The Origin and Early Evolution of Life: Where, When and How?

摘要

Although it is frequently taught in many schools and universities all over the world that since early antiquity philosophers and naturalists alike appealed to spontaneous generation to explain the origin of life, this was not really the case. Until the development of microscopes in the seventeenth century, spontaneous generation was seen mostly as a nonsexual reproductive mechanism of insects, maggots, and what were called "lower animals." The extraordinary descriptions of a microbial world by Anton van Leewenhoek and others opened an unsuspected dimension to the possibility of spontaneous generation, but it was not it was not until Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon and Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck incorporated it within their transformist schemes that it was seen as the mechanism that had led to the first appearance of life on Earth.