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History of life. The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and fossil organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to present day.
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.
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- Panspermia
- Spontaneous Generation
- Oparin: Primordial Soup Hypothesis
- John Bernal
- Miller–Urey Experiment
- Sources
Panspermia is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids, comets and planetoids. It does not attempt to explain how life originated, but shifts the origin to another heavenly body. The advantage is that life is not required to have formed on each planet it occurs on, but rather in a single location...
General acceptance until 19th century
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. The theory held that "lower" animals are generated by decaying organic substances. Aristotle stated that, for example, aphids arise from dew on plants, flies from putrid matter, mice from dirty hay, and c...
Considered disproven in 19th century
By the middle of the 19th century, biogenesis was supported by so much evidence that spontaneous generation had been effectively disproven. Pasteur remarked, about an 1864 finding of his, "Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment." This gave a mechanism by which life diversified from a few simple organisms to a variety of to complex forms. Today, scientists agree that all current life descends from earlier life, which has...
There is no single generally accepted model for the origin of life. Scientists have proposed several plausible hypotheses which share some common elements. While differing in details, these hypotheses are based on the framework laid out by Alexander Oparin (in 1924) and John Haldane(in 1929), that the first molecules constituting the earliest cells...
John Bernal showed that based upon this and subsequent work there is no difficulty in principle in forming most of the molecules we recognize as the necessary molecules for life from their inorganic precursors. The underlying hypothesis held by Oparin, Haldane, Bernal, Miller and Urey, for instance, was that multiple conditions on the primeval Eart...
In 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey performed an experiment that demonstrated how organic molecules could have spontaneously formed from inorganic precursors under conditions like those posited by the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis. The Miller–Urey experiment used a highly reducing mixture of gases—methane, ammonia, and hydrogen, as well as water va...
Bernal, J.D. (1951). The Physical Basis of Life. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. LCCN 51005794.Bernal, J.D. (1967) [Reprinted work by A.I. Oparin originally published 1924; Moscow: The Moscow Worker]. The Origin of Life. The Weidenfeld and Nicolson Natural History. Translation of Oparin by A...Bondeson, Jan (1999). The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-3609-3. LCCN 98038295.Bryson, Bill (2004). A Short History of Nearly Everything. London: Black Swan. ISBN 978-0-552-99704-1. OCLC 55589795.Oct 30, 2023 · MARK GARLICK/Spl/Alamy; HOW did life on Earth begin? Until 70 years ago, generations of scientists had failed to throw much light on biology’s murky beginnings. But then came three crucial...
The origin of life is a result of a supernatural event—that is, one irretrievably beyond the descriptive powers of physics, chemistry, and other science. Life, particularly simple forms, spontaneously and readily arises from nonliving matter in short periods of time, today as in the past.
Jul 14, 2009 · By Michael Marshall. 14 July 2009 , updated 27 April 2023. Galapagos tortoises are the product of over 3 billion years of evolution. Andy Rouse / Getty. There are all sorts of ways to reconstruct...
Mar 1, 2013 · VIEW FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD PDF. The origin of life (OOL) problem remains one of the more challenging scientific questions of all time. In this essay, we propose that following recent experimental and theoretical advances in syste...
