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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 ...
Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from matter that does not. It is defined descriptively by the capacity for homeostasis, organisation, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction. All life over time eventually reaches a state of ...
Last universal common ancestor. The last universal common ancestor ( LUCA) is the hypothesized common ancestral cell from which the three domains of life, the Bacteria, the Archaea, and the Eukarya originated. The cell had a lipid bilayer; it possessed the genetic code and ribosomes which translated from DNA or RNA to proteins.
Living systems. Living systems are life forms (or, more colloquially known as living things) treated as a system. They are said to be open self-organizing and said to interact with their environment. These systems are maintained by flows of information, energy and matter. Multiple theories of living systems have been proposed.
Biology is the scientific study of life. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary information encoded in genes , which can be transmitted to future ...
The eukaryotes ( / juːˈkærioʊts, - əts / yoo-KARR-ee-ohts, -əts) [ 5] constitute the domain of Eukarya or Eukaryota, organisms whose cells have a membrane-bound nucleus. All animals, plants, fungi, and many unicellular organisms are eukaryotes.
In biology, cell theory is a scientific theory first formulated in the mid-nineteenth century, that living organisms are made up of cells, that they are the basic structural/organizational unit of all organisms, and that all cells come from pre-existing cells. Cells are the basic unit of structure in all living organisms and also the basic unit ...
Tree of life (biology) The tree of life or universal tree of life is a metaphor, conceptual model, and research tool used to explore the evolution of life and describe the relationships between organisms, both living and extinct, as described in a famous passage in Charles Darwin 's On the Origin of Species (1859). [ 1]