Origin

“Is this where life commenced?” Edmond’s voice asked. “A spontaneous reaction in a churning sea of chemicals? Or was it perhaps a microbe on a meteorite from space? Or was it … God? Unfortunately, we can’t go back in time to witness that moment. All we know is what happened after that moment, when life first appeared. Evolution happened. And we’re accustomed to seeing it portrayed something like this.”

The screen now showed the familiar timeline of human evolution—a primitive ape slouching behind a line of increasingly erect hominids, until the final one was fully erect, having shed the last of his body hair.

“Yes, humans evolved,” Edmond said. “This is an irrefutable scientific fact, and we’ve built a clear timeline based on the fossil record. But what if we could watch evolution in reverse?”

Suddenly Edmond’s face started growing hair, morphing into a primitive human. His bone structure changed, becoming increasingly apelike, and then the process accelerated to an almost blinding pace, showing glimpses of older and older species—lemurs, sloths, marsupials, platypuses, lungfish, plunging underwater and mutating through eels and fish, gelatinous creatures, plankton, amoebas, until all that was left of Edmond Kirsch was a microscopic bacterium—a single cell pulsating in a vast ocean.

“The earliest specks of life,” Edmond said. “This is where our backward movie runs out of film. We have no idea how the earliest life-forms materialized out of a lifeless chemical sea. We simply cannot see the first frame of this story.”

T=0, Langdon mused, picturing a similar reverse movie about the expanding universe in which the cosmos contracted down to a single point of light, and cosmologists hit a similar dead end.

“‘First Cause,’” Edmond declared. “That’s the term Darwin used to describe this elusive moment of Creation. He proved that life continuously evolved, but he could not figure out how the process all started. In other words, Darwin’s theory described the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest.”

Langdon chuckled, having never heard it stated quite that way.

“So, how did life arrive on earth? In other words, where do we come from?” Edmond smiled. “In the next few minutes, you’ll have an answer to that question. But trust me, as stunning as that answer is, it’s only half of tonight’s story.” He looked directly into the camera and gave an ominous grin. “As it turns out, where we come from is utterly fascinating … but where we are going is utterly shocking.”

Ambra and Langdon exchanged a perplexed look, and although Langdon sensed this was more of Edmond’s hyperbole, the statement left him feeling increasingly uneasy.

“Life’s origin …,” Edmond continued. “It has remained a profound mystery since the days of the first Creation stories. For millennia, philosophers and scientists have been searching for some kind of record of this very first moment of life.”

Edmond now held up the familiar test tube containing the murky liquid. “In the 1950s, two such seekers—chemists Miller and Urey—ran a bold experiment that they hoped might unveil exactly how life began.”

Langdon leaned over and whispered to Ambra, “That test tube is right over there.” He pointed to the display pedestal in the corner.

She looked surprised. “Why would Edmond have it?”

Langdon shrugged. Judging from the strange collection of items in Edmond’s apartment, this vial was probably just a piece of scientific history that he wanted to own.

Edmond quickly described Miller and Urey’s efforts to re-create the primordial soup, trying to create life within a flask of nonliving chemicals.

The screen now flashed a faded New York Times article from March 8, 1953, titled “Looking Back Two Billion Years.”

“Obviously,” Edmond said, “this experiment raised some eyebrows. The implications could have been earth-shattering, especially for the religious world. If life magically appeared inside this test tube, we would know conclusively that the laws of chemistry alone are indeed enough to create life. We would no longer require a supernatural being to reach down from heaven and bestow upon us the spark of Creation. We would understand that life simply happens … as an inevitable by-product of the laws of nature. More importantly, we would have to conclude that because life spontaneously appeared here on earth, it almost certainly did the same thing elsewhere in the cosmos, meaning: man is not unique; man is not at the center of God’s universe; and man is not alone in the universe.”