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NASA's 2015 strategy for astrobiology aimed to solve the puzzle of the origin of life – how a fully functioning living system could emerge from non-living components – through research on the prebiotic origin of life's chemicals, both in space and on planets, as well as the functioning of early biomolecules to catalyse reactions and support inheritance.
Non-cellular life, also known as acellular life, is life that exists without a cellular structure for at least part of its life cycle. [1] Historically, most definitions of life postulated that an organism must be composed of one or more cells, [2] but, for some, this is no longer considered necessary, and modern criteria allow for forms of life based on other structural arrangements.
Research concerning the relationship between the thermodynamic quantity entropy and both the origin and evolution of life began around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910 American historian Henry Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a theory of history based on the second law of ...
Spontaneous generation is a superseded scientific theory that held that living creatures could arise from non-living matter and that such processes were commonplace and regular.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.
For example, content exchange between individuals enables the exchange of genes between individuals (horizontal gene transfer), an important factor in the evolution of cellular life. [35] While modern cells can rely on complicated protein machineries to catalyze these crucial processes, protocells must have accomplished this using more simple ...
Abiogenesis – Life arising from non-living matter; Anthropic principle – Hypothesis about sapient life and the universe; Connectionism – Cognitive science approach; Dual-phase evolution – Process that drives self-organization within complex adaptive systems; Emergenesis – The result of a specific combination of several interacting genes
The timeline of the evolutionary history of life represents the current scientific theory outlining the major events during the development of life on planet Earth. Dates in this article are consensus estimates based on scientific evidence , mainly fossils .
List of examples of convergent evolution – Examples of separate lineages of organisms developing similar characteristics; Divergent evolution – Accumulation of differences between closely related species populations, leading to speciation