(2 of 2)
Dr. Fox does not claim that his microspheres are alive, but he thinks that something like them may have been a step in nature's progression toward life. If amino acids were continually raining down from the sky, it is natural to suppose that considerable quantities of them accumulated on fairly hot parts of the young earth's surface. The heat made them react, as in Dr. Fox's lab; after they had turned into proteinlike molecules, heavy rain dissolved them and washed them into the sea. There they cooled and formed microspheres, each of which packaged together a great assortment of proteins and similar chemicals. This process may have been repeated billions of times in different places, generating during each repetition many billions of microspheres. Eventually, one of them happened to have in its membrane the proper chemical wherewithal for a dim sort of life. Once this spark was alight, the great parade of evolution, from bacteria up to man, was a natural consequence.