Oh, I so agree!
Here's Darwin's "warm little pond scenario" from his 1871 [correcting date] letter to his friend Sir Joseph Hooker:
It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine [sic] compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were found.Yockey's remarks regarding this statement:
The passage (obviously not having been subjected to an editor's blue pencil) was not indexed and remained unnoticed until 1950....Snoopers!!! LOLOL!It is irresponsible and dishonest to reference this "warm little pond" quotation ... from Darwin's private correspondence as representing his view of the origin of life.... Everyone has the right to float tentative ideas and even nonsense to friends in his or her personal correspondence without responsibility being assumed by snoopers. [Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life, p. 119]
As has been pointed out already, Darwin saw this obvious point way back in the day. And yet even now, creationists use "Why doesn't this a happen all the time now?" as a snare for the unwary (the REALLY unwary). You could hardly ask for a better illustration that the purveyors of anti-E nonsense are selectively blind, ineducable, and incorrigible.
I'm not sure why you pinged me on this. I never said Darwin put the warm pond out as the answer to biogenesis.
What I said, and have always said, is that Darwin proposed two (at least two) scenarios for the origin of life. The later of the two implies natural processes. Since Darwin was concerned throughout his marriage about his wife's fear that they would be apart in the afterlife, one can assume Darwin was inclined toward natural processes in biogenesis, as he was in the origin of diversity. He was consistently inclined toward natural processes in every aspect of his work.
For Darwin, and indeed, for anyone with a scientific imagination, the warm pond scenario would be a starting point for research, rather than a declaration of fact.
The Chemical SoupNazis of today have taken Darwin's musings and brewed an entree in many threads like this one.. Carrying "survival of the fittest" back to its ultimate inception requires a chemical soup to explain it all..
I know, I know.... NO SOUP FOR ME TODAY!....