Part 1 of Essay
------------------------ Soup or Sandwich IN THE VERY BEGINNING, about 4.6 billion years ago (give or take a few years), a small ball of rock, water and gas had come to be and immedi- ately set about the process of combining its atoms into more and more complex arrangements. Thus began that most wondrous story, the e ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... organic (carbon- based) molecules out of the basic components of the atmos- phere. As these molecules slowly rained into the early oceans, a kind of primordial soup was created. Via the ultraviolet radiation, light- ning, volcanic action, and other forms of heat and energy, this soup was able to slowly combine the organic molecules into ever more com- plex forms: first simple amino acids, then organic macromolecules, then single-strand RNA molecules, and finally simple viruses. The only trouble with the s ....