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Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from matter that does not. It is defined descriptively by the capacity for homeostasis , organisation , metabolism , growth , adaptation , response to stimuli , and reproduction .
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
In 1785, he stated that Earth was a superorganism and that its proper study should be physiology. [12]: 10 The Gaia hypothesis, proposed in the 1960s by James Lovelock, suggests that life on Earth functions as a single organism that defines and maintains environmental conditions necessary for its survival. [13] [14]
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia.
Over time these evolutionary processes lead to formation of new species , changes within lineages , and loss of species . "Evolution" is also another name for evolutionary biology , the subfield of biology concerned with studying evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth.
Different elements can combine to form compounds such as water, which is fundamental to life. [32] Biochemistry is the study of chemical processes within and relating to living organisms . Molecular biology is the branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecular basis of biological activity in and between cells, including molecular ...