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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]
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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 tree of life or universal tree of life is a metaphor, conceptual model, and research tool used to explore the evolution of life and describe the relationships between organisms, both living and extinct, as described in a famous passage in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). [1]
The theory of a universal common ancestry of life is widely accepted. In 2010, based on "the vast array of molecular sequences now available from all domains of life," [70] D. L. Theobald published a "formal test" of universal common ancestry (UCA).