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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]
For decades, scientists have theorized that volcanic lightning on an early Earth played a crucial role in kickstarting life on the planet by breaking molecules into useful, biological components.
A scenario is a set of related concepts pertinent to the origin of life (abiogenesis), such as the iron-sulfur world.Many alternative abiogenesis scenarios have been proposed by scientists in a variety of fields from the 1950s onwards in an attempt to explain how the complex mechanisms of life could have come into existence.
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 ...
The timeline of the evolutionary history of life represents the current scientific theory outlining the major events during the development of life on planet Earth. Dates in this article are consensus estimates based on scientific evidence , mainly fossils .
The origin of life on Earth has been a matter of speculation for quite some time. Living things did not spontaneously appear, so some sort of biological or even non-biological process must have been responsible for the generation of life. Lightning is a non-biological process, and many have speculated that lightning was present on early Earth.
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.