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Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. Traditional religion attributed the origin of life to deities who created the natural world. 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 Earth was formed at 4.54 Gya, and the earliest evidence of life on Earth dates from at least 3.8 Gya from Western Australia. Some studies have suggested that fossil micro-organisms may have lived within hydrothermal vent precipitates dated 3.77 to 4.28 Gya from Quebec , soon after ocean formation 4.4 Gya during the Hadean .
Primordial soup, also known as prebiotic soup, is the hypothetical set of conditions present on the Earth around 3.7 to 4.0 billion years ago. It is an aspect of the heterotrophic theory (also known as the Oparin–Haldane hypothesis) concerning the origin of life, first proposed by Alexander Oparin in 1924, and J. B. S. Haldane in 1929.
Experimentalists used a variety of terms for the study of the origin of life from nonliving materials. Heterogenesis was applied to the generation of living things from once-living organic matter (such as boiled broths), and the English physiologist Henry Charlton Bastian proposed the term archebiosis for life originating from non-living materials.
A copy of this letter was included in Melvin Calvin's 1969 book Chemical evolution: Molecular evolution towards the origin of living systems on the Earth and elsewhere, [17] and the term "warm little pond" has since been invoked in the scientific literature as a descriptor for shallow lakes or ponds as candidate environments for the origin of life.
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 ...
The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere (2016) is a book by Eric Smith and biophysicist Harold J. Morowitz which provides an introduction to origins of life research via a review of perspectives from a variety of fields active in this research area, including geochemistry, biochemistry, ecology, and microbiology.
The mediaeval great chain of being as a staircase, implying the possibility of progress: [1] Ramon Lull's Ladder of Ascent and Descent of the Mind, 1305. Alternatives to Darwinian evolution have been proposed by scholars investigating biology to explain signs of evolution and the relatedness of different groups of living things.