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As metabolic rate increases, the lifespan of an organism is expected to decrease as a direct result. The rate at which this occurs is not fixed and thus the -45° slope in this graph is just an example and not a constant. The rate of living theory postulates that the faster an organism's metabolism, the shorter its lifespan.
Research concerning the relationship between the thermodynamic quantity entropy and both the origin and evolution of life began around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910 American historian Henry Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a theory of history based on the second law of ...
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.
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.
Altogether, these three developments in science presented the wider scientific community with a seemingly paradoxical situation regarding the origin of life: life must have evolved from non-biological precursors after the Earth was formed, and yet spontaneous generation as a theory had been experimentally disproved.
The theory was popular in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was used as a heuristic device, but lost importance in the early 1990s, when it was criticized by several empirical studies. [5] [6] A life-history paradigm has replaced the r/K selection paradigm, but continues to incorporate its important themes as a subset of life history theory. [7]
The rate of discovery of new objects can be defined by the expansion rate , introducing a discovery timescale /. [ 5 ] To include copy number n i {\displaystyle n_{i}} in the dynamics of assembly theory, a production timescale τ p ≈ 1 / k p {\displaystyle \tau _{\text{p}}\approx 1/k_{\text{p}}} is defined, where k p {\displaystyle k_{\text{p ...
In evolutionary biology, punctuated equilibrium (also called punctuated equilibria) is a theory that proposes that once a species appears in the fossil record, the population will become stable, showing little evolutionary change for most of its geological history. [1]