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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]
Wächtershäuser, a chemist by training, has been an international patent lawyer in Munich since 1970. He has published numerous articles in organic chemistry, genetic engineering and patent law, and has made contributions to evolutionary theory concerning the origins of perception and cognition, and the origin of life.
An origin-of-life theory based on self-replicating beta-sheet structures has been put forward by Maury in 2009. [ 77 ] [ 78 ] The theory suggest that self-replicating and self-assembling catalytic amyloids were the first informational polymers in a primitive pre-RNA world.
If the deep marine hydrothermal setting was the site for the origin of life, then abiogenesis could have happened as early as 4.0-4.2 Gya. If life evolved in the ocean at depths of more than ten meters, it would have been shielded both from impacts and the then high levels of ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
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 ...
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 iron–sulfur world hypothesis is a set of proposals for the origin of life and the early evolution of life advanced in a series of articles between 1988 and 1992 by Günter Wächtershäuser, a Munich patent lawyer with a degree in chemistry, who had been encouraged and supported by philosopher Karl R. Popper to publish his ideas.