought of both Nietzsche and Tolstoy, Schopenhauer’s work may be regarded as the springboard that launched modern Western philosophical inquiry into the problem of the meaning of life. Here is the passage in which Schopenhauer explicitly asked the question:

Since a man does not alter, and his moral character remains absolutely the same all through his life; since   he must play out the part which he has received, without the least deviation from the character; since   neither experience, nor philosophy, nor religion can effect any improvement in him, the question arises, What is the meaning of life at all? (1860b) [emphasis added]

The circumstances under which concern with the problem of the meaning of life were, in Schopenhauer’s case, not merely academic but real and personal. Well off financially, but struggling with personal misery and a sense of loneliness and isolation, he felt driven to find some understanding of himself and of the world around him that seemed so bleak and senseless.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy begins with a metaphysical structure he inherited from Kant and more or less simply decrees. There is a difference between the thing-in-itself and the phenomenal world of appearances. The thing-in-itself is the will to live, or, more simply, the will. It is the fundamental power and reality that underlies all things. The world we know and live in, with its stupendous abundance of things and forms, is merely the phenomena of the will, the objectification of it, its mirror, something not entirely real, or not real at all. (There is also a pure, will-less subject of knowledge whose metaphysical status is unclear: sometimes it seems to be in the very realm of the will, the realm of true reality, of things-in-themselves; at other times it seems to be something like the first creation and objectification of the will.)

The will itself just wills. It is pretty nasty, perhaps demonic. It is a blind striving, craving, and grasping, aiming at nothing in the end, except to go on willing and aggrandizing itself. It has in itself an inner contradiction, manifest in the constant struggle and strife between the billions of individual objectifications of itself in the phenomenal world. I am one such objectification; you are another. My true self, my inner essence, is the will; the same is true of you: my essence and yours are one and the same. When we fight (as we usually do), the will is engaged in a battle with itself.

The phenomenal world is an awful place. It is full of misery, pain, suffering. Little happiness is found anywhere. The twin poles of human life are pain (want, desire, stress) and boredom. Almost everyone lives a life that, from without, is meaningless and insignificant and, from within, dull and senseless.

But what is the meaning of life? The question is appropriate because life as we know it is something like Macbeth’s tale told by an idiot, a “farce.” If the question is about life’s inner essence, Schopenhauer’s answer is simply “the will-to-live.” The meaning of life is the will.

Another way of taking the question “What is the meaning of life?” is to construe it as a question about the goal, point, aim, end, or purpose of life. When Schopenhauer explicitly asks the question (in On Human Nature), it is this sense of it he appears to have in mind. His answer is depressing. The point or purpose of life is to suffer. We are being punished for the crime of being born, punished for who we are, namely, the nasty thoroughly egoistic will. The meaning of life in this sense, then, is to suffer, to be punished for our sin.

Schopenhauer suggests a number of ways of thinking about our phenomenal, experienced life. All of them are pretty bleak. He recommends that we look upon our life: as an unprofitable episode interrupting the blessed calm of nothingness; as on the whole a disappointment, nay, a cheat; as Hell, in which on the one hand men are the tormented souls and on the other the tormenting devils; as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony; as some kind of mistake; and as a process of disillusionment. Any or all of these could be taken as answers to the question “What is the meaning of life?” (or to the question “What is life?”)

If we ask what we should do, how we can give our lives worth and meaning, Schopenhauer does have an answer. “Salvation” lies in the total denial of the will. Knowledge of the will and its horrific phenomena can and should function as a quieter of the will, bringing it to a state in which it stops willing and effectively abolishes itself. Thinking in this vein, a Schopenhauerian might say that the meaning of life is to deny, quiet, and eventually abolish the will to live that is essentially oneself.

One naturally wants to know whether this is not just suicide—whether the cessation of willing simply means that one passes into a state of nothingness. Schopenhauer’s answer is “No.” The state of the will-less individual after death seems to be nothing to us; but our present state would seem to be nothing to him. His state is wonderful and blessed, but what it is like is inconceivable to us.

In our current state, when one denies the will in herself, she does not literally commit suicide. Suicide doesn’t work because it is itself a powerful act of willing. Instead, she practices self-denial and asceticism, cultivates detachment, stops wanting and pursuing the things most people go for; and although there is still some struggle with the dying will in her, on the whole her life becomes full of peace and joy. The will is quieted and eventually abolishes itself in the individual. Very few people are capable of doing this heroic thing, Schopenhauer says, but he himself does not claim to be one of these people.

For all the darkness of his philosophy, the moral for all of us—even those of us who are not prepared to totally deny the will—which Schopenhauer derives in the end is very much in the Christian/Buddhist vein. We should not be competitive or grasping or villainous, but rather we should show compassion and kindness to everyone, since everyone is always having a bad day in this hell we are all living in, and what we all need above all are love, compassion, help, and consideration. The fundamental principle of morality, which you should follow, is: Don’t hurt anyone; help everyone you can. Following this principle, one can achieve, short of complete denial of the will, a kind of half-way salvation.

Another of Schopenhauer’s points about meaning in life should be mentioned. It is that the meaningfulness of one’s life depends not on one’s outer circumstances but rather on the way one looks at life. People look at life differently, and so the meaningfulness of her life varies considerably from person to person. To one person life is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning.

b. Kierkegaard

A major nineteenth century European philosopher who continued the tradition of thought on the meaning of life was the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Kierkegaard was not an academic. The sources of his interest in problems of meaning seem to have been his not having to work for a living, his personal demons, his Nordic gloom, his congenital tendencies toward guilt, depression, anxiety, and dread, his awareness of increasing doubt all around him of the teachings of his inherited Christianity, and his agonizing failure to live up to his own Christian ideals, primarily because of his embodiment and its concomitant proclivity for the things of the flesh, especially sensuousness and sex.  Out of all that emerged what appears to be a severe case of self-loathing, which in turn prompted serious inquiry into the meaning of (his) life.

It is difficult to determine what Kierkegaard’s own views were on just about everything because he constantly used humor, satire, paradox, and irony, and even more because he spoke in different voices and wrote from different perspectives under different pseudonyms.

Nonetheless, the standard view is that Kierkegaard was fundamentally a Christian. He claimed that one’s life can be meaningful and worth living only if one believes genuinely and passionately in the Christian God.

And then there is the leap. Christian belief goes beyond rational evidence, and even conflicts with it. One must make a leap from knowledge to Christian faith—the only thing in which one can find true meaning—a leap over the confines of common sense and reason. One is to accept Christian faith even if (or just because?) it is absurd. For it is the only adequate source of the kind of meaning a human being has to have to keep on going with a sense that life is worthwhile.

Another way to describe Kierkegaard’s overall philosophy is to characterize it in terms of his three stages or levels of life. One should make an ascent from the lowest stage, the aesthetic (sensuous, even sensual), through the higher ethical stage, and on to the highest stage of all, the religious, which somehow baptizes and incorporates the two lower stages into itself. Only one who has reached the religious stage can have a truly meaningful life and thus a life worth living.

Whatever Kierkegaard’s own view was, we can make the following observations about things Kierkegaard (or one or other of his pseudonymous authors) said about the meaning of life.

(1) One thing is that life can seem meaningless. In the early work, Either/Or (1843), we find this passage: “How empty and meaningless life is.” Elsewhere in Either/Or we get similar thoughts and questions, for instance, “What, if anything, is the meaning of this life?” and “My life is utterly meaningless.” Perhaps, though, the idea is that, though life is often meaningless, it need not be so, and, when it is, it is because of some kind of failure of the liver (of the life, not the organ).

(2) A second interesting idea in Kierkegaard is that meaning has something to do with unity. In a meaningful life all the diverse aspects of it come together to form some kind of coherent whole. One pursues some one goal, to which everything in one’s life is subordinated.

(3) A third point, an important one, is that, though meaning is a good thing, it is possible for there to be too much meaning in one’s life, or in its parts. Kierkegaard observes:

 No part of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it any moment he wants to; on the other hand, every single part of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that he can     remember it at any moment. ( Either/Or )

To have one’s life full of meaning to the brim, to regard life and everything one does in it as infinitely significant, brings with it so much pressure and stress that one’s life becomes unbearable.

To me [says Kierkegaard] it seems . . . that to be known in time by God makes life enormously strenuous. Everywhere where he is present each half hour is of infinite importance. Yet to live like that for sixty years is unsupportable. It is difficult enough putting up even with the three years’ hard study for an examination, and those are still not as strenuous as half an hour like this. ( Concluding Unscientific Postscript )

(4) A fourth idea about meaning in Kierkegaard is the idea that one can give one’s life meaning, or that one can acquire meaning in life, by doing something like devoting oneself to something. Of Antigone he says, “her life acquires meaning for her in its devotion to showing him [her father, after his death] the last honors daily, almost hourly, by her unbroken silence.” ( Either/Or )

(5) Meaning does not come from abstract, objective knowledge of any kind, whether philosophical, or scientific, or historical, or even theological. It comes from some kind of faith, a faith that is passionately acquired and lived daily.

(6) One twentieth century approach to the problem of the meaning of life is to see, accept, and bask more or less happily in the absurdity of life. Kierkegaard anticipated this approach prophetically in his characterization of the “humorist.” Kierkegaard writes: “Weary of time and its endless succession, the humorist runs away and finds humorous relief in stating the absurd.” ( Concluding Unscientific Postscript )

(7) Kierkegaard’s humorist also at one point expresses a view which is surprisingly rare, namely, the view that one’s life may have a meaning, but one doesn’t know what it is. Kierkegaard writes: “[L]et a humorist say what he has in mind and he will speak, for example, as follows: What is the meaning of life? Yes, good question. How should I know?” ( Concluding Unscientific Postscript )

(8) Although Kierkegaard himself was a Christian who viewed meaning as ultimately grounded in religious faith, in one’s personal relation to a supernatural God, yet, paradoxically perhaps, and certainly in an admirable spirit of non-exclusivity, he said:

It is possible both to enjoy life and to give it meaning and substance outside Christianity, just as the most    famous poets and artists, the most eminent of thinkers, even men of piety, have lived outside Christianity  ( Concluding Unscientific Postscript ).

(9) One finds in Kierkegaard the idea that life has meaning only insofar as it is related in some way to the Infinite. Nothing finite can supply the meaning of life.

On the whole, if for no other reason, Kierkegaard’s work is valuable because of its suggestiveness. Under one pseudonym or another, Kierkegaard made many important points which were taken up, or unfortunately overlooked, by subsequent philosophers concerned with the meaning of life.

c. Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) cut his philosophical teeth on Schopenhauer and devoted himself in his later works—from 1883 up to the onset of insanity in January 1889—to struggle with, among other things, the meaning of life.

Nietzsche’s grand project was the revaluation of all values. Part of this project was that of giving to life a new meaning. Nietzsche’s interest in the matter was not merely academic. Coming up with new values and giving life a new meaning was a project that involved a total transformation of Nietzsche’s own self, early versions of which he became dissatisfied with. One thing Nietzsche wanted to do was to produce an affirmative philosophy of life to replace Schopenhauer’s pessimistic, life-denying philosophy.

Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer’s picture of life as suffering, or punishment for one’s sin, together with its ethic of compassion toward the poor and the sick. Such a picture belonged to a weak, sick, decadent, nay-saying mode of being in decline. Nietzsche himself wanted to produce a positive, healthy, life-affirming philosophy, one suitable for life in the ascendant.

Sometimes, particularly early in his writings, Nietzsche seemed to think some end or other is required to make things meaningful. At times, both early and late, Nietzsche spoke as though the very concept of the meaning of something is the concept of its end, object, or goal.

In other places, however, Nietzsche spoke as if the meaning of life lies in freedom from , not in the achievement of, ends. Perhaps this should be construed as the rejection of given ends to be discovered, not in the rejection of all ends, particularly those one creates. Moritz Schlick—whose thought we will consider in more detail later—claimed that Nietzsche saw that life has no meaning so long as it stands wholly under the domination of purposes. In Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, “Sir Hazard,” expressing Nietzsche’s own considered view, says, “I have saved them from the slavery of ends.” (Klemke, 3 rd ed., 63).

Nietzsche sometimes spoke as if life, before he came into it, or before he revaluated all values, had no meaning: “Sombre is human life, and as yet without meaning: a buffoon may be fateful to it” ( Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883). There is no meaning “out there” to be discovered, no meaning in the essences of things, apart from human will, desire, perspective. In fact, apart from perspective, there is no world out there at all, no “thing-in-itself,” no “facts-in-themselves.” But a psychologically strong person can do without things in themselves and meaning (already there) to be discovered in them. That is because he can organize a small part of the world himself and thus create meaning. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche speaks of “the creative strength to create meaning,” and he says:

It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can do without meaning in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world because one organizes a small portion of it oneself. ( The Will to Power )

Whatever the meaning of life is, or is to be, it is terrestrial, not celestial. Meaning must not be placed in some fabricated “true world” but in this very earth in which we live and have our being. And the meaning of life is to be created, not discovered.

Still, somehow, man is not the meaning and measure of all things, though he has posited himself as such.

All the values by means of which we have tried so far to render the world estimable for ourselves and which then proved inapplicable and therefore devaluated the world—all these values are, psychologically considered, the results of certain perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and increase human constructs of domination—and they have been falsely projected into the essence of things. What we find here is still the hyperbolic naiveté of man: positing himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things. ( The Will to Power )

The mistake lies in projecting our own values onto reality, in thinking that our meaning and values are present in things as such. But our meaning does not lie in “things-in-themselves.” It is created by us. If we then give things out there such and such a meaning, we should recognize that it is not a meaning we have found in the things themselves, but rather one that we have given them.

We can still ask, What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning we shall give to life? Nietzsche gives two different answers. One is that the meaning of life is the Übermensch (sometimes translated as ‘ Superman’), Nietzsche’s post-human creator of meaning, affirmer of life, and bearer of values.

I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud—man. ( Thus Spake Zarathustra )

The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman SHALL BE the meaning of the earth! ( Thus Spake Zarathustra )

The other answer is that the meaning of life is the will to power.

All meaning is will to power. ( The Will to Power )

On the surface these two answers are different. But perhaps they are consistent. Perhaps what the will to power generates is the Superman, or what the Superman represents is the will to power. Again, perhaps the will to power is the meaning of life in the sense of its kernel or essence, while the Superman is its meaning in the sense of its end or goal.

Nietzsche’s view has some aspects or consequences that should be noted. One consequence of Nietzsche’s view is that the meaning of life is absent in the old and the sick. He acknowledged the fact. Another consequence (or perhaps component) of Nietzsche’s view is that nihilism, the denial of all value, is a transitional stage, not the finale. Yet another consequence is that the meaning of life is not about the predominance of pleasure over pain. Concern with that evidences only nihilism. Finally, it may be conjectured that Nietzsche would probably regard with scorn those of us in the current debate among academic philosophers about the meaning of life. He would consider us “minute” philosophers:

The study of the minute philosophers is only interesting for the recognition that they have reached those stages in the great edifice of philosophy where learned disquisitions for and against, where hair-splitting objections and counter-objections are the rule: and for that reason they evade the demand of every great philosophy to speak  sub specie aeternitatis . (Nietzsche, 1874)

One of the next thinkers in the Western intellectual tradition to ask seriously the question, “What is the meaning of life?” was the great Russian novelist and moralist Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). He asked the question and offered part of an answer in A Confession, written in Russian in 1879, circulated in 1882, and translated and published in 1884. Tolstoy’s reflections on the question stimulated a great deal of subsequent debate on the issue.

Although characters in his earlier works, such as War and Peace , sometimes talked about the meaning of life and felt the problem deeply, Tolstoy himself raised serious questions about it only as part of a psychological crisis he underwent in the mid to late 1870s. Despite having everything anyone could ever want—wealth, fame, status, love, physical strength, and so forth—Tolstoy found himself severely disturbed. His symptoms were depression, psychological paralysis, obsession with suicide, and the continual recurrence in his head of the question of the meaning of life.

Tolstoy put his question about the meaning of life in several different ways. Here are some of them, listed in order of their occurrence in his Confession :

What is it for? What does it lead to? Why? What then? What for? But what does it matter to me? What of it? Why go on making any effort? How go on living? What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything? Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy? What am  I, with my desires? Why do I live? What must I do? What is the meaning of my life? Why do I exist?

Several of these seem to be quite different questions, but Tolstoy regarded them all as the same question put in different ways.

Tolstoy said explicitly that his question was not about the composition, origin, and fate of the universe, nor again about the question, “What is the life of the whole?” That question, Tolstoy said, is unanswerable for a single man, and it is “stupidity” to think an individual must first answer the question about the meaning of the universe or the whole of humanity before he can answer the question of the meaning of his own life.

Tolstoy came to think that he should not expect to find the answers to his questions in philosophy. The legitimate task of philosophy is merely to ask the question and perhaps refine and clarify it, not to answer it, which it cannot do.

This view of philosophy as incapable of providing answers to the questions of life must have been one Tolstoy came to some way into his crisis. At another point, apparently earlier, Tolstoy did try to find answers in philosophy (as well as in the mathematical, physical, biological, and social sciences). The philosophers he studied were Socrates, the Buddha, “Solomon” (the author of Ecclesiastes ), and Schopenhauer.

All of these he interpreted as providing a negative answer. The gist of Socrates’ thought is that the true philosopher seeks death, because the life of the body, with all its ailments and desires, is an impediment to what he is really all about, namely, the quest for truth. The individual life of the physically discrete individual is pretty meaningless, something one would rather do without. The Buddha, as Tolstoy read him, teaches that life is the greatest of evils and works as hard as he can to free himself from it. “Solomon” teaches that it’s all “vanity.” And Schopenhauer, as Tolstoy understood him, wishes for, and advocates, annihilation.

In a nutshell, Tolstoy’s problem was this: since I will suffer, die, be forgotten, and make no difference (leave no trace) in the long run, how does my life, or anything I do, have any meaning? It was a problem he felt deeply. He had to have an answer to go on living. Tolstoy’s concern with the issue was not merely theoretical.

The solution to the problem that Tolstoy eventually came to was one he thought had been known all along by the unlearned peasants. The solution lies in a kind of irrational knowledge called “faith.” Faith is faith in God, and lived faith involves some kind of relation to the Infinite. Meaning is found in the appropriate relationship to God, the Infinite. Tolstoy’s solution bears obvious resemblances to Kierkegaard’s and is very much in the same spirit.

Tolstoy spent the rest of his life working out the details of, or variations on, this solution. The progress of his thought can be traced in What I Believe and On Life, as well as in his late short fiction ( The Death of Ivan Ilych, Father Sergius, and so forth). To the end Tolstoy held that faith in God, work, service to others, unselfishness, and love are essential parts of a meaningful life. He taught that the things ordinarily pursued by many—wealth, status, power, fame—contribute nothing to the meaningfulness of life.

e. Some Common Aspects of the Lives of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy

Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy all had lives which rendered them virtual breeding grounds for problems with the meaning of life. (1) All of them were well off and did not have to work for a living; there is no evidence that any of them ever felt a real threat of, say, homelessness or starvation. Nietzsche was the one that wasn’t exactly wealthy, but in his case his early retirement (in his late twenties) provided him with a pension for life sufficient to meet his material needs and free him up for a life of thought and writing. (2) All of them suffered from psychological illness of one sort or another—at the very least, a sense of gloom or melancholy, and in some cases a sense of worthlessness and a preoccupation with suicide, or feelings of dread and anxiety, or the encroachment of outright madness. (3) All of them grew up in religious environments, the tenets of which they lost faith in when they reached adulthood, and the lack of which they struggled with throughout their lives (eventually regaining, in the cases of Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, some portion of what they had lost). (4) None of them was a professional academician, except for Nietzsche in his youth.

From these four, and from our own experiences of life, we have inherited, to the extent that we have it, our preoccupation with the meaning of life.

3. Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophers

In the early twentieth century questions about the meaning of life continued to be of interest to leading European or “Continental” philosophers.    

a. Heidegger

The great German philosophy professor Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was certainly concerned with the meaning of life. He presented two different outlooks, which we may call “early Heidegger” and “later Heidegger.”

For early Heidegger (that is, the Heidegger of Being and Time, 1927), the question of the meaning of life is the question how we can live an “authentic” life, one that is our life, not just the life for us that has been fixed by the community we live in. His answer is that to live a meaningful life is to live a life of authenticity. To live a life authenticity is to live a life that one oneself chooses, not the life that is prescribed for one by one’s social situation. To live a life of authenticity, one must have a plan , something that unifies one’s life into an organic whole. This is one’s own plan. So a meaningful life is one of focused authenticity. “Authenticity is Heidegger’s accounted of what it is to live a meaningful life.”

Living authentically, it turns out, is a matter of living in a way that is true to your heritage. “Being true to heritage is being true to your own, deepest self.” In the end, the content of authenticity is not something you freely choose ex nihilo, but rather something you discover in the conjunction of heritage and facticity.

Early Heidegger’s thought seems to be a kind of pantheism, and it is possible that Heidegger subscribed to some such view all his life.

Later Heidegger proposes a somewhat different view. In this philosophy of his, we are given the task, in which our meaning lies, of being “guardians of the world.” The world is a holy place. To understand and appreciate that fact is to exhibit not just a certain intellectual and practical stance toward the world, but to live with an attitude of respect and reverence toward the world, toward the natural world especially. Later Heidegger saw exploitation of the natural world, as in mining and highway-building, as deplorable, as contrary to the very meaning of life. The meaning of life is guardianship of the world.

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) changed his views over the course of his life. In his work Being and Nothingness (1943) , advocated an outlook from which life is absurd . We more or less seriously pursue goals which, from a detached standpoint, we can see don’t really matter. But we continue to act as though they do, and hence our lives are absurd. The Sartrean project is to overcome this detached standpoint, or to incorporate it into our lives.

The problem is other people. They insist on their own reality. They tend to get in the way of our pursuit of our own goals.

Later on, Sartre espoused a somewhat different view. On this new view, “our fundamental goal in life is to overcome our ‘contingency’,” to become the foundation of our own being. The main obstacle (again) is other people who, on the one hand, pursue their own (different) goals and, on the other, propose a real (military) threat to one’s way of life and one’s homeland.

In his 1944 play, No Exit, there is the famous line: “Hell is other people.” Other people do not cooperate with my projects, and I do not cooperate with theirs. The result is war, in something like Schopenhauer’s sense. People are always at war, or at least at odds, with each other.

In both his early and his later thought, Sartre ends up being pretty pessimistic and depressing. Life is meaningless. We can, by our free choice, give life some meaning or other. But the decision to do so is itself a matter of ungrounded free choice, which is such that it doesn’t matter whether that decision or some other one is made.

Albert Camus (1913-1960), a Frenchman born in Algeria, was one of the leading existentialists (though he himself disowned the label) and one of the more influential writers of the first half of the twentieth century. He was familiar with the work of Nietzsche, and greatly influenced by it.

On our theme, Camus’s starting point was the perception of the absurd. Human life, he felt, was absurd, meaningless, and senseless. The way in which it is, or the reason it is, lies in an inevitable clash between the needs and aspirations of human beings and the cold, meaningless world.

This clash has at least four facets. First, we seek—demand, even—a rational understanding of things, some way of seeing the world as familiar to us. But the world does not cooperate: to us, it is ultimately unintelligible. Second, we long for some kind of unity underlying and organizing the manifest diversity we find all around us. But again, the world is heedless of our longings. The world that presents itself to our senses is nothing but disjointed plurality. Third, we long for a higher reality (a God, for example), something transcendent, some cosmic meaning of everything. But no such meaning can be discerned. Fourth, we strive for continued life, or at least to achieve something permanent in the end. But our efforts are pointless, everything will come to nothing, and all that lies ahead is death and oblivion.

Our situation is like that of the mythical Greek of old, Sisyphus. We are condemned, as it were, to pushing a rock up a hill, over and over only to see it roll back down again, every time, when it reaches the top. Pointless labor is Sisyphus’ lot, and ours too.

The pointlessness and absurdity of life raise the question of suicide. Should we kill ourselves? Camus’s answer is that, no, we should not. Suicide is escapist. To kill yourself is to give in, to lose. If we were prisoners of war—which is something like what we are—our captor and tormentor would want us to do exactly that—confess that things are too much for us and kill ourselves. That would be his ultimate victory, which would bring him a chuckle, or perhaps even a hearty guffaw.

How then should we live? The first thing to do is to insist that life is better if there is no meaning. That would really irritate our tormentor. Second, we should cultivate a mindset of honesty and lucidity. We should not indulge in denial, or evasion, or imaginings of an eventual escape into an afterlife where everything will be put right. We should acknowledge that life is awful—but then, perhaps, add “and I love it” or “all is well.” Third, we should take up an attitude of revolt, defiance, and scorn. Camus observes, “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” Surely such an attitude would vex our hypothetical tormentor beyond measure. Fourth, we should live for now, stop worrying about the future, stop striving to achieve future goals. Nothing is going to come of anything we do in the long run anyway. Fifth, we should “use everything up”: work hard, play hard, approach everything with zest and passion, expend energy to the human limit. This amounts to a kind of perverse “Yes!” to life. Finally, we may ask why anyone would want to live like this? Is it something that would appeal only to the French? What are the advantages of such an attitude toward life?

Camus has answers to these queries, three in fact. First, living as he recommends is a way of salvaging our dignity, and it is a way to which a certain majesty adheres. Second, surprisingly perhaps, such a way of living brings with it a “curious joy.” Third, it is the way of freedom. Camus’s scornful existentialism is the best conception we have of a truly free human being, one who does not allow himself to be shaped and determined by the mindless, meaningless world that surrounds him.

4. Early Twentieth Century Analytic, American, and English-Language Philosophers

  Anglo-American philosophers in the very late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries continued to be interested in problems of the meaning of life as well.

The American pragmatist philosopher William James (1842-1910), a Harvard professor, wrote a couple of interesting essays on our theme in the late 1890s. Both essays were written as addresses to be delivered to live audiences. They demand some discussion and consideration.

In “Is Life Worth Living?” (1895), James reveals deep, probably first-person, familiarity, with the existential source of concern with the issues of the meaning and worthwhileness of life. He calls it the “profounder bass-note of life” and suggests that it is to be found, or heard, somewhere in all of us: “In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.” (1895: 32)

Some people are so naturally optimistic and in love with life that they are constitutionally incapable of being much bothered by the bass-note and pay it little attention. James’s example of such a person is Walt Whitman; and one thinks of the English. James finds no fault—intellectual, moral, or otherwise—with such people. It is rare good fortune to be blessed with such a temperament. If everyone were, the question of the worthwhileness of life would never arise.

But for every Whitman, there is a suicide, and a thinker of the dreary constitution of the poet James Thomson, author of “The City of Dreadful Night.”

In his address, James imagines himself in discussion with a would-be suicide whom he tries to persuade to take up his burden and see life through to its natural end. James acknowledges that some of these suicides—perhaps the majority of them—are too far gone to have anything said to them, for instance, those whose suicidal impulses are due to insanity or sudden fits of frenzy. It is to the class of reflective would-be suicides—those disposed to kill themselves because of their thinking, reading, and brooding on the darker side of life—that James directs his remarks. It is these he wants to cheer up (or comfort) and keep alive.

James speaks of two stages of recovery from suicidal illness. The first stage includes three elements, three palliatives, for the suicidal condition. First, there is the thought, “You can end it whenever you will.” This strikes one as a strange thought to recommend to one contemplating suicide. But James thinks the thought can be a comfort. It means there’s no particular guilt or stigma attached to suicide. It means one won’t have to put up with this miserable world forever; one can opt out whenever one wants. It may delay the act by encouraging the thought, “Why kill myself today when I can always do it tomorrow?” Second, James points out, there is in human beings a natural sense of curiosity. It is worth hanging around a while longer in order to see the headlines of tomorrow’s newspaper. Third, there is a certain fighting instinct in human beings. James thinks the normal man has a reason to go on, even if the whole thing is worthless and meaningless, as long as there is some injustice to be put right, some villain to be put down, or some evil to overcome in the little corner of the universe he inhabits. The three things just mentioned all lie in the first stage of recovery, one that is partial and inferior to what lies in the second stage.

The second stage is one of full recovery. It is the religious stage. It gives one assurance of a fully worthwhile and meaningful life.

James’s injunction is to believe—to believe in a supernatural, spiritual order of things which overcomes and makes right the deficiencies of the natural order as we know it. We do not have rational or evidential proof that such a supernatural order exists. But Kant proved that natural science cannot prove that such an order does not exist. To make one’s life worthwhile and meaningful, all one has to do is to posit faith in such an order, to believe that there is a spiritual realm in which all the wrongs of the natural order are righted. In that case, one will view the natural order as an inadequate representation of the spiritual, or as a veil through which the true and wonderful nature of the spiritual is hidden or obscured.

One need have little conception of what the spiritual realm is like. The content of the belief in it can be quite minimal. All one needs to affirm is that there is such a realm and that its reality makes life worthwhile. James draws on two of the tenets of his pragmatism to support such an approach to the meaning and worthwhileness of life.  One is the right to believe what we need to believe, even though it goes beyond belief warranted by empirical and rational evidence. His classic case for the right of such belief is in his essay, “The Will to Believe.”

Another tenet of pragmatism on which James draws is the idea that belief is a matter of action. To believe something is not so much to have a certain mental state as to act in a certain way. Whatever is in one’s mind, to act as though life is worthwhile and has meaning is to believe that it does

In “What Makes a Life Significant” (1899), James expressly addressed the question of the significance or meaning of life. What he said in this essay was rather different from what he had said in the previous one. The essay was in part a response to the deification of the uneducated, hard-working peasants in Tolstoy’s Confession. James admired Tolstoy a great deal but felt he went a bit overboard in his praise of peasant life and in his tendency to identify it as the very locus of meaning. James held that the lives of Tolstoy’s peasants were full of one ingredient necessary for a meaningful life—toil, struggle, pluck, will, suffering, manly virtues—but that they lacked the other necessary ingredient for a fully meaningful life, namely, what James called “ideals.”

Toward the end of the essay, James gives his own view. He states it in two or three different ways, the sense of which seems to be the same. “[I]deal visions” must be backed “with what the laborers have, the sterner stuff of manly virtue.”

[T]o redeem life from insignificance, [c]ulture and refinement all alone are not enough. . . . Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will. . . . There must be some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles, for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result. (1899: 877)

The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,—the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.—And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place. (1899: 878)

James is rather vague about what the “ideals” are, or even what they are like. In at least some cases they have something to do with culture and refinement, but it seems that they can and will vary from person to person, and may reside in some form in the uncultured and unrefined. In any event, it is noteworthy that James does not bring up the subject of religion. There is no suggestion that belief in God or a spiritual world is necessary for a fully meaningful life. An ideal wedded to manly virtue is enough.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is often portrayed as one of those early twentieth century analytic philosophers who had no patience for big questions, such as that of the meaning of life. The portrayal is often reinforced by the famous story of Russell and the cab-driver, to whom Russell had nothing to say about the meaning of life.

It is true that Russell sometimes expressed a dismissive attitude toward the question: to Hugh Moorhead he said, “Unless you assume a God, the question (of life’s meaning) is meaningless” (Metz 2013b: 23), and to the taxi-driver he had indeed nothing to say about the meaning of life. But elsewhere he seems to have taken the question very seriously.

In “A Free Man’s Worship,” he begins with a fairly gloomy, despairing picture of the world science reveals to us, the only world there is, really. It is purposeless, void of meaning. The causes that produced us had no prevision of the end they were achieving. We ourselves, and everything precious to us, are the outcome of the accidental collocations of atoms. There is no life for the individual beyond the grave. The existence of our very species, along with all its achievements, will eventually be extinguished in the death of the solar system and “buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.”

But the thing for us to do is to maintain our ideals against the hostile universe. That universe knows the value of raw power, and not much else. Let us not worship it, as did Nietzsche. In exalting the will to power, Nietzsche was failing to maintain the highest human ideals in the face of the cruel world; he was, in a sense, giving in, capitulating, prostrately submitting to evil, sacrificing his best to Moloch.

Let us be clear-sighted and honest. Let us recognize that the facts are often bad, that in the world we know there are many things that would have been better otherwise, that our ideals are not in fact realized in the world.

But, again, in our minds and hearts, even though the whole business may be futile, let us tenaciously cling to our ideals, loving truth and beauty. Let us renounce power. Let us worship only the God created by our own love of the good. Let us live constantly in the vision of the good.

One trap we must guard against falling into is that which (Russell would think) Camus fell into some decades later. We should not cultivate and live in a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the senseless universe. Why not? Because indignation is still a kind of bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with the evil world. Give up the indignation so that your thoughts can be free. From freedom of thought comes art, philosophy, and the vision of beauty.

To achieve this we must develop a kind of detachment from our own personal happiness, must learn to free ourselves from the burden of concern for petty things and personal goods.

To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things–this is emancipation, and this is the free man’s worship. (Russell 1903: 61)

In The Conquest of Happiness Russell makes a couple of remarks about the meaning of life that are worthy of note. The first is this:

The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts. Life is not to be conceived on the analogy of a melodrama in which the hero and heroine go through incredible misfortunes for which they are compensated by a happy ending. (1930: 29)

The second is odd but interesting, perhaps not the kind of thought that would occur to most people:

the human heart as modern civilisation has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied, because it feels deeply, perhaps even unconsciously, that it has somehow missed the meaning of life, that perhaps others, but not we ourselves, have secured the good things which nature offers man’s enjoyment. (1930: 75)

The thought seems to be that people hate each other because they think others have achieved (or know?) the meaning of life and they don’t. If that is true, one should be careful not to let on that he knows the meaning of life, even if he does.

Several writers have advocated focus and have thought of a life organized by one big project or goal as the paradigm case of a meaningful one. Russell rejects the idea.

All our affections are at the mercy of death, which may strike down those whom we love at any moment. It is therefore necessary that our lives should not have that narrow intensity which puts the whole meaning and purpose of our life at the mercy of accident. For all these reasons the man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those central ones upon which his life is built. (1930: 177)

Finally, in “The Place of Science in a Liberal Education,” Russell makes the now familiar point that the meaning of life must come not from without but from within.

The search for an outside meaning that can compel an inner response must always be disappointed: all “meaning” must be at bottom related to our primary desires, and when they are extinct no miracle can restore to the world the value which they reflected upon it. ( Mysticism and Logic, ch. 2, “The Place of Science in a Liberal Education”)

That is not to say that the meaning of life is created or chosen as opposed to discovered. For our primary desires are something largely given, something (if we are lucky) we simply find in ourselves.

Moritz Schlick (1882-1936) was one of the central figures of the logical positivist movement. Thinkers in the movement are commonly said to have been dismissive of such “metaphysical” questions as that of the meaning of life. Yet Schlick for one was in no way dismissive. He described himself as a seeker of the meaning of life and wrote an extremely interesting essay on the topic in 1927.

Schlick’s contribution to the debate is (to some) one of the most appealing writings in the whole of the literature. Schlick was aware of Schopenhauer’s musings and was concerned to escape his dire conclusions. Schlick found his answer in (his interpretation of) Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. The answer is that life can be meaningful only if it is freed from its subjugation to ends and purposes. The suggestion is radical: a life has meaning only if it does not have some end or purpose to which everything is subordinated.

Schlick argued that the meaning of life is to be found not in work but in play. Work, in the philosophical sense, is always something done not for its own sake but for the sake of something else, some end or purpose that is to be achieved.  Most often that end is the survival and perpetuation of life—that is, more work functioning only to perpetuate the life of the species. But it is absurd to take the meaning of life to lie in the continued survival of the species, or in the work required to make that survival possible. The meaning of life must lie in the content of existence, not in bare existence as such.

What then is the meaning of life? One candidate that suggests itself is feelings of pleasure and happiness. But Schlick rejects that candidate, partly on the grounds that pleasure is likely only to lead to the satiety and boredom which Schopenhauer so vividly made us aware of. Schlick also rejects the ideal of happiness as the meaning of life by way of the observation that man is essentially an active creature for which a life of idle pleasure is by no means suitable. What Schlick ends up saying is that the meaning of life is to be found in play, that is, in activity engaged in for its own glorious sake and not for the furtherance of some further end or goal. Doing something only in order to produce some further end or goal is work, and work cannot be the meaning of life. Of course, work is necessary for human existence and thriving, but it is meaningful only if it can—and it can be—turned into play, something one would do with delight even if nothing came of it in the end.

Schlick backs off from saying that the meaning of life is play. Instead, he says that the meaning of life is youth , since youth is the period of life in which play predominates. A nice consequence of this position is the fact that a life cut short in its infancy or youth is a meaningful life. If you are killed when you are ten years old, it is likely that you lived a life full of meaning.

One other aspect of Schlick’s view should be mentioned. It is that youth is not literally a matter of how long one has lived on this earth. If an old fellow turns his work into play, if he performs it primarily for the sake of the sheer joy of doing it, then he is young in the sense that matters. The key to a fully meaningful life would be to stay forever young.

The Bengali Indian poet, short-story writer, novelist, dramatist, artist, sage, and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), often credited with a major role in the cross-fertilization of East and West, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1919. He wrote in English (sometimes). He knew the works of Einstein, Yeats, Wordsworth, and a host of other Western thinkers. In 1930 he delivered the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford, published the next year as The Religion of Man (1931), a remarkable volume containing much reflection on the meaning of life. This article will limit itself to consideration of a couple of points in that book.

Tagore is interesting because his interest in the question of the meaning of life did not arise out of anything like the circumstances which seemed to create the interest in so many Western thinkers. Tagore was not well-off and bored, he did not suffer from depression and existential angst, he did not worry about the importance of his personal life in the vast scheme of things, he was not a professional academic philosopher.

Tagore’s tendency was to view the question of the meaning of life as the question, “What is man?” or “What am I?” His answer seems to have been that the true human is the universal self, or the true Man represented by the life of the species, or even by the life of all beings.

If he had a problem, it lay in the chaotic, hodgepodge nature of this everyday life. Not exactly seeking for a solution to the predicament, one came to him on an ordinary day on which he was just living his everyday life in east India. He gives a gripping and poetic account of it in chapter six of The Religion of Man. He writes:

Suddenly I became conscious of a stirring of soul within me. My world of experience in a moment seemed to become lighted, and the facts that were detached and dim found a great unity of meaning. The feeling which I had was like that which a man, groping through a fog without knowing his destination, might fee when he suddenly discovers that he stands before his own house. (Tagore 1931, 95)

One thing that is noteworthy in this is that Tagore felt he had seen the meaning of life, not when he realized that his life really mattered, or added up to something sub specie aeternitatus, nor when he came up with a view of things that rid him of his angst and depression, but rather when he found that his life was part of a great unity of meaning. He saw meaning when everything, including his individual life, was one unified whole.

A second feature of Tagore’s conception of the meaning of life is the role he gives to detachment. The detachment that is relevant seems to be something like non-attachment to the petty concerns of one’s own individual life. It is not a lack of concern for anything and everything. It is lack of concern for how one’s own individual, personal life fares. The appropriately detached person places his interest in how Man as the eternal being, or beings of any sort ultimately fare. (There is an admirable concern for all life, not just human life in the thought of Tagore.) The appropriately detached man loses concern for his personal triumphs and failures and cultivates an enlivening interest in the life of the whole, with which, instead of his personal life, he identifies himself. The result is a vast increase in the sense of meaningfulness in his own life.

A very different approach to the problem of the meaning of life was taken by the prominent logical positivist English philosopher A. J. Ayer (1910-1989).

Ayer argued, in an important 1947 paper, that “there is no sense in asking what is the ultimate purpose of our existence, or what is the real meaning of life” (Ayer 1947: 201). His argument is that there is no reason to believe in anything like a God who created us and intended us for a specific purpose. And even if there were such a God, his purposes could not give life meaning unless we agreed with them and accepted them. Thus the meaning of life always comes back to what we as individuals purpose, value, and aim at. There is no meaning out there to be discovered.

Ayer insists that the meaninglessness of life is nothing to cry about. One’s life has whatever meaning one gives it. It just doesn’t make sense to ask about the meaning of life because there is not, and could not be, such a thing. The question “What is the meaning of life?” is illogical and unanswerable. But a person can give his life a meaning, and if he does, it will be meaningful to him. It will come down to the value judgments the person makes. And these are a matter of personal choice and preference. There is no sense in saying that one person’s value judgments are true and another’s false. Give your life a meaning, and that’s the meaning it will have.

5. Conclusion

The dismissal of the question about the meaning of life which was characteristic of Ayer and his generation, and Camus’s idea that meaninglessness doesn’t matter, may be what ironically sparked the recent interest in the question. The natural philosophical response is that surely the question of the meaning of life is meaningful and important: in light of the remarks of Ayer, Camus, and their ilk, how is that so? A sense that the meaning of life must be a philosophical problem that matters has motivated work on the question of what the question of the meaning of life is all about, if we do not take Ayer’s dismissive attitude and Camus’s stance toward it. The work of Richard Taylor, Robert Nozick, Thomas Nagel, Joel Feinberg, Harry Frankfurt, Susan Wolf, Thaddeus Metz, Joshua Seachris, Julian Young, John Cottingham, David Benatar, and Garrett Thomson (among others) are attempts to answer this question.

The preceding survey brings us up to around 1950, just before a veritable explosion of works on the meaning of life took place in philosophy, especially in the Anglo-analytic tradition. Those interested in this explosion should begin by consulting the excellent overviews in Thaddeus Metz’s article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Metz 2013) and Joshua Seachris’s article in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Seachris 2012) . 

6. References and Further Reading

• Ayer, A. J. “The Claims of Philosophy.” Reprinted in The Meaning of Life, 3rd Ed.. E. D. Klemke (ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2008: 199-202. (Originally published in 1947)
• Baier, K. “The Meaning of Life.” Reprinted in The Meaning of Life. E. D. Klemke (ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 1981: 81-117. (Originally published in 1947.)
• Camus, A. “The Myth of Sisyphus.” J. O’Brien (tr.). Reprinted in part in Ways of Wisdom: Readings on the Good Life, Steve Smith (ed.). Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983: 244-255. (Originally published in French in 1943.)
• Carlyle, T. 1834. Fraser’s Magazine. available online at Project Gutenberg.
• Heidegger, M. Being and Time. J. Macquarrie and J. Robinson (trs.). Oxford: Blackwell, 1973. (Originally published in German in 1927.)
• James, W. “Is Life Worth Living?.” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, New York: Dover Publications, 1956: 32-62. (Originally published in 1895.)
• James, W. “What Makes a Life Significant?.” in On Some of Life’s Ideals. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1899: 49–94. Reprinted in William James: Writings 1878-1899. New York: The Library of America, 1992: 861-80.
• Kierkegaard, S. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. (Available free online and in several print editions.) (Originally published in Danish in 1846.)
• Kierkegaard, S. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life. (Available free online and in several print editions.) (Originally published in Danish in 1843.)
• Klemke, E. D. (ed.). The Meaning of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
• Klemke, E. D. (ed.). The Meaning of Life. 2nd Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Klemke, E. D. & Cahn, S. (eds.). The Meaning of Life: A Reader, 3rd Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Metz, T. “The Meaning of Life.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition). Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
• Nagel, T. “The Absurd,” Reprinted in The Meaning of Life. E. D. Klemke (ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 1981: 151-161. (Originally published in 1971.)
• Nietzsche, F. Ecce Homo. (available free online and in several print editions.) (Originally written in German in 1888-1889.)
• Nietzsche, F. On the Genealogy of Morals. Ian Johnston (tr.). 2009.
• Nietzsche, F. Thus Spake Zarathustra. (available free online and in several print editions.) (Originally written in German in 1883-1885.)
• Nietzsche, F. Twilight of the Idols. (available free online and in several print editions.) (Originally written in German in 1888-1899.)
• Nietzsche, F. The Will to Power. (available free online and in several print editions.) (Originally published in German in 1901-1911.)
• The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2014.
• Russell, B. “A Free Man’s Worship.” Reprinted in The Meaning of Life. E. D. Klemke (ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 1981: 55-62. (Originally published in 1903.)
• Russell, B. The Conquest of Happiness. London: Liveright, 1930.
• Sartre, J. P. Being and Nothingness. H. E. Barnes (tr.). New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. (Originally published in French in 1943.)
• Sartre, J. P. “Existentialism and Humanism.” B. Frechtman (tr.). 1956. Reprinted in Ways of Wisdom. S. Smith (ed.). Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983: 234-43.
• Schlick, M. 1927. “On the Meaning of Life.” Reprinted in The Meaning of Life: A Reader, 3rd Ed., E. D. Klemke & S. Cahn (eds.). P. Heath (tr.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2008: 62-71. (Originally published in 1927.)
• Schopenhauer, A. 1840. On the Basis of Morality. (available free online and in several editions)
• Schopenhauer, A. “On the Suffering of the World.” in Essays and Aphorisms. R. J. Hollingdale (tr.). New York: Penguin Books, 1970: 41-50. (Originally published in German in 1851.)
• Schopenhauer, A. “On the Vanity of Existence.” in Essays and Aphorisms. R. J. Hollingdale (tr.). New York: Penguin Books, 1970: 51-54. (Originally published in German in 1851.)
• Schopenhauer, A. “On Affirmation and Denial of the Will to Live.” in Essays and Aphorism., R. J. Hollingdale (tr.). New York: Penguin Books, 1970: 61-65. (Originally published in German in 1851.)
• Schopenhauer, A. “On Suicide.” in Essays and Aphorisms. R. J. Hollingdale (tr.). New York: Penguin Books, 1970: 77-79. (Originally published in German in 1851.)
• Schopenhauer, A. The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life. T. B. Saunders (tr.). 1860. rpr. in The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer, 2004.
• Schopenhauer, A. The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: On Human Nature. T. B. Saunders (tr.). 1860. Reprinted in The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer, 2004,
• Schopenhauer, A. The World as Will and Representation. 2 Vols. E. F. J. Payne (tr.). 1969. New York: Dover Publications. (Vol. 1 first appeared in 1818, Vol. 2 in 1844, in German.)
• Schopenhauer, A. Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale (tr.). 1970. New York: Penguin Books. (Originally published in German in 1851.)
• Seachris, J., 2012, “Meaning of Life: The Analytic Perspective,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
• Smith, S., (ed.), 1983, Ways of Wisdom: Readings on the Good Life, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
• Tagore, R., 1961, The Religion of Man, London: George Allen & Unwin Co., Reprinted Boston: Beacon Press. (Originally published in 1930.)
• Taylor, R., 1970, “The Meaning of Life,” Reprinted in The Meaning of Life, E. D. Klemke (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 1981: 141-150.
• Tolstoy, L., 2005, A Confession, Aylmer Maude (tr.), Reprinted Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. (Originally published in 1884.)
• Young, J. 2014, The Death of God and the Meaning of Life, 2nd ed., New York & London: Routledge.

Author Information

Wendell O’Brien Email: [email protected] Morehead State University U. S. A.

An encyclopedia of philosophy articles written by professional philosophers.

Beginnings: Life on Our World and Others

By Pat Brennan, NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program

Earth’s surface is shown as it might have looked some 3.8 billion years ago, perhaps when life was just beginning, in this artist’s rendering. Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lizbeth B. De La Torre

Feature | June 13, 2023

Where do we begin?

To chart the course of life in the cosmos, we might start with the first cells, moving and burning energy ­– perhaps in a hollow on Earth’s freshly minted surface, or a superheated vent at the bottom of an ancient sea.

But a true understanding of life, on Earth or some other world, likely will require us to unravel even earlier beginnings: the ignition of stars with their freight of life’s building blocks, the formation of planets from protoplanetary disks, the energy and chemistry of surfaces and atmospheres.

With more than 5,000 exoplanets confirmed, and likely billions more in our Milky Way galaxy, possible places where other life might reside have skyrocketed in recent years. And with more sophisticated telescopes scanning the sky and in development, we have better tools than ever to understand these distant worlds.

To seek answers to that age-old question “Are we alone?” with these new tools, what do we need to know?

“We don’t know where to look or what to look for if we don’t understand what happened on Earth,” said Mary Voytek, director of the NASA Astrobiology Program at the agency’s headquarters in Washington.

The question of origins quickly becomes a heavy lift, so it might be best to break it into pieces. Let’s start with what we know.

How Did Earth End Up With Life?

Much of NASA’s astrobiology research, studying the origins and requirements of life in the cosmos, begins right here at home. And it goes all the way back to the birth of our star, the Sun, inside a swirling cloud of gas and dust.

That cloud contained ingredients essential to life, including carbon, water, ammonia, methane, and other building blocks – molecules made from elements mostly forged in the hearts of previous generations of stars, whose explosive deaths scattered their contents through the cosmos.

Seeing the same components in distant families of stars and planets can check the first box on the list of habitable conditions.

“It started with the star,” Voytek said. “The reason it ended with life on Earth is in the details: How planets formed out of the rotating disk of dense gas surrounding a newly formed star, the relationship to the whole system – the star, the other planets around it – that made Earth habitable and supported the emergence and evolution of life.”

Next on the list of conditions favorable to habitability: where Earth wound up once our solar system formed. Earth dwells in the “habitable zone,” the orbital distance from a star that allows liquid water to pool on a planet’s surface under a suitable atmosphere. Life on Earth inhabits a shockingly diverse range of conditions, from deep cold to caustic, boiling pools, but all appear to require liquid water. Scientists expect water to be essential to life on other worlds as well.

Venus, otherwise Earth’s twin in size and rocky composition, orbits too close to the Sun, just inside the inner edge of the habitable zone. On its surface, hot enough to melt lead, liquid water is out of the question, though it might have existed in the past. On today’s Martian surface, frozen and exposed beneath the thinnest of atmospheres at the habitable zone’s outer edge, persistent liquid water is highly unlikely.

The icy moons of the outer solar system, with their hidden oceans of liquid water, also might provide habitable conditions ­– despite being well outside the traditional habitable zone.

While environments similar to those found among our planets and moons could prevail in systems elsewhere in the galaxy, some ­– such as potentially habitable “exomoons” – are beyond the reach of our present remote sensing technology. So the habitable zone and the possibility of surface water are at best a rough guide, helping astronomers sort through the variety of exoplanets for potential life-bearing targets.

Getting the Right Chemistry

Scientists interested in this question, as well as understanding life’s origin, also focus on molecules and chemistry. How did microscopic interactions on a volatile early Earth, some four billion years ago, create an energy consuming, waste producing package of material we would define as “alive?”

Scientists offer many potential scenarios for jump-starting life, said Betül Kaçar, a professor in the Department of Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kaçar heads the Molecular Paleobiology Laboratory at UW-Madison, as well as the NASA Interdisciplinary Consortium for Astrobiology Research (ICAR) project, Metal Utilization and Selection across Eons (MUSE) , which studies the delicate dance between evolution, geochemistry and the biology of early life.

“Maybe life started through comet impact,” Kaçar said. “Or shock synthesis, or hydrothermal vents. These are among the more popular, big ideas.”

Her research group takes an experimental approach, focusing in part on enzymes – the proteins that trigger chemical reactions in our cells, aka metabolism, that can help construct or break down cellular material.

“We resurrect multiple important enzymes to explore ancient biological systems that basically go back to the birth of these metabolic innovations – how life learned to use what was available in its environment, including the atmosphere, in the first place,” Kaçar said. “We are using available DNA to reverse the clock and go back billions of years into the past.”

Kaçar says she’s also seen a shift in recent years in astrobiology research, toward exploring the behavior of ancient aggregations of molecules that might be seen as life-like, rather than simply synthesizing the chemical compounds associated with early life.

These might well include “messier” forms of molecules, Voytek said – “proto-molecules,” able to store information or catalyze reactions, but far more primitive and less efficient than the comparatively efficient RNA and DNA we’re familiar with today.

“We’re looking at these as life-like, but not exactly life,” Voytek said.

Voytek and Kaçar see another shift as well: an expansion in our view of the history of life on Earth that ranges from the bottom of the deep ocean at hydrothermal vents – a viable possible pathway for life’s origin – all the way up to potential life-generating chemistry on the earliest land surface. The components and functions of life might even have arisen piecemeal, at various times and places over hundreds of millions of years, only later stitching together to form recognizable, living organisms.

Chemistry across this spectrum can access “more variety of energy sources, mineral diversity, presence of wet-dry cycles,” Kaçar said. “When it comes to the origin of life, it’s about location, location, location, and also chemistry.”

What We Can Learn from Other Planets

Meanwhile, as our eyes on the universe grow in sophistication, so does our ability to find exoplanets and learn more about them.

So far, telescopes have revealed exoplanets come in many flavors, some rocky, some gaseous. They include “super-Earths,” which might or might not be scaled-up, rocky worlds, and “mini-Neptunes,” junior versions of our own Neptune – two planet types that, though common in the galaxy, are strange to us because they don’t occur in our solar system. Add to the menagerie “hot Jupiters” and “hot Saturns,” in tight, scorching orbits around their stars, and rogue planets floating freely through space without a parent star.

Human knowledge of other worlds continues to be profoundly shaped by increasingly powerful space telescopes. Surveys by NASA’s now-retired Kepler and the still-active Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have helped us discover planets, while the James Webb Space Telescope has begun delivering a torrent of images and atmospheric data. The Roman Space Telescope, expected to launch in 2027, may discover some 100,000 more of these distant worlds, in addition to testing new technology for directly imaging exoplanets.

Future, even more powerful space telescopes could search exoplanet atmospheres directly for signs of life – what astrobiologists call biosignatures.

But if Earth is our model for seeking evidence of life among the exoplanets, we must learn not only how to detect biosignatures from a planet that resembles our present-day world. We also must try to recognize life signs on planets that resemble Earth’s distant past, when conditions were very different than the present day.

Timothy Lyons, a biogeochemistry professor at the University of California, Riverside, heads the Alternative Earths Team, previously funded through the NASA Astrobiology Institute and now as an ICAR project. The team probes how Earth might have looked to a distant observer at various points in its 4.5-billion-year existence.

“Earth is the only planet we know of with life,” Lyons said. “But Earth has been many different planets over its history. Those are the alternative Earths.”

Would we recognize a living Earth, for instance, before oxygen was abundant enough in the atmosphere to be detected? Life-forms that did not rely on oxygen thrived for billions of years before an oxygenated atmosphere would have registered on the instruments of an observer many light-years away. And after life began producing oxygen, its accumulation in the atmosphere was likely low enough to evade detection for billions of years.

It’s even possible, he said, that oxygen would have remained undetectable until perhaps as recently as 800 million years ago, long after the earliest appearance of complex life – cells with a central nucleus – and about the same time as the earliest animal life.

One of the goals of Lyons’ research team is to use chemical measurements of ancient rocks, which provide a record of the past, as well as computer models, to produce a kind of catalog of gaseous profiles of Earth’s many phases. Using such a platform, they can imagine possibilities on distant planets, even if very different from anything in Earth’s archives. If Webb and future space telescopes capture matching profiles in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, it could be a strong sign of a “biosphere” – a world marked by environmental conditions and changes that drive, and are driven by, some form of life.

“The ultimate objective is to understand how a planet can develop and sustain a detectable biosphere – not only to know that [life] could be there, but that it is there,” Lyons said. “And we hope our work will inform designs of new telescopes and the interpretations of the first waves of atmospheric composition data from planets in habitable zones.”

Future investigators also will have to recognize non-biological processes that might yield gases we interpret as biosignatures. Photochemistry and certain atmospheric properties could produce abundant oxygen, for instance, on a planet devoid of life.

Taking such a holistic view of the potential for life beyond Earth requires multi-disciplinary teams like Lyons’ and Kaçar’s, involving biologists, geochemists, geologists, exoplanet researchers and others.

“It’s almost like a biologist, a geologist and an astronomer walk into a bar, and life happens,” Kaçar said. Or they might order a “smoothie,” she says, a blend of many scientific disciplines to crack the code of life detection – among our neighboring planets or the exoplanets scattered across the galaxy.

“There’s amazing interest right now, more than I’ve ever seen, toward pursuing this problem, an amazing amount of students,” she said. “It’s really wild and incredibly inspirational. That’s why I think we’re very close to solving this. It’s great fun.”

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The origin of life: what we know, what we can know and what we will never know

1 Department of Chemistry, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva, 84105, Israel

Robert Pascal

2 Institut des Biomolécules Max Mousseron (UMR 5247, CNRS, Universités Montpellier 1 and Montpellier 2), Université Montpellier 2, Place E. Bataillon 34095, Montpellier Cedex 05, France

The origin of life (OOL) problem remains one of the more challenging scientific questions of all time. In this essay, we propose that following recent experimental and theoretical advances in systems chemistry, the underlying principle governing the emergence of life on the Earth can in its broadest sense be specified, and may be stated as follows: all stable (persistent) replicating systems will tend to evolve over time towards systems of greater stability. The stability kind referred to, however, is dynamic kinetic stability, and quite distinct from the traditional thermodynamic stability which conventionally dominates physical and chemical thinking. Significantly, that stability kind is generally found to be enhanced by increasing complexification, since added features in the replicating system that improve replication efficiency will be reproduced, thereby offering an explanation for the emergence of life's extraordinary complexity. On the basis of that simple principle, a fundamental reassessment of the underlying chemistry–biology relationship is possible, one with broad ramifications. In the context of the OOL question, this novel perspective can assist in clarifying central ahistoric aspects of abiogenesis, as opposed to the many historic aspects that have probably been forever lost in the mists of time.

2. Introduction

The origin of life (OOL) problem continues to be one of the most intriguing and challenging questions in science (for recent reviews on the OOL, see [ 1 – 6 ]). Its resolution would not only satisfy man's curiosity regarding this central existential issue, but would also shed light on a directly related topic—the precise nature of the physico-chemical relationship linking animate and inanimate matter. As one of us (A.P.) has noted previously [ 1 , 7 , 8 ], until the principles governing the process by which life on the Earth emerged can be uncovered, an understanding of life's essence, the basis for its striking characteristics, and outlining a feasible strategy for the synthesis of what could be classified as a simple life form will probably remain out of reach. In this essay, we will argue that recent developments in systems chemistry [ 9 – 11 ] have dramatically changed our ability to deal with the OOL problem by enabling the chemistry–biology connection to be clarified, at least in broad outline. The realization that abiogenesis—the chemical process by which simplest life emerged from inanimate beginnings—and biological evolution may actually be one single continuous physico-chemical process with an identifiable driving force opens up new avenues towards resolution of the OOL problem [ 1 , 7 , 12 , 13 ]. In fact that unification actually enables the basic elements of abiogenesis to be outlined, in much the same way that Darwin's biological theory outlined the basic mechanism for biological evolution. The goal of this commentary therefore is to discuss what aspects of the OOL problem can now be considered as resolved, what aspects require further study and what aspects may, in all probability, never be known.

3. Is the origin of life problem soluble in principle?

In addressing the OOL question, it first needs to be emphasized that the question has two distinct facets—historic and ahistoric, and the ability to uncover each of these two facets is quite different. Uncovering the historic facet is the more problematic one. Uncovering that facet would require specifying the original chemical system from which the process of abiogenesis began, together with the chemical pathway from that initiating system right through the extensive array of intermediate structures leading to simplest life. Regretfully, however, much of that historic information will probably never be known. Evolutionary processes are contingent, suggesting that any number of feasible pathways could have led from inanimate matter to earliest life, provided, of course, that those pathways were consistent with the underlying laws of physics and chemistry. The difficulty arises because historic events, once they have taken place, can only be revealed if their occurrence was recorded in some manner. Indeed, it is this historic facet of abiogenesis that makes the OOL problem so much more intractable than the parallel question of biological evolution. Biological evolution also has its historic and ahistoric facets. But whereas for biological evolution the historic record is to a degree accessible through palaeobiologic and phylogenetic studies, for the process of abiogenesis those methodologies have proved uninformative; there is no known geological record pertaining to prebiotic systems, and phylogenetic studies become less informative the further back one goes in attempting to trace out ancestral lineages. Phylogenetic studies presume the existence of organismal individuality and the genealogical (vertical) transfer of genetic information. However, the possibility that earliest life may have been communal [ 14 ] and dominated by horizontal gene transfer [ 15 – 17 ] suggests that information regarding the evolutionary stages that preceded the last universal common ancestor [ 18 ] would have to be considered highly speculative. Accordingly, the significance of such studies to the characterization of early life, let alone prebiotic systems, becomes highly uncertain.

The conclusion seems clear: speculation regarding the precise historic path from animate to inanimate—the identity of specific materials that were available at particular physical locations on the prebiotic Earth, together with the chemical structures of possible intermediate stages along the long road to life—may lead to propositions that are, though thought-provoking and of undeniable interest, effectively unfalsifiable, and therefore of limited scientific value.

Given that awkward reality, the focus of OOL research needs to remain on the ahistoric aspects—the principles that would explain the remarkable transformation of inanimate matter to simple life. There is good reason to think that the emergence of life on the Earth did not just involve a long string of random chemical events that fortuitously led to a simple living system. If life had emerged in such an arbitrary way, then the mechanistic question of abiogenesis would be fundamentally without explanation—a stupendously improbable chemical outcome whose likelihood of repetition would be virtually zero. However, the general view, now strongly supported by recent studies in systems chemistry, is that the process of abiogenesis was governed by underlying physico-chemical principles, and the central goal of OOL studies should therefore be to delineate those principles. Significantly, even if the underlying principles governing the transformation of inanimate to animate were to be revealed, that would still not mean that the precise historic path could be specified. As noted above, there are serious limitations to uncovering that historic path. The point however is that if the principles underlying life's emergence on the Earth could be more clearly delineated, then the mystery of abiogenesis would be dramatically transformed. No longer would the problem of abiogenesis be one of essence , but rather one of detail . The major mystery at the heart of the OOL debate would be broadly resolved and the central issue would effectively be replaced by a variety of chemical questions that deal with the particular mechanisms by which those underlying principles could have been expressed. Issues such as identifying historic transitions, the definition of life, would become to some extent arbitrary and ruled by scientific conventions, rather than by matters of principle.

4. The role of autocatalysis during abiogenesis

In the context of the OOL debate, there is one single and central historic fact on which there is broad agreement—that life's emergence was initiated by some autocatalytic chemical system. The two competing narratives within the OOL's long-standing debate—‘replication first’ or ‘metabolism first’—though differing in key elements, both build on that autocatalytic character (see [ 1 ] and references therein). The ‘replication first’ school of thought stresses the role of oligomeric compounds, which express that autocatalytic capability through their ability to self-replicate, an idea that can be traced back almost a century to the work of Troland [ 19 ], while the ‘metabolism first’ school of thought emphasizes the emergence of cyclic networks, as articulated by Kauffman [ 20 ] in the 1980s and reminiscent of the metabolic cycles found in all extant life. With respect to this issue, we have recently pointed out that these two approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It could well be that both oligomeric entities and cyclic networks were crucial elements during life's emergence, thereby offering a novel perspective on this long-standing question [ 1 , 7 ]. However, once it is accepted that autocatalysis is a central element in the process of abiogenesis, it follows that the study of autocatalytic systems in general may help uncover the principles that govern their chemical behaviour, regardless of their chemical detail. Indeed, as we will now describe, the generally accepted supposition that life's origins emerged from some prebiotic autocatalytic process can be shown to lead to broad insights into the chemistry–biology connection and to the surprising revelation that the processes of abiogenesis and biological evolution are directly related to one another. Once established, that connection will enable the underlying principles that governed the emergence of life on the Earth to be uncovered without undue reliance on speculative historic suppositions regarding the precise nature of those prebiotic systems.

5. A previously unrecognized stability kind: dynamic kinetic stability

The realization that the autocatalytic character of the replication reaction can lead to exponential growth and is unsustainable has been long appreciated, going back at least to Thomas Malthus's classic treatise ‘An essay on the principle of population’, published in 1798 [ 21 ]. But the chemical consequences of that long-recognized powerful kinetic character, although described by Lotka already a century ago [ 22 ], do not seem to have been adequately appreciated. Recently, one of us (A.P.) has described a new stability kind in nature, seemingly overlooked in modern scientific thought, which we have termed dynamic kinetic stability ( DKS ) [ 1 , 7 , 23 , 24 ] . That stability kind, applicable solely to persistent replicating systems, whether chemical or biological, derives directly from the powerful kinetic character and the inherent unsustainability of the replication process. However, for the replication reaction to be kinetically unsustainable, the reverse reaction, in which the replicating system reverts back to its component building blocks, must be very slow when compared with the forward reaction; the replication reaction must be effectively irreversible. That condition, in turn, means the system must be maintained in a far-from-equilibrium state [ 25 ], and that continuing requirement is satisfied through the replicating system being open and continually fed activated component building blocks. Note that the above description is consistent with Prigogine's non-equilibrium thermodynamic approach, which stipulates that self-organized behaviour is associated with irreversible processes within the nonlinear regime [ 26 ]. From the above, it follows that the DKS term would not be applicable to an equilibrium mixture of some oligomeric replicating entity together with its interconverting component building blocks.

Given the above discussion, it is apparent that the DKS concept is quite distinct from the conventional stability kind in nature, thermodynamic stability. A key feature of DKS is that it characterizes populations of replicators , rather than the individual replicators which make up those populations. Individual replicating entities are inherently unstable , as reflected in their continual turnover, whereas a population of replicators can be remarkably stable, as expressed by the persistence of some replicating populations. Certain life forms (e.g. cyanobacteria) express this stability kind in dramatic fashion, having been able to maintain a conserved function and a readily recognized morphology over billions of years. Indeed, within the world of replicators, there is theoretical and empirical evidence for a selection rule that in some respects parallels the second law of thermodynamics in that less stable replicating systems tend to become transformed into more stable ones [ 1 , 8 ]. This stability kind, which is applicable to all persistent replicating systems, whether chemical or biological, is then able to place biological systems within a more general physico-chemical framework, thereby enabling a physico-chemical merging of replicating chemical systems with biological ones. Studies in systems chemistry in recent years have provided empirical support for such a view by demonstrating that chemical and biological replicators show remarkably similar reactivity patterns, thereby reaffirming the existence of a common underlying framework linking chemistry to biology [ 1 , 7 ].

6. Extending Darwinian theory to inanimate chemical systems

The recognition that a distinctly different stability kind, DKS, is applicable to both chemical and biological replicators, together with the fact that both replicator kinds express similar reaction characteristics, leads to the profound conclusion that the so-called chemical phase leading to simplest life and the biological phase appear to be one continuous physico-chemical process, as illustrated in scheme 1 .

Unification of abiogenesis and biological evolution into a single continuous process governed by the drive toward greater DKS.

That revelation is valuable as it offers insights into abiogenesis from studies in biological evolution and, vice versa, it can provide new insights into the process of biological evolution from systems chemistry studies of simple replicating systems. A single continuous process necessarily means one set of governing principles, which in turn means that the two seemingly distinct processes of abiogenesis and evolution can be combined and addressed in concert. Significantly, that merging of chemistry and biology suggests that a general theory of evolution, expressed in physico-chemical terms rather than biological ones and applicable to both chemical and biological systems, may be formulated. Its essence may be expressed as follows: All stable ( persistent ) replicating systems will tend to evolve over time towards systems of greater DKS. As we have described in some detail in previous publications, there are both empirical and theoretical grounds for believing that oligomeric replicating systems which are less stable (less persistent) will tend to be transformed into more stable (more persistent) forms [ 1 , 7 , 8 , 24 ]. In fact that selection rule is just a particular application of the more general law of nature, almost axiomatic in character, that systems of all kinds tend from less stable to more stable. That law is inherent in the very definition of the term ‘stability’. So within the global selection rule in nature, normally articulated by the second law of thermodynamics, we can articulate a formulation specific to replicative systems, both chemical and biological— from DKS less stable to DKS more stable . A moment's thought then suggests that the Darwinian concept of ‘fitness maximization’ (i.e. less fit to more fit) is just a more specific expression of that general replicative rule as applied specifically to biological replicators. Whereas, in Darwinian terms, we say that living systems evolve to maximize fitness, the general theory is expressed in physico-chemical terms and stipulates that stable replicating systems, whether chemical or biological, tend to evolve so as to increase their stability, their DKS. Of course such a formulation implies that DKS is quantifiable. As we have previously discussed, quantification is possible, but only for related replicators competing for common resources, for example, a set of structurally related replicating molecules, or a set of genetically related bacterial life forms [ 1 , 7 ]. More generally, when assessing the DKS of replicating systems in a wider sense, one frequently must make do with qualitative or, at best, semi-quantitative measures.

Note that the general theory should not be considered as just one of changing terminology—‘DKS’ replacing ‘fitness’, ‘kinetic selection’ replacing ‘natural selection’. The physico-chemical description offers new insights as it allows the characterization of both the driving force and the mechanisms of evolution in more fundamental terms. The driving force is the drive of replicating systems towards greater stability, but the stability kind that is applicable in the replicative world. In fact that driving force can be thought of as a kind of second law analogue, though, as noted, the open character of replicating systems makes its quantification more difficult. And the mechanisms by which that drive is expressed can now be specified. These are complexification and selection , the former being largely overlooked in the traditional Darwinian view, while the latter is, of course, central to that view. A striking insight from this approach to abiogenesis follows directly: just as Darwinian theory broadly explained biological evolution, so an extended theory of evolution encompassing both chemical and biological replicators can be considered as broadly explaining abiogenesis. Thus, life on the Earth appears to have emerged through the spontaneous emergence of a simple (unidentified) replicating system, initially fragile, which complexified and evolved towards complex replicating systems exhibiting greater DKS. In fact, we would claim that in the very broadest of terms, the physico-chemical basis of abiogenesis can be considered explained.

But does that simplistic explanation for abiogenesis imply that the OOL problem can be considered resolved? Far from it. Let us now consider why.

7. What is still to be learned?

While Darwin's revolutionary theory changed our understanding of how biological systems relate to one another through the simple concept of natural selection, the Darwinian view has undergone considerable refinement and elaboration since its proposal over 150 years ago. First the genomic revolution, which provided Darwin's ideas with a molecular basis through the first decades of the twentieth century, transformed the subject and led to the neo-Darwinian synthesis, an amalgamation of classic Darwinism with population genetics and then with molecular genetics. But in more recent years, there is a growing realization that a molecular approach to understanding evolutionary dynamics is insufficient, that evolutionary biology's more fundamental challenge is to address the unresolved problem of complexity. How did biological complexity come about, and how can that complexity and its dynamic nature be understood? Our point is that Darwin's monumental thesis, with natural selection at its core, was just the beginning of a long process of refinement and elaboration, which has continued unabated to the present day.

Precisely the same process will need to operate with respect to the OOL problem. The DKS concept, simple in essence, does outline in the broadest terms the physico-chemical basis for abiogenesis. But that broad outline needs to be elaborated on through experimental investigation, so that the detailed mechanisms by which the DKS of simple chemical replicating systems could increase would be clarified. Already at this early stage, central elements of those mechanisms are becoming evident. Thus, there are preliminary indications that the process of abiogenesis was one of DKS enhancement through complexification [ 1 , 7 ]. More complex replicating systems, presenting a diversity of features and functions, appear to be able to replicate more effectively than simpler ones, and so are likely to be more stable in DKS terms (though this should not be interpreted to mean that any form of complexification will necessarily lead to enhanced DKS). The pertinent question is then: how does that process of complexification manifest itself? And this is where systems chemistry enters the scene [ 9 – 11 ]. By studying the dynamics of simple replicating molecular systems and the networks they establish, studies in system chemistry are beginning to offer insights into that process of replicative complexification. Following on from earlier work by Sievers & von Kiedrowski [ 27 ] and Lee et al . [ 28 ], more recent studies on RNA replicating systems by Lincoln & Joyce [ 29 ] and most recently by Vaidya et al . [ 30 ] suggest that network formation is crucial. Thus, Lincoln & Joyce [ 28 ] observed that a molecular network based on two cross-catalysing RNAs replicated rapidly and could be sustained indefinitely. By contrast, the most effective single molecule RNA replicator replicated slowly and was not sustainable. But in a more recent landmark experiment, Vaidya et al . [ 30 ] demonstrated that a cooperative cycle made up of three self-replicating RNAs could out-compete those same RNAs acting as individual replicators. The conclusion seems clear: molecular networks are more effective in establishing self-sustainable autocatalytic systems than single molecule replicators, just as was postulated by Eigen & Schuster [ 25 ] some 40 years ago.

Many key questions remain unanswered, however. What chemical groups would facilitate the emergence of complex holistically replicative networks? Are nucleic acids essential for the establishment of such networks, or could other chemical groups also express this capability? Is template binding the main mechanism by which molecular autocatalysis can take place, or can holistically autocatalytic sets be established through cycle closure without a reliance on template binding? How would the emergence of individual self-replicating entities within a larger holistically replicative network contribute to the stability of the network as a whole? How do kinetic and thermodynamic factors inter-relate in facilitating the maintenance of dynamically stable, but thermodynamically unstable, replicating systems [ 12 , 13 ]? As these questions suggest, our understanding of central issues remains rudimentary, and the road to discovery will probably be long and arduous. However, the key point of this essay has been to note that just as Darwin's simple concept of natural selection was able to provide a basis for an ongoing research programme in evolution, one that has been central to biological research for over 150 years, so the DKS concept may be able to offer a basis for ongoing studies in systems chemistry, one that may offer new insights into the rules governing evolutionary dynamics in simple replicating systems and, subsequently, for replicating systems of all kinds. Such a research programme, we believe, promises to further clarify the underlying relationship linking chemical and biological replicators.

In conclusion, it seems probably that we will never know the precise historic path by which life on the Earth emerged, but, very much in the Darwinian tradition, it seems we can now specify the essence of the ahistoric principles by which that process came about. Just as Darwin, in the very simplest of terms, pointed out how natural selection enabled simple life to evolve into complex life, so the recently proposed general theory of evolution [ 1 , 7 ] points out in simplest terms how simple, but fragile, replicating systems could have complexified into the intricate chemical systems of life. But, as discussed earlier, a detailed understanding of that process will have to wait until ongoing studies in systems chemistry reveal both the classes of chemical materials and the kinds of chemical pathways that simple replicating systems are able to follow in their drive towards greater complexity and replicative stability.

Essay: Review of Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos

Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos by Lynn M. Morgan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, 328 pages, $21.95 (paperback).

To Lynn M. Morgan, the Mary E. Woolley Professor of Anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College, nothing says “life” more than a dead embryo. In her easily readable book, Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos , Morgan brings together cultural phenomena, ethics, and embryology to show that even dead embryos and fetuses have their own stories to tell. As an anthropologist, Morgan is interested in many things, including the science of embryology and its history. But she also wants to know how culture influences our views on embryos and the material practices that accompany their study. Her intent is to establish a relationship between “specimens collected in the remote past and the contemporary cultural politics of abortion” (p. xiii). The eight chapters in Icons of Life do not provide an exhaustive historical look at early American embryology, but they do weave together the Carnegie Institute of Washington Embryology Department (CIWED), its major human embryo collector Franklin Paine Mall, and how early twentieth-century science worked. Morgan ably describes the CIWED’s early foray into embryo collecting, but she wants to do more than just describe how embryos made their way to the laboratory. She wants us to ask why it was even possible for such a thing to happen without so much as a fuss being made from the public. This involves looking at culture.

Cultural norms, including scientific practices that are deemed appropriate, have a tendency to change: what once was acceptable, (like storing several small fetuses together in a large mayonnaise jar) is often considered odd today. One might argue that this is because people value embryos more now, but Morgan believes that this so-called “modern” embryo-centric value is really not so recent. Her goal is to take us back to the early twentieth century to trace how the collecting of embryos has shaped our present-day perceptions of embryos and fetuses. These perceptions have become part of the manner in which embryos are presented in the media, medical booklets, and public conversations: miraculous, progressive, and devoid of any mothers' participation. Whether collecting embryos and ignoring where the embryos came from, or in trying to save only embryos and ignoring the lives of their mothers, Morgan’s main thesis is that embryo-centrism is the basis for both of these actions.

It wasn't until Morgan encountered “fetuses in a basement” in the biology building on her campus that she began to conceive her story about human embryo collecting. It is in this musty and dark science storeroom that her story begins. Once graciously accepted as “gifts” to the college, the fetal specimens before her had mostly been forgotten about and left to rot away. Morgan's reaction to finding the old specimens is captivating. Her descriptions of floating bodies, shriveled faces, and “curly wisps of red hair” reveal many of the paradoxes that run through her book. On the one hand, the dead-before-birth-existence in formalin induced intense visceral reaction, almost making her want to flee, and yet, on the other hand, Morgan finds the specimens curiously fascinating—eerie but enticing. Morgan uses this discovery to set in motion her historical investigation of embryo collecting.

The evolving traditions in biology and a new emphasis on medicine during the early twentieth century shaped the intellectual environment in which Franklin P. Mall , the first director of the CIWED, initiated his human embryo research. Biology during the late nineteenth century had witnessed a gradual increase in the use of experimental organisms to study and manipulate biological mechanisms (Pauly, 1987; Maienschein, 1991). It made sense that the anatomy of human embryos would soon follow suit and that Mall, who had trained with Wilhelm His in Germany, and was already adept at organizing a cadaver collection for medical students, would take the lead in embryo collecting. It also helped that Mall worked in the cradle of American biological experimentalism, Johns Hopkins University.

Unlike the ease of collecting frog or sea urchin embryos, collecting human embryos was much more difficult. First, one had to rely on women not carrying their unborn to term. Second, the doctor attending to the pregnant women had to be connected to the embryo collector in such a way that the embryo would be recovered and arrive safely to its new glass womb. This in itself was problematic given that many poor women in the early twentieth century had little access to medical care. The doctor who helped deliver the embryo to the CIWED was quite important to Mall; the women who were the physical sources of the embryos, much less so. Women’s invisibility and silence contributed to the socially-contrived embryo-centric view that we still hold. That is, the elevation of the importance of the embryo and the social production of anonymity of the women who bear them.

One of the points that Morgan tries to make throughout her chapters is that the overall success of early embryo collecting was made possible because society, as a whole, afforded little moral importance to fetal remains. During the late 1800s and early 1900s stillborn and aborted fetuses were often thrown in the garbage or buried in the backyard. No one really knew what to do with them other than to get rid of them as quickly as possible. This course of action made it easy for doctors to whisk the “specimens” away, and in keeping with early Progressive attitudes, put them to work for science and society. As the embryos and fetuses became part of the material culture of embryology, they were actively studied (science as progress) rather than buried or made to sit in a doctor's personal collection cabinet (embryo as natural history). This scientific view enabled Mall to collect human embryos and fetuses with little objection because it was done for the good of science. This defense does not work today; we have developed other views of embryos. So where do the rest of our views of embryos come from? This is what Morgan aims to tell us.

Morgan uses the stories of Gertrude Stein and Carnegie Embryo No. 836 to show how the visualization of a now dead “life form” was necessary to legitimatize embryology as a true scientific field. Morgan argues that the lack of human embryo specimens in the early 1900s meant that if they were going to be studied, it had to be done with the strictest attention to detail, accuracy, and care. This was the environment in which Stein found herself as a struggling medical student at Johns Hopkins. By 1901 she had failed her medical exams and was unable to graduate with her class. She was offered the chance to graduate if she completed an embryo modeling project. It just so happened that Mall was her professor and agreed to oversee her work. Mall liked Stein, but he was a lax supervisor and he certainly did not like her models, declaring them to be more appropriate for the waste basket than as tools for teaching. In her project, Stein had somehow drawn and modeled an embryo with a bent spinal cord that had ended up protruding just under the embryo’s frontal lobe. In not recognizing that the spinal cord had been moved out of place, Stein’s work ended up being a failure and as such, would never help move human embryology from its formative stage to that of a bonafide field of science.

Carnegie Embryo No. 836, on the other hand, represents the best of the CIWED's attention to detail and embryo visualization. A pregnant woman, simply referred to as Mrs. R, underwent a hysterectomy in Baltimore in 1914. Upon opening up her uterus, an early stage embryo was found to be “exquisite condition” and rushed from operating room to the CIWED, a mere one mile away. It isn’t until the dead embryo lands on the doorstep of the CIWED that the biography of Mrs. R's embryo really begins.

The embryo was cleaned, placed in alcohol, and given a name—No. 836. It became one of the CIWED's top models for noted embryo modeler Osborne O. Heard ; served as the source for many of James F. Didusch's medical illustrations; and more recently has been repackaged as a digital embryo for several NIH-funded virtual human embryo projects. Anyone can now log on to the internet and maneuver this famous specimens up or down, rotate it around, or select a speed for an animated fly through.

Morgan raises questions about how embryologists were able to make the study of dead embryos seem normal and rational. She explains this using a feminist perspective: by disregarding that embryos had come from other living human beings, it allowed the embryologists to ignore the fact that an embryo is a part of a woman's complex world; a world that often includes being poor, having little or no access to medical care, miscarriages, violence, and loss. By working under the assumption that their embryos were simply objects of nature, it did not matter to embryo collectors how or why embryos arrived at the CIWED.

Further evidence of this attitude is provided by Morgan's examination of John Rock and Arthur Hertig's 1938 to 1954 embryo hunt in Boston. During the early 1900s, collecting human embryos younger than fourteen days old was proving nearly impossible. Embryologists desperately wanted to study younger and younger embryos but the problem with young embryos is that they are so small, they end up being quite difficult to find. Gynecologist Rock, assistant Miriam Menkin, and pathologist Hertig formed a Boston-Baltimore connection with Mall to help deliver young embryos to the CIWED. Women were recruited to undergo elective hysterectomies to aid in fertility research. But not any woman would do; there were several prerequisites for inclusion into the study. The women who gave consent had to be married and living with their husbands, they had to have already given birth to at least three living children, and they had to be willing to keep records of their menstrual cycles and unprotected sexual activity right up to the day of their operation. While the 211 women in the study correctly believed that their records and their uteruses were being collected to help other women, they did not know that an additional part of the study involved looking for embryos.

Today there would be ethical issues with Rock’s study—the women were not told about a search for embryos and if an embryo was found, they were not told in the recovery room that they had been pregnant. By deliberately setting out to procure embryos, had Rock and the others actually committed some type of quasi-abortion? The researchers argued that they had done no such thing. They were simply scientists providing good care to women and that they had just happened to collect embryos from those who had already agreed to give their wombs up in the name of science. In effect, they were only taking “what nature had provided,” and nature had provided thirty-four embryos with the youngest embryo only thirty-six hours old. To Morgan though, this story shows us again how women are manipulated, left out of the picture, and simply viewed as incubators.

In Icons of Life , Morgan repeatedly brings up the notion of the “natural embryo,” but she asks what is so natural about an embryo coming into the hands of embryologists by way of a highly technical surgical operation and the manipulation of women's trust. To her, there is no such thing as natural embryo—all embryos develop within a social context. Without recognizing this context, our embryo-centric view is reinforced and we end up dismissing any consideration for the real welfare of embryos-soon-to-be-children such as affordable child care, a living wage for parents, national health insurance, good public schools, and so forth. Morgan argues that this narrow socially-constructed view of the unborn has its origins in science: “the embryologists looked through their microscopes at the embryos, rather than through wide-angle lenses at their society” (p. 137).

Morgan provides another example of how culture affected the CIWED's ability to collect embryos by examining fetal-remains management in the city of Baltimore. With Mall's connections to other hospitals on the east coast, the CIWED's location continued to offer great potential for embryo collecting. Not only was Baltimore a big city, but it had so many things to contribute to fetal death: disease, lack of medical care for poor women, poor working conditions, toxic exposure, and stigmatization of unwed pregnancies. Until these things were addressed, Mall could rest assured that embryos would keep coming to the CIWED. It is here that Morgan begins to tell us fascinating stories about foundling homes where newborns were taken from poor mothers and shipped to adoption farms. The chance of an infant being adopted from such a place was low; the chance of dying there was high. Eventually the notoriety of the foundling homes drove investigative journalists to write about the horrid conditions of the homes. These newspaper stories forced government officials to act, resulting in a 1914 Maryland Vice Commission report titled The Traffic in Babies .

With public health officials starting to take notice, a change was underway about the status of infants and so was the notion of what it was to be stillborn. For many years there had been no clear definition of what it meant for a fetus to die in the uterus. The vagueness about fetal death and the malleability of prenatal definitions had long aided both city officials and embryologists. The city had neither the time nor the funds to document all its deaths and bury all of its dead, and Mall needed the help of the Maryland Department of Public Health to keep classifying dead embryos and fetuses as medical waste. He knew that if public health officials started putting regulations on birth certificates, death certificates, and burials, it would make the collecting of embryos all the more difficult for him. State policy in the early twentieth century had been “tailored to meet the embryologists' needs,” but progressive thinking was looming and new regulations seemed imminent. Mall had successfully conquered all of the logistical problems with collecting human embryos—would the possibility of new legal problems be the undoing of his work? It is here that Morgan makes the case that changing definitions and early political involvement with the unborn have also influenced our modern-day perceptions of embryos.

Morgan asks what has driven us, and continues to drive us, to look into the lives of embryos. She starts by explaining how fetuses were put on “scientific display” at rather strange places. Visitors to the 1933–34 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago could head off to the exposition itself and see a scientific exhibit of prenatal development, or, they could pay a small fee and enter the Midway where one could buy food, ride the Ferris wheel, and see a two-headed fetus in a jar. While a single individual might have found the dead fetuses morbid, when viewed in the presence of other lookiloos, the fetus took on a different representation: it was simply a cheap form of shock entertainment. Morgan implies that either of the exhibits, the tidy science exhibit with its detailed descriptions of processed dead fetuses or the more casual carnival fetus, were both important in developing a socially-constructed notion of “free-floating fetuses.” It is both of these environments, the laboratory and the circus, that have molded perceptions and imaginations of embryos.

From here, Morgan temporarily leaves the laboratory and asks what has happened to embryos since the early days of embryo collecting and the Century of Progress Exposition. She argues that embryos have been manipulated in such a way that they now talk to us. Whether telling us to buy a Volvo in a television commercial, urging us to stand in awe of them at pro-life marches, or by playing a supporting role for politicians, fetuses have indeed gone public and stand in stark contrast to those private embryos which remain quietly inside of a woman's body or in a locked laboratory. Such fetal publicness, however, is not as recent a phenomenon as one might think. Morgan points out that human embryos were sought out during the 1920s, with the claim that they could scientifically illuminate some aspects of human evolution. This was followed by using embryos to try and establish whether certain races were superior to others, and finally, using embryos to show the relationship of humans to other species. She argues that the growing public awareness about embryos could not have happened without the embryo collectors. It was their studies and methods of embryo procurement that helped make possible, the public embryo.

Morgan continues with more stories as she brings embryos into the pop culture age. It is here that embryos became increasingly associated with life, beauty, and personhood. By the early 1960s, human embryo collecting for scientific purposes was becoming a thing of the past. Inside the CIWED, genetics was taking over the focus of embryology, while outside, the abortion debate was starting up and fetal imagery helped drive anti-abortionist arguments. Some of the images used to promote pro-life had bizarre beginnings. For example, one important question is whether fetuses can experience pain. From 1932 to 1958, neuroanatomist Davenport Hooker at Pittsburgh University researched if human prenates exhibited reflexes. To find out, he used single horsehairs to tickle fetal “specimens” and captured the events on film. He documented this 149 times with 149 nonviable fetuses, all of which died within twenty minutes after being surgically removed from their mothers (who no doubt were not informed what was to become of their fetuses) by a therapeutic abortion technique known as hysterotomy. This procedure involves surgically opening a pregnant woman's abdomen and womb to remove the fetus. Once the fetus was removed, Hooker worked quickly to stroke the horsehair on various parts of the fetal body and recorded each specimen's movements. This work was later used to argue that since human fetuses responded to stimuli there was no doubt that they also experienced pain during late-term abortion. While anti-abortionists are convinced of this, scientists are still debating this today.

Morgan treats Hooker and his strangely disturbing research rather tamely. She points out that Hooker was ever the discrete professional but she does not readily call him to task for his dismissal of the women who went through tremendous pain and probable grief in losing their children. And yet, this is a reoccurring theme in Icons of Life —how women have been marginalized while their embryos and fetuses have been placed in the scientific and cultural spotlight.

Morgan discusses that even as embryos and fetuses entered the era of pop culture in the 1960s, they were still presented as having to go it alone. Pictures in Look and Life magazines showed embryos and fetuses by themselves; just like those that had been affixed to the thousands of slides in the Carnegie collection. Fetuses were now depicted as floating in air, with the Petri dish that they had been placed in to be photographed, airbrushed out of the picture. Like a solitary astronaut on a space walk, the photographed fetus floats (always heads-up) against a dark background, sometimes with tiny spots of light behind it to resemble distant stars. One difference between an embryo and an astronaut though is that the latter were photographed with their tether cords leading back to their spacecraft, whereas fetuses usually showed no or little umbilical cord and no placenta. Once again, they were totally disconnected from women.

It is after describing how dead embryos and fetuses have been manipulated to appear radiant and full of life that Morgan gives the reason for her book’s title: “It seemed ironic that thousands of dead embryos and fetuses needed to be gathered, sectioned, and made visible before they could start to represent life. But without the dead specimens, this narrative of life would have been inconceivable. Dead specimens made it possible eventually to transform 'embryo'—either consciously or unwittingly—into an animated, lifelike creature” (p. 213). She argues that when people are informed that the embryos and fetuses in magazines and posters are actually dead, they immediately believe that the dead fetuses must have come from abortions. This thinking comes from the perception that all fetuses are potential people that can and will live, unless of course, an abortion intervenes. With the embryo and fetus so revered as an icon of life, and medical advances like fetal surgery and gene therapy becoming more routine, it is now unthinkable to consider that a fetus could simply die on its own.

A lack of historical knowledge about the history of embryo collecting, coupled with an ignorance about how women continue to suffer from miscarriages takes on a personal tone when Morgan is asked to comment on the excavation of several fetuses from a personal residence in Mt. Holyoke. Naturally, her friends and colleagues think that it is the work of an illegal abortionist, as do journalists who do their best to drum up sensationalist stories. As Morgan dug deeper into the story she found that the fetuses had once been part of a local doctor's collection. His son had inherited the house and did not know what to do with the specimens so he buried them in the backyard. The son's acquisition of the collection had occurred at a time quite different to that when doctors collected for Mall and biology departments. As the collective history of embryo and fetus collecting becomes forgotten, any doctor who once collected embryos and fetuses for scientific study is now labeled a monster or murderer. Morgan uses this story to make the point that to understand historical science, in this case embryo collecting, it is important to understand the prevailing culture and attitudes when science is done.

Overall, Morgan's blending of the old and the new is engaging and sometimes humorous. Morgan's feminist tone is quite evident in Icons of Life . She repeatedly shows with her stories how women have been written out of the embryo picture which has led to the rise of the fetus as its own self-interest group. At the same time she tries to be exquisitely fair to all of the many people introduced in her book by understanding the cultural context during the time when embryologists, health officials, and doctors operated. What is most engaging is her use of social, cultural, and scientific norms to show how people arrive at their own views about the unborn—from the scientists who saw embryos as objects of nature, to our current view of embryos as objects of culture.

• Maienschein, Jane, Marie Glitz, and Garland E. Allen, eds. Centennial History of the Carnegie Institution of Washington: Volume V The Department of Embryology . Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Pauly, Philip J. Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology . New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

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The Shadows of American History: the Lives of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Children

This essay about Lee Harvey Oswald’s children examines the impact of their father’s infamy on their lives and their choice to lead private lives away from public scrutiny. It highlights the resilience and struggles of June and Rachel Oswald as they navigate the legacy of a man accused of assassinating President John F. Kennedy. The narrative explores themes of identity, legacy, and personal growth, reflecting on how historical events shape the lives of individuals connected to them. Through the story of Oswald’s daughters, the essay discusses the broader implications of bearing a controversial family history and the human capacity to seek understanding and forge new paths. It underscores the importance of empathy and privacy in understanding the personal dimensions of historical events, offering insight into the unseen challenges faced by those who are inadvertently caught in the web of history.

How it works

In the annals of American history, few names evoke as much intrigue and controversy as Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy. While much has been written about Oswald’s life, motivations, and the mysteries surrounding the Kennedy assassination, far less attention has been given to the personal aspects of his life, particularly his children. The lives of Lee Harvey Oswald’s children unfold a narrative that is both poignant and telling, offering a glimpse into the human side of historical events that have shaped America’s collective memory.

Lee Harvey Oswald left behind two daughters, June and Rachel, who were thrust into the public eye from the moment of their father’s arrest. Born into a legacy they had no part in creating, these children have navigated a world that views them through the lens of their father’s infamy. The story of Oswald’s children is not just a tale of personal struggle and resilience; it is also a reflection on the impact of historical events on individual lives and the ways in which the children of controversial figures carve out their own identities amidst public scrutiny.

Despite the overwhelming shadow cast by their father’s actions, Oswald’s daughters have led lives characterized by a deliberate retreat from the spotlight. Their mother, Marina Oswald, remarried and sought to provide a semblance of normalcy for her daughters, far removed from the conspiracy theories and public fascination that followed their father’s name. The decision to live quietly, changing their last names and rarely speaking publicly about their father, underscores a desire to be seen not as the descendants of a historical figure, but as individuals with their own stories and experiences.

The narrative of Oswald’s children raises questions about the nature of legacy and the human desire for connection and understanding. It speaks to the broader theme of how families navigate the aftermath of historical events that thrust them into an unwelcome prominence. Their journey is a testament to the strength required to forge one’s path while bearing the weight of a past one did not choose. It also highlights the complexity of human relationships and the capacity for growth and renewal in the face of adversity.

In reflecting on the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald’s children, one cannot help but consider the broader implications of how history remembers and impacts the lives of those who find themselves caught in its tide. Their story is a reminder of the personal dimensions of historical events, the unseen struggles that take place beyond the headlines, and the resilience of the human spirit to overcome the challenges of a tainted legacy. As such, the lives of June and Rachel Oswald serve not only as a footnote to a pivotal moment in American history but as a compelling narrative of identity, privacy, and redemption beyond the shadows of their father’s deeds.

In conclusion, the story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s children is a poignant chapter in the complex tapestry of American history. It challenges us to look beyond the sensational aspects of historical events and consider the human stories that unfold in their aftermath. The lives of June and Rachel Oswald remind us of the enduring impact of history on individual lives and the capacity for personal resilience and renewal. As we reflect on their journey, we are reminded of the importance of empathy, understanding, and the quest for personal identity in the shadow of a public legacy.

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The Shadows of American History: The Lives of Lee Harvey Oswald's Children. (2024, Mar 25). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/the-shadows-of-american-history-the-lives-of-lee-harvey-oswalds-children/

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PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Shadows of American History: The Lives of Lee Harvey Oswald's Children . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-shadows-of-american-history-the-lives-of-lee-harvey-oswalds-children/ [Accessed: 12 Apr. 2024]

"The Shadows of American History: The Lives of Lee Harvey Oswald's Children." PapersOwl.com, Mar 25, 2024. Accessed April 12, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/the-shadows-of-american-history-the-lives-of-lee-harvey-oswalds-children/

"The Shadows of American History: The Lives of Lee Harvey Oswald's Children," PapersOwl.com , 25-Mar-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-shadows-of-american-history-the-lives-of-lee-harvey-oswalds-children/. [Accessed: 12-Apr-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Shadows of American History: The Lives of Lee Harvey Oswald's Children . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-shadows-of-american-history-the-lives-of-lee-harvey-oswalds-children/ [Accessed: 12-Apr-2024]

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What Solar Eclipse-Gazing Has Looked Like for the Past 2 Centuries

Millions of people on Monday will continue the tradition of experiencing and capturing solar eclipses, a pursuit that has spawned a lot of unusual gear.

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By Sarah Eckinger

• April 8, 2024

For centuries, people have been clamoring to glimpse solar eclipses. From astronomers with custom-built photographic equipment to groups huddled together with special glasses, this spectacle has captivated the human imagination.

Creating a Permanent Record

In 1860, Warren de la Rue captured what many sources describe as the first photograph of a total solar eclipse . He took it in Rivabellosa, Spain, with an instrument known as the Kew Photoheliograph . This combination of a telescope and camera was specifically built to photograph the sun.

Forty years later, Nevil Maskelyne, a magician and an astronomy enthusiast, filmed a total solar eclipse in North Carolina. The footage was lost, however, and only released in 2019 after it was rediscovered in the Royal Astronomical Society’s archives.

Telescopic Vision

For scientists and astronomers, eclipses provide an opportunity not only to view the moon’s umbra and gaze at the sun’s corona, but also to make observations that further their studies. Many observatories, or friendly neighbors with a telescope, also make their instruments available to the public during eclipses.

Fredrik Hjalmar Johansen, Fridtjof Nansen and Sigurd Scott Hansen observing a solar eclipse while on a polar expedition in 1894 .

Women from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and their professor tested out equipment ahead of their eclipse trip (to “catch old Sol in the act,” as the original New York Times article phrased it) to New London, Conn., in 1922.

A group from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania traveled to Yerbaniz, Mexico, in 1923, with telescopes and a 65-foot camera to observe the sun’s corona .

Dr. J.J. Nassau, director of the Warner and Swasey Observatory at Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, prepared to head to Douglas Hill, Maine, to study an eclipse in 1932. An entire freight car was required to transport the institution’s equipment.

Visitors viewed a solar eclipse at an observatory in Berlin in the mid-1930s.

A family set up two telescopes in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1963. The two children placed stones on the base to help steady them.

An astronomer examined equipment for an eclipse in a desert in Mauritania in June 1973. We credit the hot climate for his choice in outfit.

Indirect Light

If you see people on Monday sprinting to your local park clutching pieces of paper, or with a cardboard box of their head, they are probably planning to reflect or project images of the solar eclipse onto a surface.

Cynthia Goulakos demonstrated a safe way to view a solar eclipse , with two pieces of cardboard to create a reflection of the shadowed sun, in Lowell, Mass., in 1970.

Another popular option is to create a pinhole camera. This woman did so in Central Park in 1963 by using a paper cup with a small hole in the bottom and a twin-lens reflex camera.

Amateur astronomers viewed a partial eclipse, projected from a telescope onto a screen, from atop the Empire State Building in 1967 .

Back in Central Park, in 1970, Irving Schwartz and his wife reflected an eclipse onto a piece of paper by holding binoculars on the edge of a garbage basket.

Children in Denver in 1979 used cardboard viewing boxes and pieces of paper with small pinholes to view projections of a partial eclipse.

A crowd gathered around a basin of water dyed with dark ink, waiting for the reflection of a solar eclipse to appear, in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 1995.

Staring at the Sun (or, How Not to Burn Your Retinas)

Eclipse-gazers have used different methods to protect their eyes throughout the years, some safer than others .

In 1927, women gathered at a window in a building in London to watch a total eclipse through smoked glass. This was popularized in France in the 1700s , but fell out of favor when physicians began writing papers on children whose vision was damaged.

Another trend was to use a strip of exposed photographic film, as seen below in Sydney, Australia, in 1948 and in Turkana, Kenya, in 1963. This method, which was even suggested by The Times in 1979 , has since been declared unsafe.

Solar eclipse glasses are a popular and safe way to view the event ( if you use models compliant with international safety standards ). Over the years there have been various styles, including these large hand-held options found in West Palm Beach, Fla., in 1979.

Parents and children watched a partial eclipse through their eclipse glasses in Tokyo in 1981.

Slimmer, more colorful options were used in Nabusimake, Colombia, in 1998.

In France in 1999.

And in Iran and England in 1999.

And the best way to see the eclipse? With family and friends at a watch party, like this one in Isalo National Park in Madagascar in 2001.

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Regions Riding Forward® Scholarship Contest

Their Story. Your Voice.

Your voice is your own. But it's also been impacted by others. Who, we wonder, has inspired you? Let us know by entering the Regions Riding Forward Scholarship Contest. 

You could win an $8,000 college scholarship

For the opportunity to win an $8,000 scholarship, submit a video or written essay about an individual you know personally (who lives in your community) who has inspired you and helped you build the confidence you need to achieve your goals.

The details

The 2024 Regions Riding Forward Scholarship Contest consists of four (4) separate Quarterly Contests - one for each calendar quarter of 2024. Regions is awarding four $8,000 scholarships through each Quarterly Contest.

Each Quarterly Contest has its own separate entry period, as provided in the chart below.

The entry deadline for each Quarterly Contest is 11:59:59 PM Central Time on the applicable Quarterly Contest period end date (set forth in the chart above).

No purchase or banking relationship required.

Regions believes in supporting the students whose passion and actions every day will continue to make stories worth sharing. That’s why we have awarded over $1 million in total scholarships to high school and college students.

How to enter, 1. complete an online quarterly contest application.

Enter the Regions Riding Forward Scholarship Contest by completing a Quarterly Contest application.  The second Quarterly Contest runs from April 1, 2024 through June 30, 2024. Complete and save all requested information. 

2. Prepare your Written Essay or Video Essay

For each Quarterly Contest, the topic of your Written Essay or Video Essay (your “Essay Topic”) must be an individual you know personally, who lives in your community. Your Written Essay or Video Essay must address how the individual you have selected as your Essay Topic has inspired you and helped you build the confidence you need to achieve your goals.

Written Essay and Video Essay submissions must meet all of the requirements described in the contest Official Rules. Your Written Essay or Video Essay must be (i) in English, (ii) your own original work, created solely by you (and without the use of any means of artificial intelligence (“AI”)), and (iii) the exclusive property of you alone.

Written Essays must be 500 words or less. You can write your Written Essay directly in the application, or you can copy and paste it into the appropriate area in the application form.

Video Essay submissions must be directly uploaded to the contest application site. Video Essays must be no more than 3 minutes in length and no larger than 1 GB. Only the following file formats are accepted: MP4, MPG, MOV, AVI, and WMV. Video Essays must not contain music of any kind nor display any illegal, explicit, or inappropriate material, and Video Essays must not be password protected or require a log-in/sign-in to view. You must upload your Video Essay to the application, and you may not submit your Video Essay in DVD or other physical form. (Video Essays submitted via mail will not be reviewed or returned.)

Tips to Record Quality Videos on a Smartphone:

• Don’t shoot vertical video. Computer monitors have landscape-oriented displays, so shoot your video horizontally.
• Use a tripod. Even small movements can make a big difference when editing.
• Don’t use zoom. If you need to get a close shot of the subject, move closer as zooming can cause pixilation.
• Use natural lighting. Smartphone lighting can wash out your video.

3. Review and submit your Quarterly Contest application

Review your information on your Quarterly Application (and check the spelling of a Written Essay) and submit your entry by 11:59:59 p.m. Central Time on the applicable Quarterly Contest period end date. The second Quarterly Contest period end date is June 30, 2024.

4. Await notification

Winning entries are selected by an independent panel of judges who are not affiliated with Regions. If your entry is selected as a Quarterly Contest winner, you will need to respond to ISTS with the required information.

Eligibility

For purposes of this contest:

• The “Eligible States” are defined as the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
• An “accredited college” is defined as a nonprofit, two- or four-year college or university located within one of the fifty (50) United States or the District of Columbia.

To be eligible to enter this contest and to win an award in a Quarterly Contest, at the time of entry, you must:

• Be a legal U.S. resident of one of the Eligible States.
• Be age 16 or older.
• Have at least one (1) year (or at least 18 semester hours) remaining before college graduation.
• If you are not yet in college, begin your freshman year of college no later than the start of the 2025 – 2026 college academic school year.
• As of your most recent school enrollment period, have a cumulative grade point average of at least 2.0 in school (and if no GPA is provided at school, be in “good standing” or the equivalent thereof in school).

View Official Rules

NO PURCHASE OR BANKING RELATIONSHIP REQUIRED. PURCHASE OR BANKING RELATIONSHIP WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED. The 2024 Regions Riding Forward Scholarship Contest (the “Contest”) consists of four (4) separate quarterly contests (each a “Quarterly Contest”): (1) the “Q-1 Contest;” (2) the “Q-2 Contest;” (3) the “Q-3 Contest;” and (4) the “Q-4 Contest.” The Q-1 Contest begins on 02/01/24 and ends on 03/31/24; the Q-2 Contest begins on 04/01/24 and ends on 06/30/24; the Q-3 Contest begins on 07/01/24 and ends on 09/30/24; and the Q-4 Contest begins on 10/01/24 and ends on 12/31/24. (For each Quarterly Contest, entries must be submitted and received by 11:59:59 PM CT on the applicable Quarterly Contest period end date.) To enter and participate in a particular Quarterly Contest, at the time of entry, you must: (a) be a legal U.S. resident of one of the Eligible States; (b) be 16 years of age or older; (c) have at least one (1) year (or at least 18 semester hours) remaining before college graduation; (d) (if you are not yet in college) begin your freshman year of college no later than the start of the 2025 – 2026 college academic school year; and (e) as of your most recent school enrollment period, have a cumulative grade point average of at least 2.0 in school (and if no grade point average is provided at school, be in “good standing” or the equivalent thereof in school). (For purposes of Contest, the “Eligible States” are defined as the states of AL, AR, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, KY, LA, MS, MO, NC, SC, TN and TX.) Visit regions.com/ridingforward for complete Contest details, including eligibility and Written Essay and Video Essay requirements and Official Rules. (Limit one (1) entry per person, per Quarterly Contest.) For each Quarterly Contest, eligible entries will be grouped according to form of entry (Written Essay or Video Essay) and judged by a panel of independent, qualified judges. A total of four (4) Quarterly Contest Prizes will be awarded in each Quarterly Contest, consisting of two (2) Quarterly Contest Prizes for the Written Essay Entry Group and two (2) Quarterly Contest Prizes for the Video Essay Entry Group. Each Quarterly Contest Prize consists of a check in the amount of $8,000 made out to winner’s designated accredited college. (Limit one (1) Quarterly Contest Prize per person; a contestant is permitted to win only one (1) Quarterly Contest Prize through the Contest.) Sponsor: Regions Bank, 1900 Fifth Ave. N., Birmingham, AL 35203.

© 2024 Regions Bank. All rights reserved. Member FDIC. Equal Housing Lender. Regions and the Regions logo are registered trademarks of Regions Bank. The LifeGreen color is a trademark of Regions Bank.

2023 Winners

High school:.

• Amyrrean Acoff
• Leon Aldridge
• Kharis Andrews
• Colton Collier
• Indya Griffin
• Christopher Hak
• Aquil Hayes
• Jayden Haynes
• McKenna Jodoin
• Paris Kelly
• Liza Latimer
• Dylan Lodle
• Anna Mammarelli
• Karrington Manley
• Marcellus Odum
• Gautami Palthepu
• Melody Small
• Lauryn Tanner
• Joshua Wilson
• Mohamed Ali
• Kayla Bellamy
• Lauren Boxx
• Alexandria Brown
• Samuel Brown
• Thurston Brown
• Conner Daehler
• Tsehai de Souza
• Anjel Echols
• Samarion Flowers
• Trinity Griffin
• Kristina Hilton
• Ryan Jensen
• Miracle Jones
• Shaniece McGhee
• Chelby Melvin
• Lamiya Ousley
• Kiera Phillips
• Gabrielle Pippins
• Ethan Snead
• Sydney Springs
• Kirsten Tilford
• Tamira Weeks
• Justin Williams

2022 Winners

• Paul Aucremann
• William Booker
• Robyn Cunningham
• Kani'ya Davis
• Oluwatomi Dugbo
• Lillian Goins
• Parker Hall
• Collin Hatfield
• Gabrielle Izu
• Kylie Lauderdale
• Jacob Milan
• Jackson Mitchell
• Carmen Moore
• Madison Morgan
• Kaden Oquelí-White
• Kaylin Parks
• Brian Perryman
• De'Marco Riggins
• Brianna Roundtree
• Sydney Russell
• Carlie Spore
• Morgan Standifer
• Ionia Thomas
• Ramaya Thomas
• Jaylen Toran
• Amani Veals
• Taylor Williams
• Alana Wilson
• Taryn Wilson
• Aryaunna Armstrong
• Hannah Blackwell
• T'Aneka Bowers
• Naomi Bradley
• Arianna Cannon
• Taylor Cline
• Catherine Cummings
• Margaret Fitzgerald
• Chloe Franklin
• Camryn Gaines
• Thomas Greer
• Kayla Helleson
• Veronica Holmes
• Logan Kurtz
• Samuel Lambert
• Jaylon Muchison
• Teresa Odom
• Andrew Payne
• Carey Price
• Emily SantiAnna
• Curtis Smith
• Jered Smith
• Mariah Standifer
• Maura Taylor
• Anna Wilkes