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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.
Spontaneous generation is a superseded scientific theory that held that living creatures could arise from non-living matter and that such processes were commonplace and regular.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.
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.
There are few clear examples of abiogenic methane-ethane-butane, as the same processes favor enrichment of light isotopes in all chemical reactions, whether organic or inorganic. δ 13 C of methane overlaps that of inorganic carbonate and graphite in the crust, which are heavily depleted in 12 C, and attain this by isotopic fractionation during ...
In his Origin of Species, Darwin was unable or unwilling to touch on this issue. [22] Third and finally, Louis Pasteur and John Tyndall experimentally disproved the (now superseded) theory of spontaneous generation , which suggested that life was constantly evolving from non-living matter and did not have a common ancestor, as suggested by ...
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 biosphere is postulated to have evolved, beginning with a process of biopoiesis (life created naturally from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds) or biogenesis (life created from living matter), at least some 3.5 billion years ago. [3] [4] In a general sense, biospheres are any closed, self-regulating systems containing ...
Bernal called this idea biopoiesis or biopoesis, the process of living matter evolving from self-replicating but non-living molecules, [17] [31] and proposed that biopoiesis passes through a number of intermediate stages. Robert Shapiro has summarized the "primordial soup" theory of Oparin and Haldane in its "mature form" as follows: [32]