Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 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 ...
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. [ 1 ...
Warm little pond. A warm little pond is a hypothetical terrestrial shallow water environment on early Earth under which the origin of life could have occurred. The term was originally coined by Charles Darwin in an 1871 letter to his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker. [ 1][ 2] This idea is related to later work such as the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis ...
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 ...
Panspermia (from Ancient Greek πᾶν (pan) 'all' and σπέρμα (sperma) 'seed') is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by space dust, [ 1] meteoroids, [ 2] asteroids, comets, [ 3] and planetoids, [ 4] as well as by spacecraft carrying unintended contamination by microorganisms, [ 5][ 6][ 7] known as ...
If the deep marine hydrothermal setting was the site for the origin of life, then abiogenesis could have happened as early as 4.0-4.2 Gya. If life evolved in the ocean at depths of more than ten meters, it would have been shielded both from impacts and the then high levels of ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
RNA world. A comparison of RNA ( left) with DNA ( right ), showing the helices and nucleobases each employs. The RNA world is a hypothetical stage in the evolutionary history of life on Earth, in which self-replicating RNA molecules proliferated before the evolution of DNA and proteins. [ 1] The term also refers to the hypothesis that posits ...