Part one of term paper
------------------------ 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 complex arrangements. Thus began that most wondrous story, the evolu- tion of life o ...

Part two of term paper
... evolved. There are two primary schools of thought on the processes involved: the "soup" theory and the "sandwich" theory. According to the more-popular soup theory, chemical evolution first took place in the upper atmosphere, where ultraviolet radiation from the sun could generate an assortment of simple and complex organic (carbon- based) molecules 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. ...