Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Spontaneous generation is a superseded scientific theory that held that living creatures could arise from nonliving matter and that such processes were commonplace and regular. It was hypothesized that certain forms, such as fleas , could arise from inanimate matter such as dust, or that maggots could arise from dead flesh.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. Traditional religion attributed the origin of life to deities who created the natural world. Spontaneous generation, the first naturalistic theory of abiogenesis, goes back to Aristotle and ancient Greek philosophy, and continued to have support in Western scholarship until the 19th century. [15]
One ancient view of the origin of life, from Aristotle until the 19th century, is of spontaneous generation. [19] This theory held that "lower" animals such as insects were generated by decaying organic substances, and that life arose by chance. [20] [21] This was questioned from the 17th century, in works like Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia ...
From here, is where the study of the origin of life branched. Those who accepted Pasteur's rejection of spontaneous generation began to develop the theory that under (unknown) conditions on a primitive Earth, life must have gradually evolved from organic material. This theory became known as abiogenesis, and is the currently accepted one. On ...
Primordial soup, also known as prebiotic soup, is the hypothetical set of conditions present on the Earth around 3.7 to 4.0 billion years ago. It is an aspect of the heterotrophic theory (also known as the Oparin–Haldane hypothesis) concerning the origin of life, first proposed by Alexander Oparin in 1924, and J. B. S. Haldane in 1929.
The theory of a universal common ancestry of life is widely accepted. In 2010, based on "the vast array of molecular sequences now available from all domains of life," [ 70 ] D. L. Theobald published a " formal test " of universal common ancestry (UCA).
Haldane's article on abiogenesis in 1929 introduced the "primordial soup theory", which became the foundation for the concept of the chemical origin of life. He established human gene maps for haemophilia and colour blindness on the X chromosome , and codified Haldane's rule on sterility in the heterogametic sex of hybrids in species .
The iron–sulfur world hypothesis is a set of proposals for the origin of life and the early evolution of life advanced in a series of articles between 1988 and 1992 by Günter Wächtershäuser, a Munich patent lawyer with a degree in chemistry, who had been encouraged and supported by philosopher Karl R. Popper to publish his ideas.