What is the latest scientific theory on the origin of life?
Although the DEVELOPMENT of the diversity and complexity of life is covered in the theory of evolution, the origin of life is not. To answer this we look instead to the Miller/Urey experiment, where in a scientific lab the building blocks of life (amino acids, nucleotides, etc) where created in conditions similar to early earth. Others believe that an asteroid brought life to earth from somewhere else. The website below outlines the basics of these two theories very eloquently (the asteroid theory is in there, although it isn’t given a separate section).
I’m not sure why the first poster think you mean the big bang… As for the actual origin of life, the mainstream theory is called abiogenesis. To oversimplify a bit, abiogenesis is the theory that since organic compounds occur naturally and frequently, chance dictates that they will eventually fall into a primitive self-organizing pattern. This is what is usually referred to as the primordial soup. This is a not the same as evolution by natural selection, of course. They are separate theories, but both fall generally into “origin of life.” This might be confusing, but evolution began before the primordial soup differentiated into things that we would consider alive. A nice primer on human evolution is “The Naked Ape” by a zoologist named Desmond Morris. It’s relatively short, and elaborates the likely evolutionary explanations for psychological and morphological traits of human beings. This is called evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, if you’re interested.
