Spontaneous Generation...Science gurus, please help!?

Question

My biology textbook talks about Spontaneous Generation, and how people once believed that living things (like maggots or mice) came from garbage and dead meat (dead things). The book says this isn't possible and disproved it with an experiment.

But for Evolution to have worked, wouldn't the first single celled organisms have been a result of spontaneous generation? If not, what was it?

Thank in advance for clearing up my confusion.

Answer 1

The theory of evolution through random selection is that things change over time. Evolution does not really talk about the primordial soup theory, which is different. Evolution is mostly concerned with the diversity of species, not the origins of the first living cell.

So... to address the primordial soup theory, it is theorized that under high pressures, temperatures, and concentrations, that certain molecules came together to form the foundations of life. Some amino acids formed organic molecules, and formed the building blocks of life like DNA. This theory has not been proved, whereas evolution has been observed thousands and thousands of times and has not been disproved once through many experiments.

Spontaneous Generation was disproved, because of the experiment that man did with the broth in the flask with a tube that caught the entering microbes. At the time they couldn't see where the bacteria originally came from, and I suppose they didn't have cameras to catch the mice walking up to the cheese to prove that the mice did not appear out of nowhere. So, it has been shown to be false. The primordial soup theory has not been disproved, nor has it been proved, but it remains a plausible explanation for how the first cellular material and the first living cell came to be. Maybe it will be disproved one day, maybe not. There is also a theory that cellular material or even cells came here via asteroids. There are theories that aliens put it here, or that God put it here.

I think when contrasting those ideas with creation, creation proposes that God made man and all of the animals sort of at once, and that they did not evolve from one another, however, it has been shown time and again, and proven repetetively through fossil evidence, observation, and DNA analysis that the life on this planet all did originate from some sort of common ancestor, and that we have all evolved from one starting point, regardless of how that starting point arrived here in the first place.

Answer 2

Living organisms did NOT spring up fully made as predicted by spontaneous generation. To condense into a few sentences what could easily be the semester mentioned by klu, chemists now believe that certain chemicals reacted in the primordial earth to make simple replicating molecules. Studies have already shown that many types of biological molecules “spontaneously” come together in recreations of what chemical conditions probably existed on the primordial earth. Other reactions have shown that simple nucleic acids like RNA can assemble more RNA molecules, thus the biological molecules can reproduce themselves. One molecules start reproducing, they also start competing for resources (more molecules), and so it would not be hard to see that the evolution of more complex but more efficient molecules would start winning out the reproduction race.

Multiply these complex interactions and competitions not by the many trillions of trillions that occur in a tiny test tube, but by the HUGE number of interactions across the entire surface of the planet AND then give the reactions many millions of years to progress; that would pretty well favor a self contained, self replicating cluster of chemicals we now call a cell.

Answer 3

NO, the theory of spontaneous generation was more akin to magic. Things simply appeared.

Evolution argues that conditions were right for certain things to come together in a way that led to more "parts" to join etc.

This is an over simplification but there is not enough room or time to teach a semesters worth of chemistry, biology, genetics, biology, statistics, and other courses to explain fully.

Answer 4

Let's put it this way: if you leave meat out in primordial Earth, would flies have come out of it? The answer is no.

The first organisms were created through a series of complex chemical reactions and changes which have been repeated, not through witchcraft.

Answer 5

properly i'm the seat of my pants sort of female so very spontaneous. I do attempt to temper that however so i do no longer do something too stupid, so I attempt and carry the reigns tight inspite of the undeniable fact that it ain't common. LOL