The living puddle

The above title  is from (Ehrenvard, 1962), discussed by (Williams, 1966). Ehrenvard believes that life is probably older than organisms. He imagines a stage at which every body of water could be thought of as a single diffuse organism. His view has resonance with Darwin’s warm little pond which I discussed previously McLachlan (2010). The origin of life is one of the most profound mysteries confronting science and rain pools are the quintessential warm little ponds where life may have originated. Furthermore, Strother and colleagues (Strother et al. 2011), present evidence that rain pools and other puddles were the places where life first colonised land. More specifically, the famous palaeontologist Alfred Sherwood Romer's theory suggests that amphibians may have originated in rain pools and used them as a base for the colonization of land (quoted by Dawkins 2004), p251. Thus these humble and much overlooked habitats take on a significance which places them in a new light.

Reference

Dawkins, R. (2004). The Ancestor's Tale: A pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. Weidenfeld and Nicholson. UK.

Ehrenvard, G. (1962). Life: Its Origin and Development. Minneopolis: Burgess.Williams, G. C. (1966). Adaptation and Natural Selection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
McLachlan, A. J. (2010). Life in the puddle. http://www.atholmclachlan.blogspot.com./
Strother, P. K., Battison, L., Brasier, M. D. and Wellman, C. H. (2011). Earth’s earliest non-marine eukaryotes. Nature, 473, 505-509.