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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 ...
Abiogenesis. Stages in the origin of life range from the well-understood, such as the habitable Earth and the abiotic synthesis of simple molecules, to the largely unknown, like the derivation of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) with its complex molecular functionalities. [ 1]
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.
e. Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity—in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Church Fathers as well as in medieval Islamic science. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two ...
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 .
Alexander Ivanovich Oparin ( Russian: Александр Иванович Опарин; 2 March [ O.S. 18 February] 1894 – 21 April 1980) was a Soviet biochemist notable for his theories about the origin of life and for his book The Origin of Life. He also studied the biochemistry of material processing by plants and enzyme reactions in plant ...
Darwinism. Charles Darwin in 1868. Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.
t. e. On the Origin of Species (or, more completely, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) [ 3] is a work of scientific literature by Charles Darwin that is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. It was published on 24 November 1859. [ 4]