The word evolution is most closely associated with Darwin and Biology. Yet it is the word that changed physics in my lifetime.” These are the words used by the physicist Jacob Bronowski in his now classic narration of “The Ascent of Man”, in the 1970s on BBC television. Bronowski is at that point trying to explain the formation of the chemical elements in the stars, by nuclear fusion processes, and concludes “matter itself evolves”. Indeed, all the natural elements, present on Earth and accessible by mining, were the Earth’s inheritance when it was born. Geological and chemical evolution must necessarily precede evolution of life on Earth. For almost the first 1.5 billion years, of its almost 4.6 billion years of existence, the Earth was devoid of life forms. Biology rests on a remarkably intricate canvas of biochemistry. A living cell is throbbing with chemical activity. Interlinked metabolic pathways, finely regulated, synthesise and degrade the molecules necessary for cellular functions and cell division. In Arthur Kornberg’s words “chemistry is the lingua franca of biology and medicine”. How did cellular chemistry evolve? Is there a convincing model for the formation of the first cell? Did cells evolve in a primordial soup of molecules as postulated by Alexander Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane or are soup scenarios too simplistic? Are there plausible pathways for the prebiotic formation of precursors of the molecules of biology? These and many other questions on chemical and early biological evolution do not have firm answers based on incontrovertible evidence. Speculation is a legitimate approach towards constructing evolutionary scenarios and to build hypotheses which might be testable.