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Spontaneous generation is a superseded scientific theory that held that living creatures could arise from nonliving matter and that such processes were commonplace and regular.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.
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] The theory held that "lower" animals are generated by decaying organic substances.
Virey was an early advocate of transmutation of species who a postulated direct descent of humans from apes. [1] Virey used the term evolution in 1803. He was highly critical of the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck such as spontaneous generation but supported an evolutionary history of life on earth.
Lamarck saw spontaneous generation as being ongoing, with the simple organisms thus created being transmuted over time becoming more complex. He is sometimes regarded as believing in a teleological (goal-oriented) process where organisms became more perfect as they evolved, though as a materialist, he emphasized that these forces must originate ...
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 ...
Pasteur decided to partake in this competition to combat Pouchet's support of spontaneous generation. He designed an experiment to deny the notion of spontaneous generation. He thought that if spontaneous generation were true in which air itself could cause generation, then all sterile swan neck flasks that were later exposed to air would ...
On the Origin of Species (or, more completely, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) [3] is a work of scientific literature by Charles Darwin that is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. It was published on 24 November 1859. [4]
Transmutation of species, Inheritance of acquired characteristics, Lysenkoism – first theories of evolution. Not supported by experiment, and rendered obsolete by Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics, combined in the modern synthesis which finds that genes in the form of DNA are the primary way parental characteristics are passed to ...