Abstract:
The origin of life is one of the greatest scientific enigmas in modern world, and has ever attracted public attention. The elongated and complicated chemical process before the earliest cellular organism is defined as the chemical evolution of life. The chemical evolution of life and the early evolution of the earth's lifeless components constituted a set of interrelated, interactive and restricted processes. We illustrate the complicated series of chemical reaction, the formation of small organic molecules from inorganic matter, and then that of large organic molecules, and finally the origin of the earliest primitive cells in respect of the environmental evolution of the Universe, the Solar system and the primitive Earth. We also discuss and summarize most popular current hypothesis about the chemical evolution of life, concerning its early chemical evolution in primitive oceans, on the surfaces of clay minerals, via eruption of volcanoes, or came from the outer space beyond the Earth.