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In biology, a biological life cycle (or just life cycle when the biological context is clear) is a series of stages of the life of an organism, that begins as a zygote, often in an egg, and concludes as an adult that reproduces, producing an offspring in the form of a new zygote which then itself goes through the same series of stages, the ...
Life cycles can be divided into two major stages: growth and reproduction. These two cannot take place at the same time, so once reproduction has begun, growth usually ends. [9] This shift is important because it can also affect other aspects of an organism's life, such as the organization of its group or its social interactions. [8]
The definition of life has long been a challenge for scientists and philosophers. [2] [3] [4] This is partially because life is a process, not a substance. [5] [6] [7] This is complicated by a lack of knowledge of the characteristics of living entities, if any, that may have developed outside Earth.
The transition from non-life to life has never been observed experimentally, but many proposals have been made for different stages of the process. The study of abiogenesis aims to determine how pre-life chemical reactions gave rise to life under conditions strikingly different from those on Earth today.
The entire gametophyte generation, with the sole exception of pollen grains (microgametophytes), is contained within the sporophyte. The life cycle of a dioecious flowering plant (angiosperm), the willow, has been outlined in some detail in an earlier section (A complex life cycle). The life cycle of a gymnosperm is similar.
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is pushing for added protections for the monarch butterfly after suggesting multiple populations could go extinct in mere decades.
The idea is that Earth's life forms affect the global carbon cycle and so major evolutionary events alter the carbon cycle, redistributing carbon within various reservoirs within the biosphere system and in the process temporarily lowering the atmospheric (greenhouse) carbon reservoir until the revised biosphere system settled into a new state.