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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]
Analysis of the tree of life places thermophilic and hyperthermophilic bacteria and archaea closest to the root, suggesting that life may have evolved in a hot environment. [228] The deep sea or alkaline hydrothermal vent theory posits that life began at submarine hydrothermal vents. [229] [230] William Martin and Michael Russell have suggested
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.
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.
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia. [32] [33 ...
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.
The Vital Question is a book by the English biochemist Nick Lane about the way the evolution and origin of life on Earth was constrained by the provision of energy.. The book was well received by critics; The New York Times, for example, found it "seductive and often convincing" [1] though the reviewer considered much of it speculative beyond the evidence provided.
[4] [5] Charles Darwin more famously proposed the theory of universal common descent through an evolutionary process in his book On the Origin of Species in 1859: "Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first ...