Origin of life
Lazcano and Miller (1994) suggest that the pace of molecular evolution was dictated by the rate of recirculating water through mid-ocean submarine vents. Complete recirculation takes 10 million years, so any organic compounds produced by then would be altered or destroyed by temperatures exceeding 300 °C. They estimate that the development of a 100 kilobase genome of a DNA/protein primitive heterotroph into a 7000 gene filamentous cyanobacterium would have required only 7 million years.