Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 394
THE ESSENTIAL ROLE OF CLAY. AND PHOTOSYNTHESIS IN EVOLUTION been able to settle even the elementary chicken and egg problem in relation to the evolution of proteins. 4. The segregation of Haldane's soup into protobionts with a chemistry and an identity of their own during the early period of life in the making, was again a gigantic problem. 5. Last but not least, is the challenge of conceiving how the development of some kind of reproductive machinery took place when the first bricks of life evolved. . This was highly essential for the daughter cells to have all the chemical and metabolic capabilities of the parent cells. . Before closing this chapter, we should like to add a few more examples of how scientists are baffled by the dilemma of life as though originating by itself. There are millions of stages involved, of tiny invisible steps, through which the chemical evolution must have carved its course. . It is not just the enormity of the challenge to comprehend how these chemical steps were taken in a certain direction and under what natural influences. There are also immense problems to visualize and discover the rationale of how these steps were sequenced in a well-designed and worked out chain linking each ring with the other at the right place the only place where it should have been linked. . How easy it sounds for a scientist to declare that the age of bionts, drawing their energy from fermentation, came to an end and at that point began the new era of photosynthesis. . But how difficult indeed it is to visualize and solve the problems attendant upon this transition from one age to another. . The presence of phosphorus in every living cell must also be justified in view of the fact that phosphorus is a rare element. Add to this the case of molybdenum and some other even rarer elements, essentially used in life building processes, and the dilemma is further compounded. Some 383