Beginning 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 compl ....

Middle of Essay
.... 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 soup theory is that is almost definitely wrong! The time required for it to work is statistically greater than the lifetime of the Earth. The time is only statistically great ....