Especially important were Oparin's suggestions that organic compounds, presumably required for the origin of the first organisms, could have been delivered to the Earth on meteorites or that they may have been generated in the early atmosphere, had it been reducing.
For astronomers, finding the first stars would be the equivalent of biologists finding the first organisms that arose on Earth.
They were among the first organisms to collect their energy from the sun using photosynthesis – breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen.
The trilobites were not the first organisms to develop eyes, and therefore to develop what Mr. Fortey calls the gene that says, "Make eyes!" But they are old enough to prove that those genes, which are elements in the human inheritance, "must be so ancient that they go back before the last common ancestor of insect and vertebrate".
To understand this is to realise that, whatever the puzzle set by the appearance of design in living things, it is most easily explicable in terms of Darwin's huge, all-embracing idea, and the enormous time available since the first organisms began to drift on the warm pre-Cambrian tides.
But "Evolution" points out that more than half of the earth's 4,000-plus known minerals would not exist without the biological processes — photosynthesis, in particular — begun around 3.5 billion years ago by the first organisms to leave a record, cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae.
So what were the first organisms to fly?
Diatoms might become the first organisms for which the gap in our knowledge of the relationship between genotype and phenotype is closed.
Similarly, the first organisms that would be recognized as rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) probably lived and died before the first individuals that would have been classified as Homo sapiens were born.
In the case of the growth and formation of hook shapes in Nature, their biochemistry will be of equal importance and must have been fundamental to the very first organisms that appeared with shapes of biomaterial.
The absence of fouling on many of these species indicates an effective defensive strategy to prevent the adhesion of bacteria, the first organisms that allow the formation of biofilm structures and fouling.
