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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]
The modern version of panspermia holds that life may have been distributed to Earth by meteoroids, asteroids, comets [30] or planetoids. [31] It does not attempt to explain how life originated, but shifts the origin of life to another heavenly body.
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.
Experimentalists used a variety of terms for the study of the origin of life from nonliving materials. Heterogenesis was applied to the generation of living things from once-living organic matter (such as boiled broths), and the English physiologist Henry Charlton Bastian proposed the term archebiosis for life originating from non-living materials.
The iron–sulfur world hypothesis is a set of proposals for the origin of life and the early evolution of life advanced in a series of articles between 1988 and 1992 by Günter Wächtershäuser, a Munich patent lawyer with a degree in chemistry, who had been encouraged and supported by philosopher Karl R. Popper to publish his ideas.
Günter Wächtershäuser (born 1938 in Gießen) is a German chemist turned patent lawyer who is widely known for his work on the origin of life, and in particular his iron-sulfur world theory, a theory that life on Earth has hydrothermal origins.
The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere (2016) is a book by Eric Smith and biophysicist Harold J. Morowitz which provides an introduction to origins of life research via a review of perspectives from a variety of fields active in this research area, including geochemistry, biochemistry, ecology, and microbiology.
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 ...