In science, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was an English naturalist known for his theory of evolution, which states that all species of life have evolved over time from one or a few common ancestors through the process of natural selection. He published his theory along with scientific evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species - by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. [1] During these years, between 1843 and 1865, coincidently, the science of energetics (thermodynamics) was assembling. Bold statements deriving out of this new energy science, coming from respected physicists such as William Thomson and Rudolf Clausius, had declared as physical laws of the world that the "energy of the universe is constant" and the "entropy (or dissipation of energy) of the universe tends to a maximum". [2]

His grandson Charles Galton Darwin (C.G. Darwin) is one of the founders of human thermodynamics, who in fact was the first to outline a "human thermodynamic" theory of evolutions of "human molecules". [5]

Warm little pond
One of the difficulties with Darwin's theory, from a chemical thermodynamics point of view, is that he supposed that life emerged from non-life in a warm little pond at some point in the distant past. Specifically, in a 1871 letter written by Darwin to English botanist Joseph Hooker, Darwin made the suggestion that:

"[The original spark of life may have begun in] a warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, so that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes."

This postulate, together with the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment which showed that sparks ignited in a chemical broth over several days could make amino acids, combined with recent fossil records indicated that bacterial existed on the earth about 3.85 billion years ago, have led to the belief that once upon a time, three or four billion years ago, lightning struck a puddle of water containing a kind of warm chemical chicken broth and triggered the formation of amino acids, the building blocks of life. This type of logic, however, is inconsistent with standard molecular evolution tables that show a continuous build up and lineage of molecular structure, a table that cannot be divided by a certain hypothetical day. In other words, the laws of chemistry don't simply stop on a particular day and give their powers over to the laws of biology. The reverse is true, the laws of chemistry and thermodynamics are what define evolution and the laws of biology are only approximations. [4]

References
1. Darwin, Charles. (1859). On the Origin of Species - by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray.
2. (a) Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin), "On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy" (Google Books) (URL), Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for April 19, 1852, also Philosophical Magazine, Oct. 1852, also Mathematical and Physical Papers, vol. i, art. 59, pp. 511.
(b) Clausius, R. (1865). The Mechanical Theory of Heat – with its Applications to the Steam Engine and to Physical Properties of Bodies. London: John van , 1 Paternoster Row. MDCCCLXVII.
3. Von Baeyer, H.C. (1998). Warmth Disperses and Time Passes – the History of Heat. New York: The Modern Library.
4. (a) Gladyshev, Georgi, P. (1997). Thermodynamic Theory of the Evolution of Living Beings. Commack, New York: Nova Science Publishers.
(b) Avery, John (2003). Information Theory and Evolution. New Jersey: World Scientific.
5. Darwin, Charles G. (1952). The Next Million Years (pg. 26). London: Rupert Hart-Davis.