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People kept on wondering, though, whether the eggs of these animals might not be central to the generation process. [1] Spontaneous generation is a superseded scientific theory that held that living creatures could arise from nonliving matter and that such processes were commonplace and regular.
Lazzaro Spallanzani (Italian pronunciation: [ˈladdzaro spallanˈtsaːni]; 12 January 1729 – 11 February 1799) was an Italian Catholic priest (for which he was nicknamed Abbé Spallanzani), biologist and physiologist who made important contributions to the experimental study of bodily functions, animal reproduction, and animal echolocation. [2]
The transition from non-life to life has never been observed experimentally, but many proposals have been made for different stages of the process. The study of abiogenesis aims to determine how pre-life chemical reactions gave rise to life under conditions strikingly different from those on Earth today.
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 .
This list is part of the List of organisms named after famous people, and includes organisms named after famous individuals born before 1 January 1800. It also includes ensembles in which at least one member was born before that date; but excludes companies, institutions, ethnic groups or nationalities , and populated places.
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 theory held that "lower" animals are generated by decaying organic substances.
A tree of life, like this one from Charles Darwin's notebooks c. July 1837, implies a single common ancestor at its root (labelled "1").. A phylogenetic tree directly portrays the idea of evolution by descent from a single ancestor. [3]
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 ...