Biogenesis: is the idea that life is only begotten from other life forms. You can't have a rock suddenly melt into becoming a mole. The Biogenesis theory is the predominant one nowadays, and dates from about the middle of the 1800s.
Spontaneous generation: was an older theory. The idea was that maggots just appeared spontaneously in meat, aphids formed out of dew on plants, contagious diseases could just manifest without actually catching them from somebody else. Life could form out of unalive things.
Overwhelmingly nowadays, science believes in biogenesis. All living things originate in other living things. There is just one hitch... how did life start originally on our planet, billions of years ago? The most common theory is that somehow almost organic molecules were shaped and stewed in rockpools on early Earth, eventually interacting in chemical ways which made them into a version of DNA, and eventually the self-replicating nature of these chemical reactions produced the earliest life forms.
And some would say, that story of the organic stew sounds a lot like a case of spontaneous generation.
Spontaneous generation: was an older theory. The idea was that maggots just appeared spontaneously in meat, aphids formed out of dew on plants, contagious diseases could just manifest without actually catching them from somebody else. Life could form out of unalive things.
Overwhelmingly nowadays, science believes in biogenesis. All living things originate in other living things. There is just one hitch... how did life start originally on our planet, billions of years ago? The most common theory is that somehow almost organic molecules were shaped and stewed in rockpools on early Earth, eventually interacting in chemical ways which made them into a version of DNA, and eventually the self-replicating nature of these chemical reactions produced the earliest life forms.
And some would say, that story of the organic stew sounds a lot like a case of spontaneous generation.
